Corps de l’article

1. Introduction

The translation of heterolingual literature has proven a particularly fruitful area of research for translation studies. Particularly challenging are those translations where a literary work is translated into one of the languages that make up its original fictional universe (Grutman 2006; García Vizcaíno 2008; Stratford 2008). In general, it is assumed that the translation process tends to reduce the interlingual tensions present in the ST (Grutman 2004; Lewis 2003; Stratford 2008). As translation scholars have pointed out, the translation often not only homogenizes the original, but sometimes also inverts its values by familiarizing what was supposed to remain foreign (the embedded language or languages) and, vice versa, by defamiliarizing what was supposed to remain familiar (the surface language). In this article, we examine the effects of such homogenization or inversion processes on the narrative situation through an analysis of the Spanish translation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by the Dominican-American author Junot Díaz.[1]

We wish to stress beforehand that our analysis is not primarily concerned with the supposed ‘untranslatability’ of heterolingual literary texts (Derrida 1988; Berman 1985; Berman 2004), but rather approaches heterolingualism from a decidedly functionalist perspective. As Meylaerts (2006a; 2006b) has emphasized, making the identification of translation problems the core business of translation studies betrays the lingering presence of a predominantly equivalence-based conception of translation, which exaggerates the monolingualism of both source and target cultures. We agree that the question as to whether there is more or less heterolingualism in the TT must be complemented by the more encompassing one as to which functions are realized by heterolingualism, and, above all, whether these functions undergo significant shifts between ST and TT.

Further, it is important to note that our analysis centers on but is not restricted to the phenomenon of heterolingualism, or what Grutman (2006: 19) describes as the “foregrounding of foreign languages” in a literary work, rather than merely a mimetic rendering of multilingualism or diglossia. In what follows, we will analyze how heterolingualism (Spanish-English code mixing or Spanglish) functionally interacts with other phenomena, such as nerd talk or African-American English, and even with mechanisms of addressing the narratee. For this reason, we regularly resort to the notion of heteroglossia as coined by Mikhail Bakhtin. In his well-known essay “Discourse in the novel,” Bakhtin defined heteroglossia (raznorečie) in terms of “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (Bakhtin 1981: 262). As this definition indicates, using different languages is but one means by which a novel can highlight the interplay of “voices,” next to, for instance, the use of dialects, jargons, generic languages, languages of authority, and so forth.[2] Drawing in these elements will allow us to widen the scope of the conclusions, and relate the translation of heterolingualism to the more general issue of identity construction in literary texts (not just the identity of characters but also narrators and narratees, and even the implied author and implied readers).[3]

1.1. Translating Nontranslation

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (henceforth BWLOW) came out in 2007 to great acclaim and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. The book tells the tragicomic life story of Oscar de León, an aspiring science fiction writer of Dominican descent living in New Jersey who cannot find his way in society and eventually decides to go back to the Dominican Republic to find true love, but instead dies an untimely death at the hands of the cruel dictatorial regime of Rafael de Trujillo. The title of the book already underscores Oscar’s outsiderhood by mixing in elements of fantasy writing into the usual format of the ethnic novel. BWLOW would be in the same league as any up-from-the-ghetto narrative if it were not for the adjective wondrous, which somehow suggests superhuman interference, an element that does not normally fit in well with the reality claims of ethnic literature.[4] As we learn in the novel, the name Oscar Wao refers to the way a Dominican-American would (mis-)pronounce Oscar Wilde, the notorious literary outcast with whom the title character is derisively compared. As we will argue, BWLOW is a book that ingeniously plays on the generic frame of ethnic fiction and the legitimacy of the ethnic insider perspective associated with it.

This has important formal implications. Díaz adopts a strategy of what literary critic Evelyn Ch’ien calls “assertive nontranslation” (2004: 209), which means that he refuses to explain or contextualize non-English elements, but rather integrates them into the discourse without the use of brackets or italics, thus deliberately offsetting the cadence of the English sentences. As a result, the reader gets the impression of being pulled into the bilingual dynamic of the immigrant community, without necessarily understanding everything that is going on between the interlocutors. In an early interview conducted on the occasion of the publication of his short-story collection Drown in 1996, Díaz himself specified his method of nontranslation as follows:

I feel I’m not a voyeur nor am I a native informer. I don’t explain cultural things, with italics or with exclamation marks or with side bars or asides. I was aggressive about that because I had so many negative models, so many Latinos and black writers who are writing to white audiences, who are not writing to their own people. If you are not writing to your own people, I’m disturbed because of what that says about your relationship to the community you are in one way or another indebted to. You are only there to loot them of ideas, and words, and images so that you can coon them to the dominant group. That disturbs me tremendously.

