Exchanging Different Versions of Jokes with Ariel Magnus

Looking through his bibliography, it was obvious that he's a writer who likes to play with literary concepts and genres; heck, you can see it just from his author photo: the pate and facial hair seem specially designed to accentuate the sparks flying off of that mad-scientist brain of his. Subsequently, Seagull Books asked me to translate his novel Chess with My Grandfather (originally scheduled for this year but now Covided into 2021), an extraordinary novel based around the diaries of a grandfather he never met and the World Chess Championship played in Buenos Aires in 1939; a blend of real life, madcap schemes, acute political, philosophical, and literary reflection, and, of course, lots of jokes. The challenge, obviously, was to match the word count, and I find that Spanish tends to shrink by about 10 percent when transferred into English, but that actually gave me (or rather us: I naively thought that the restrictions would reduce the scope for author comments; I was wrong) a little more leeway when trying to find the right combination of words and phrases to reflect what in the original is a glorious exercise in playful brevity.