Céspedes 2000: 900

Díaz’s refusal to write to an outside group should not be understood to mean that he is writing exclusively for Dominican-Americans. His remarks concern the kind of mechanisms of address encoded in mainstream fiction, which uses ethnic themes without necessarily exploring them in depth. His strategy of aggressive nontranslation is thus a way of resisting easy assimilation into and marketization by a dominant, Anglo-American culture, which ‘domesticates’ ethnic voices through translation (Venuti 1995). It goes without saying that all this poses peculiar challenges for the translator of Díaz’s prose. There are, however, broader socio-cultural implications as well. Rather than focusing all attention on what inevitably gets lost in translating a text that itself defies translation, our aim is to highlight the cultural significance of a poetics of nontranslation, and what happens if such a poetics is transposed into another language.

1.2. Methodological Remarks

Our approach builds on recent research on multilingual literature (or, what we define more broadly as heteroglossic literature) in translation. Since Lewis (2003: 412) has pointed out “l’absence d’une réflection adéquate sur les défis que posent [les langues métissées] à l’égard des conceptions conventionnelles de la langue et de la traduction”, several advances have been made. Regarding the functions of literary multilingualism, García Vizcaíno (2008: 213-216) distinguishes in rather general terms between foregrounding an element (e.g., the illocutionary force of the sentence, or part of its propositional content) and creating a humoristic effect. Stratford (2008: 461) gives a more detailed account, referring to the taxonomy of Horn (1981: 226), which distinguishes the following functions (our translation):

  1. Linguistic characterization

  2. Accentuate the illusion of reality

  3. Establish an authorial voice

  4. Contribute to the unification of heterogeneous elements

  5. Produce a comical effect

  6. Transmit language-specific concepts

  7. Function as a purely aesthetic factor

  8. Function as a quote

Furthermore, diverse methods or techniques for the translation of linguistic multiplicity have been discussed. García Vizcaíno (2008: 216-221) distinguishes between explicitation (rendering the pragmatic effect of heteroglossia in a more explicit way), compensation (making up for the loss of linguistic multiplicity elsewhere in the text), and the use of code switching. This third strategy (which, as García Vizcaíno acknowledges, sometimes overlaps with the second) can take several forms: switching between languages through nontranslation of certain elements of the ST’s main language (see also Grutman 2006: 37), the introduction of different regional varieties of the target language, or the use of different registers of the target language. In the latter two cases, interlingual variation in the ST is replaced by intralingual variation (the insertion of different varieties or registers of the same language) in the TT. On the other hand, authors like Berman (1985) or Koster (1997) have adopted a more normative perspective by rejecting the use of dialect in the TT to render the heteroglossia of the ST (Grutman 2006: 20).

In our analysis we will use these insights and elaborate on them by applying them to narratological categories. First, we will focus on one function of ST heteroglossia in particular, which comes close to the first function of Horn (1981), namely a way of characterizing a speaker. Importantly, heteroglossia is here not only a way of characterizing the narrator as an individual, but also a way of characterizing the relation between the narrator and the narratee(s). Concretely, we will describe heteroglossia as a solidarity-enhancing mechanism. As such, heteroglossia also fulfills a narratological function, as it affects the relation between the narrator and the narratee(s).

Second, with respect to the translation techniques used in the Spanish-language versions of BWLOW, we will argue that the substitution of interlingual variation by intralingual variation (specifically the use of Dominican Spanish) constitutes a dominant strategy. Interestingly, this strategy also seems to imply a shift in the main function fulfilled by heteroglossia. One salient difference is that the narrative voice becomes less ethnically or racially marked in translation.[5] But on the other hand, translated heteroglossia clearly fulfills Horn’s third function, the identification of the voice of the author Junot Díaz, who has Dominican roots. As we shall argue, the solidarizing functions are directed away from the relation between the narrator(s) and the narratee(s) and towards that between the author and the implied audience of the translation.

2. Textual characteristics of the ST

BWLOW is a mosaic of linguistic varieties and registers. The book confronts the reader with all kinds of English: Spanglish, nerd talk, ghetto talk, African-American English, and colloquial English. In our analysis we will be less concerned with multilingualism or heterolingualism per se than with heteroglossia in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of the co-existence of a number of socially codified registers or styles (which may or may not be approached in terms of “foreign languages”). First we give a succinct overview of the various types of heteroglossia in BWLOW. In a second step, we will discuss the broader significance of these types for the narrative as a whole.

2.1. Types of Heteroglossia

2.1.1. Spanglish

A first instance of heteroglossia is the use of Spanglish, or the insertion of Spanish expressions and idioms into the English text to convey ethnically marked discourse. Díaz’s use of Spanglish is quite experimental, as the following examples attest.

The use of Spanish in example (1) is fairly conventional: it occurs in a dialogue and highlights loaded concepts or taboo words, which somehow suggest a bond between members of the same group or express the voice of a collectivity. In example (2), an entire proverb is rendered in Spanish (literally: those who run least may fly, meaning still waters run deep), which is already less obvious for the Anglophone reader with a weak grasp of Spanish. Example (3), finally, contains some regionally inflected words (prieta, meaning swarthy, dark-skinned) which are peculiar to the Dominican context, and which may not be directly intelligible even to readers who know some Spanish.

Importantly, Díaz does not offer any translation of the Spanish words or sentences. There is no glossary, nor are there explanatory English paraphrases in the text. Compare this with an example of the Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros, quoted in García Vizcaíno (2008), where the author has decided to both italicize the Spanish expressions lárgate and me das asco and supplement them by the paraphrastic English expressions I don’t ever want to see you again and you disgust me:

As we already pointed out, Díaz’s refusal to translate or contextualize does not therefore mean that he only writes for members of his own ethnolinguistic community.[6] If these elements are not explained, it is because the narrator judges or suggests that his narratee(s) understand(s) what he or she is saying. Thus, the use of these non-English elements creates an in-group effect, which the actual reader can observe from a distance.

2.1.2. African-American English

Example (3) in the above section shows that Díaz frequently sprinkles his prose with expressions borrowed from African-American English (for a discussion see Green 2004). Second-generation Dominican-Americans identify strongly with their African American peers because they are often in a similar socio-economic position and because outside observers often categorize them as African-Americans on the basis of their skin color. At the same time, many Dominican-Americans try to resist this binary black-white racial classification, which differs from racial taxonomies in the Dominican Republic, where dark skin is associated with a Haitian background, by insisting that they (also) speak Spanish (Bailey 2000: 556-557). In the quote, Oscar’s big sister Lola, whom Yunior is unsuccessfully courting, appears to defy the expectations thrust upon her because of her very dark skin by resisting Yunior’s (and the narrator’s) communicative frame. Phrases like I got jumped or let me steal on her ass can be interpreted as typical instances of African-American English. By switching to Dominican Spanish, Lola asserts her agency by blocking this code choice.

The racial characterization of the narrator’s voice is reaffirmed by other elements as well, such as the use of nigger in the sense of somebody. Although this word has a generic meaning, it is clear that only a member of the ethnic in-group can safely employ such identifying labels in a non-derogatory fashion:

The frequency of generic nigger testifies to its effectiveness in circumscribing a specified community. As we will show, there is no Spanish equivalent for generic nigger, since this concept is intimately tied to the strict black-white dichotomy built into the U.S. racial lexicon.

2.1.3. Nerd Talk

Oscar, the protagonist of BWLOW, tries to escape (or transcend?) his miserable life by immersing himself completely in science fiction, comic strips and role-playing games, an inclination which underwrites his “un-Dominicanness,” his outsiderhood in his own ethnic group, where a man is supposed to be “fly bachatero” (party animal) chasing Dominican girls. The following quote ironically juxtaposes Oscar’s fluency in various science fiction languages with his inability to function in real life and talk the language of his fellow ethnics. Although it is not Oscar himself who is speaking here but the narrator, the latter seems to adopt the former’s nerd speak:

Note that in Díaz’s prose the nerd-speak is neither highlighted nor explained, so that the non-initiated reader has to infer the underlying meanings from the context. In this way, we are made to feel outsiders in Oscar’s universe, which reinforces our sense of the latter’s alienation from his community. Oscar’s “otakuness” (otaku is a Japanese term referring to people who show excessive interest in video games and comic strips) or “nerdiness” is in a way inversely proportional to his Dominicanness, or better, his Dominican-Americanness.

2.1.4. Footnotes

A final instance of (genre-specific) heteroglossia that we would like to address is Díaz’s inventive use of footnotes. Footnotes (like glossaries, bibliographies, asides, and the like) are a common feature of most ethnic fiction, as they function to explain to the non-initiated reader elements that are peculiar to the in-group. Such formal elements belong to the shared repertoire of ethnic writers, who willy-nilly become “translators of ethnicity” for the outside world (Sollors 1986: 250). As Sollors indicates, however, this enforced translational capacity on the part of the ethnic author can be turned into an instrument of willful deceit, whereby the reader is denied the usual explanatory gesture or is given the wrong or incomplete information. In this way, the ethnic writer can play with the conventions of a genre that may appear constrictive. We claim that this is precisely what is at stake in BWLOW.

Instead of clarifying things to the reader, Díaz’s footnotes mock the authority of a supposedly neutral voice mediating between cultures, mixing (pseudo-)earnest discourse with vulgar or colloquial speech. The footnotes are used to both feed and thwart the reader’s expectations about the progression of the narrative. One of the many uncharming epithets cast upon Oscar by those around him is that of the “neighborhood parigüayo.” This expression is accompanied by the following footnote:

This footnote is very different from an objective encyclopedic footnote. The narrator addresses the narratee directly and uses rhetorical questions and colloquial language.[7] Moreover, it is telling that this footnote itself could use a footnote. The first and the final line contain a reference to the fictional race of Watchers in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Marvel comics. These characters, who live on the blue side of the moon, compile information about the universe and in doing so help to defend the earth against such supervillains as Galactus. Díaz uses this Marvel universe as an intertext to visualize Oscar’s predicament as an “Outlander” among his peers, whose tragicomic death can be said to symbolize the Dominican Republic’s unsuccessful working through of the dictatorship of that other “supervillain” Rafael Trujillo, who in an earlier footnote is described as “a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up” (footnote 1, p. 2).

The irony of the footnote apparatus in BWLOW derives from the fact that it offers “objective” historical background information on the Dominican Republic, even while questioning the validity of such knowledge by drawing on sources that either do not exist (the Dictionary of Dominican Things) or belong to a fictional universe (“Watchers agree”).[8] Rather than attesting the historical accuracy of things and events described in the main narrative, the footnotes thus draw attention to the difficulties involved in representing traumatic events. Instead of filling the gaps, Díaz’s footnotes draw the reader’s attention to the impossibility of telling the entire truth.

2.2. Mechanisms of Address

Part of the originality of Díaz’s prose derives from the solidarity effects it creates between the narrator and the narratee, the “you” addressed in the text. Both the narrator and the narratee remain somewhat mysterious throughout. Only half-way through the book, the reader realizes that the main narrator of the book is actually one of the characters, namely Yunior, a typical Dominican womanizer who has his eye on Oscar’s big sister Lola, and who has resolved to take the maladjusted protagonist under his wing. Apart from a short chapter in which Lola tells about how she ran away from home in her adolescence and ended up in the Dominican Republic, it is Yunior who appears to narrate the bulk of the story of Oscar’s downfall.[9] The characteristics of this narrator gradually come into sharper focus as specific narratees are addressed.

The fact that most of Oscar’s life story is told by Yunior, who has little in common with the estranged anti-hero, is of considerable importance. Although he clearly sympathizes with Oscar, Yunior makes sure not to lose credibility among his macho college friends. As the following passage indicates, however, Yunior is more familiar with Oscar’s mental universe than he is willing to acknowledge:

As the rhetorical question between brackets indicates, the you addressed in this quote is clearly a person for whom knowledge of Elvish is a sign of social weakness. Yunior’s literally entering into Oscar’s world compromises his standing among his Dominican-American friends who like to go to parties, chase girls and pump iron in the gym, a community from which the otherworldly Oscar is excluded.

This results in a conflict of codes: Oscar’s sci-fi language contrasts sharply with the African-American English and slang expressions (deletion of the definite article before fool, fucking Elvish, gotta be kidding) which Yunior uses among his friends. Sometimes, Yunior addresses his peers quite explicitly, as in the following example:

The word players and the slang phrases fuck, bitch, ass suggest a very strong emotional bond between the narrator and his addressees. This bond is created mostly through a shared interest in sex. Oscar also shares this interest, but because of his shyness he is unable to get a girl. This makes him an outsider among Dominican-Americans (a watcher among players). Although Yunior makes some half-hearted attempts to share his “playerly wisdom” with Oscar, he is anxious not to fall out with his peers (p. 173). It is only after Oscar’s death that Yunior develops a lasting fascination for Oscar, whose downfall seems to confront him with a suppressed part of his identity linked to the dictatorship of Trujillo.

Yunior’s function as narrator changes in those sections of the book where the orbit is widened to include Oscar’s family relations and Dominican history as a whole. Here, Yunior’s voice seems to merge imperceptibly with that of one of Oscar’s science fiction characters, namely a “Watcher” observing our earthly doings from a safe distance. This Watcher may embody an older, more mature version of Yunior fulfilling a “cosmic duty” to tell Oscar’s unfinished story to the “future generation of de Leóns and Cabrals” (explicitly addressed on p. 115). This sense of responsibility is emphasized by the fact that Yunior consistently refers to himself as your Watcher, thus suggesting that he feels responsibility towards the narratee:

The kind of narratees the Watcher addresses are very different from those addressed by the “playerly” Yunior with whom Oscar shared a room in college. Whereas the latter tends to refer to “us niggers” to suggest an affectionate bond among Dominican-American friends who like to act cool by borrowing slang words and phrases from African-American English, the former sometimes ironically uses the anachronistic “Negro” to evoke a hypercorrect or overeducated narratee. Thus, at one point, the narrator is talking about the so-called “Fukú,” the curse that would have descended on the western hemisphere ever since Columbus set foot on shore there. This “Great American Doom,” as it is called in the novel, creates an ironic contrast with the American dream scenario in immigrant fiction. In the following quote, Yunior half-jokingly reprimands the narratee for being unaware of the ways in which the fukú is to blame for some of the major disasters in the history of the Americas:

The use of the capitalized Negro here evokes an addressee who is presented as being out of touch with his own community. This is more or less in line with another context of address, where the narratee is explicitly situated in the university world with which the more mature Yunior (perhaps a kind of alter ego of Díaz himself?) is highly familiar:

Irrespective of the kind of narratee that is addressed, whether Yunior’s friends, Oscar’s family, university students and teachers, or the Dominican people as a whole, in each case there are strong solidarity effects generated by the narration. As we will indicate, these solidarity effects will undergo significant changes in translation.

2.3. Heteroglossia as a Solidarity-Enhancing Mechanism

To conclude our section on the ST, we would like to emphasize that textual heteroglossia and the narratological I-you relation (which can be said to be two of the most salient phenomena in the text, given their unconventional and comical effects) are closely interlinked. Both the narrator and the narratees are difficult to grasp: on the one hand, very little information is given (for example, the narrator remains anonymous up to page 169, and it is impossible to pin down the narratee as a specific individual). But on the other hand, in a more indirect way, the text is also very informative. Thus, the narrator’s voice is far from being a depersonalized voice: Yunior’s heteroglossic way of speaking is constitutive of his sociological and ethnic/racial identity. With respect to the narratee, we find various textual hints (Negro, players, future generation, us niggers …) which suggest that the textual you cannot be constructed as a generic audience.

Heteroglossia interacts with this narratological structure by reinforcing the solidarity between the narrator and the narratee: Spanglish, African-American English, nerd talk, as well as the footnotes suggest an in-group or several in-groups, which are defined through the exclusive knowledge of certain codes and forms of address. Heteroglossia thus not only constitutes the narrator’s voice, but also the relation between the narrator and the narratee: the use of specific registers enhances the solidarity between these textually encoded positions.

3. BWLOW into Spanish

Having sketched how BWLOW creates solidarity by mixing various registers and vernaculars, we now turn to what happens to these solidarity effects in translation. There can be no doubt that anybody who takes it upon herself to translate BLWOW faces an enormous challenge. This applies a fortiori to those who attempt to translate the work into Spanish, as this language already constitutes a vital component, an embedded code, of Díaz’s prose. As Nuria Barrios writes in El País, “¿Cómo transmitir el juego, la sorpresa y la verdad de un idioma donde es posible decir ‘Then you will be mi negra bella’?” (How can one convey the playfulness, the inventiveness and the truth of a language which allows one to say ‘Then you will be mi negra bella’; Barrios 2008).[11] The publishers of the Spanish translation took special care in selecting a translator by involving Díaz directly in the screening process. Eventually, the task was entrusted to Achy Obejas, a Cuban author whose artistic sensibilities guaranteed a bold usage of the idiomatic turns of the Spanish language. Given her Caribbean background, moreover, Obejas was able to tap into the regionally inflected expressions and idioms from which Díaz’s writing draws its energy.

Obejas’s translation was well received by critics. One reviewer goes so far as to suggest that the translation of BWLOW can provide a spur for contemporary Spanish authors to break free from the traditional strictures of their language and to integrate more slang or street language into their writings:

[…] a pesar de ser una traducción del inglés, suena inusitadamente libre en español: mezcla jergas, mezcla idiomas, mezcla tonos, mezcla vulgarismos y cultismos, arcaísmos y corrupciones […]; en suma, uno recibe el ruido de la calle […].

Gándara 2008[12]

Despite being a translation from English, it sounds unusually free in Spanish: it mixes jargons, idioms, tones, vulgar and learned expressions, archaisms and corruptions…; in sum, you get a sense of the language of the streets.

Translated by author

In drawing attention to this review, we wish to emphasize that our analysis of the relative normalization of the heteroglossic density of Díaz’s original should not be read as a critique of Obejas’s undeniable skills as a translator. What concerns us, rather, is how this – perhaps inevitable – normalization process affects the narrative structure of the ST, and in particular the effectiveness of certain solidarity mechanisms.

3.1. Differences between the Spanish-Language Editions

Soon after the publication of BWLOW, two Spanish-language editions of BWLOW came onto the market, one published by Vintage Español for North-America and the other by Random House Mondadori for Europe and South-America. Both these editions draw on Achy Obejas’s translation of Díaz’s original. The two versions are not identical, however.

A first difference concerns the title. While Mondadori translates BWLOW as “La maravillosa vida breve de Óscar Wao,” the Vintage edition carries a slightly altered title, namely “La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao.” This difference probably has to be attributed to copyright matters, and is of no further consequence for our analysis.[13]

Second, while both editions make use of Obejas’s translation, the Vintage edition makes explicit mention of an editor, María Teresa Ortega, who helped in preparing the book for publication.[14]

Third, there are a number of textual differences between the two versions, which however are few and far between. To give an idea, the first 700 words of the ST yield no more than five divergences between the two Spanish editions.

There are no systematic textual discrepancies to hint at fundamentally opposed translation strategies.

Fourth, the Vintage volume contains an inserted paratext, which is absent from the Mondadori edition, and which we here cite in full:

Finally, probably the most important difference between the Vintage and Mondadori editions concerns the footnote apparatus. Whereas the Mondadori retains the footnotes of the ST, the Vintage adds no less than 115 footnotes, which are set off from those of the author by means of square brackets (as indicated in the translator’s note), but which are not numbered separately. We will discuss the function of the Vintage footnotes below.

3.2. Translating Heteroglossia

Let us now turn to a discussion of the various translation techniques used in the Spanish editions of BWLOW to convey the various forms of heteroglossia present in the ST.

3.2.1. Spanglish

Since Díaz sprinkles his prose with Spanish phrases and expressions, the Spanish-language version has to recreate the plurilingual situational context in different ways. One strategy has been the reintroduction of English elements in the TT. However, the arsenal of English elements, some of them phonetically transcribed to convey the Hispanic background of the speaker, remains fairly limited: fokin (45 instances in 200 pages), bróder (16 instances), loser (7 instances), or such internationally recognized phrases as my apologies or slam. These words have to be approached as conventionalized keys, which serve to indicate variations in register and tone. It is safe to say that the English of the TT is much less functional than the Spanish in the ST.

Interestingly, when the English from the ST is left untranslated, it is normalized, as in the following example, where the ungrammatical negative imperative is turned into a correct English clause:

A dominant strategy for conveying the interlingual variation is its substitution by intralingual variation, i.e., the insertion of Dominican or Caribbean words, such as prieto/a, maco, tígueres, papichulo, rapar, or singar. This use of regional forms offsets on a lexical level what gets lost on a syntactic level, where the disruptive grammar of the original is to a certain degree flattened out through the use of idiomatic Spanish sentences. The following example illustrates the frequent lexical innovations of the TT:

On the one hand, we can observe how lexical elements from the ST are rendered by locally marked variants. Not only is English bus translated by means of the Caribbean word guagua rather than the less regionally marked autobús, but also the Spanish bravos is not retained (which violates the translator’s note in the Vintage volume) but is replaced by the local equivalent tígueres. Note that, in this way, the alliterating structure of the ST (bravos on the bus) falls away, but this is compensated for by the rhythmic stress pattern and colorful word choice of the TT. On the other hand, we should note that buenmosos is corrected as buenmozos in order to conform to standard spelling.

In general, the Spanish syntax of the translation is much closer to the norm than the English syntax of the ST. Where Díaz makes plenty of use of incomplete sentences, negative concords, and the like, to give the reader the impression of being drawn into the Dominican-American community, Obejas’s translation does not tinker with Spanish sentence structure. The vernacular dimension is restored by lexical means, through the insertion of local words and phrases. Further, Obejas reconnects to vernacular discourse through phonetic renderings of recurring words or morphemes: pa instead of para (me fui pa mi casa), -ao instead of -ado (ese afeminao), or na instead of nada (te dije que esa negrita no servía pa na).

3.2.2. African-American English

A good example of African-American English in the ST is the use of the invariant be in “No be a baby” quoted above, which becomes “Don’t be a baby” in the Spanish translation. In the original, the use of “bad” grammar is associated with lower social class status, while at the same time suggesting toughness, a deliberate violation of educational norms as a measure of street credibility. In this particular instance, it suggests Oscar’s (imposed) masculinity and insensitivity while breaking up with one of his early infatuations. By correcting the “bad” English, the TT loses this double connotation of social inferiority and superiority. The normalization of the “bad” English in translation to some degree results in a levelling out of the ascribed and assumed identity positions of the characters in the novel.

The narrative voice becomes less racially marked as well. This is evident if we consider the translation of the word nigger. For example, in the following scene, where Oscar’s mother throws him to the floor because he’s crying over a girl, screaming that if he wants the “puta” to respect him, he should give her “un galletazo,” a cuff on the ears.

The implication is, of course, that Oscar is not man enough to subdue his girlfriend, which once again reveals his inability to observe the male-dominated social codes of Dominican culture, to the distress of his own mother, who, ironically, is a victim of that culture. In the Spanish edition, the word nigger is replaced by the much less loaded tipo de varón, which does not carry any racial undertones. In other examples, nigger is translated by impersonal constructions such as uno, cualquiera, the impersonal construction with se or hyperonymic forms such as los tipos or un muchacho.

In the few instances where the racial usage is not neutralized, this seems to happen for aesthetic or formal reasons more than anything else, as when the young Oscar is described as “the first nigger to learn the perrito.” In the Spanish version, this becomes “el primer negrito que aprendió el perrito.” Here, the diminutive not only takes the sting out of the slur, it also creates a smooth rhyme.[15]

Another racialized form of address is Negro. Even though the word was created to avoid slurs like nigger, here too the racial inflection is entirely lost:

Clearly, the neutral mi gente does not carry the same ambiguous connotations of racial uplift and betrayal associated with capitalized Negro in English. Instead, it identifies the narratee in the translated text with the Dominican people in general. Also interesting to note is that the indefinite article in an illegal invasion is substituted by a definite article in la invasión ilegal. In this way, the invasion is redescribed as part of the shared knowledge of Dominican people rather than one of the American interventions in the Caribbean.

A final example brings together some of the translation strategies discussed above:

No podía practicar deportes is much less strong than Couldn’t play sports for shit. The slang expression no G is replaced by ni don pa na, which has some of the colloquial flavour of the original (through the phonetic transcription of spoken language) but is still more neutral and less (ethnically) marked. Something similar can be said about the substitution of sus aparatos “antivaginales” for his anti-pussy devices. Although the adjective antivaginales is put between brackets to suggest that this is something which Oscar’s friends might have literally said, the phrase seems to present us with a sanitized version of the vulgar sexual slur directed at the protagonist. On the other hand, this process of neutralization is counteracted by daring lexical choices, which restore some of the narrative exuberance characteristic of Díaz’s prose. Thus, girl is translated by hembra (a sexist slur), and not by the more neutral chica. The Caribbean words maco and panas are not only more colloquial than their ST equivalents, they also add a further regional dimension.

3.2.3. Nerd Talk

As regards the nerd talk, the conclusion can be fairly transparent: here, the translator has made use of neologisms and calques from the English language. This is how Mondadori conveys the passage we discussed at the beginning of section 2.1:

The Vintage volume does not differ fundamentally from the Mondadori: elvish is left untranslated rather than hispanicized and fanático is substituted for the perhaps somewhat more informal fan. What really sets apart the two editions, however, is that Vintage offers no less than six footnotes to accompany the passage, explaining the following terms to the TT reader: elvish, chakobsa, lensman, Marvel, Stan Lee and otakunidad.

3.2.4. Footnotes

Above, we noted that the Vintage edition includes a series of explanatory footnotes. The function of the inserted footnotes appears to be threefold.

A majority of them serves to explain the narrator’s nerd talk or science fiction language:

A second group of footnotes contextualizes cultural references, for instance to popular musicians (Sinéad O’Connor, Robert Smith, Lou Reed …) or politicians (Kennedy). Apart from elements belonging to mainstream culture in North America, Caribbean terms are explained too, such as klerin [“aguardiente haitiano”], or even specifically Dominican ones, as the following example attests:

A third and final category of footnotes elucidates the relatively few cases where English words or phrases have been left untranslated in the main text, as is the case with the following pun:

The non-translation of the second sentence was motivated by the realization that the word play would not come out in Spanish. Whether the joke is still funny when it needs to be explained in a footnote is another issue. Keeping in mind that the Vintage volume was produced for a North American audience, we can only conclude that its editorial policy of paraphrasing all “foreign” elements (including both Caribbean and North American cultural references) appears rather conservative or even patronizing, especially in view of Díaz’s poetics of nontranslation. What is also significant is that the Cadillac joke is told by one of Lola’s teenage boyfriends in a chapter narrated entirely by her and in all probability addressed to Yunior.[16]

3.3. Addressing the Narratee in Translation

Regarding the translation of the you-form, several observations can be made which point in the same direction, namely a tendency to make the you-figure less salient and more generic. First, when the you-form has a generic meaning in the ST, the Spanish translation frequently uses impersonal constructions such as uno, impersonal se, or a definite article, instead of the generic tú. In other contexts, the you-reference disappears. This is for example the case in Yunior’s self-references as your (humble) Watcher, which establishes a solidarity relation between the narrator and the narratee. In only one of the three cases discussed in 2.2, the expression is translated equivalently (su humilde Observador). In the other cases, your is substituted by a demonstrative modifier or a definite article. As a consequence, the solidarity between the narrator and the narratee decreases.

The TT narratee becomes less specific as well. Whereas the ST deliberately exploits the singular-plural ambiguity of the you-form, the Spanish translation consistently addresses the narratee with the plural ustedes:

Interestingly, even in those cases where a Spanish second person singular construction occurs in the ST, the translation replaces it by a plural equivalent:

Where in the ST you is modified in expressions such as you all or some of you, the translation leaves out this qualification, thus giving a more generic meaning to you:

We already mentioned that forms of address such as Negro were translated by the more neutral mi gente. A similar mechanism is at work in the translation of players, of which we noted above that it creates a strong emotional bond between the interlocutors:

Players: never never never fuck with a bitch named Awilda. Because when she awildas out on your ass you’ll know pain for real.

Díaz 2008a: 175

Socios: nunca, nunca, nunca se metan con un perra llamada Awilda. Porque cuando se ponga a awildar, van a saber lo que es dolor de verdad.

Díaz 2008b: 166, Mondadori edition

In most of these cases, although the translation does convey solidarity meanings, the in-group effect becomes weaker, and the TT often loses the racial and sexual undertones present in the ST.

3.4. Translation as a Solidarity-Displacing Mechanism

In section 2.3 we noted how textual heteroglossia and the narratological I-you relation interact with each other as solidarity-creating or solidarity-enhancing mechanisms in the ST. Our translation analysis has shown that in the TT textual heteroglossia and forms of address equally interact with each other, and contribute to a displacement of the solidarity mechanisms. In the ST, the occurrence of heteroglossia is very closely connected with the identity of the characters, which are Dominican-American, but also represent and question certain stereotypes within that community, such as the macho versus the nerd. Spanglish, the “bad” English grammar, and racially inflected expressions such as nigger or Negro work together in creating an ethnically or sociologically defined in-group to which the narrator and the narratee belong. The relation between the narrator and the narratee is also often personalized in marked forms of address.

In translation, the heteroglossic elements are more geographically than sociologically marked. Especially the sociological characterization of the narrator and the narratee appears to be very difficult to render in translation. The main forms of heteroglossia are now the shared nerd and sci-fi interest of the narrator and the narratee, and the use of Dominican Spanish. At the same time, we have seen that the narratee is less personalized and more generic. In fact, what happens is that the narratee moves somewhat closer to the implied reader of the TT. The use of plural ustedes, or of mi gente quite consistently evokes the idea of Dominican people in general, more than is the case with the often more personalized you, racial Negro or sexist players in the ST.

This leads to the question as to whether textual heteroglossia still has a solidarity-enhancing function in the translation. We think it still does, but now the solidarity affects perhaps less the relation between the narrator and the narratee, and more clearly the relation between the implied reader of the TT and the implied author of the ST. The use of Dominican Spanish becomes more of a feature of Junot Díaz, a Dominican-American writer, whose work defines itself within the Spanish-speaking world through language use. When the translators state in the editorial note of the Vintage volume that they have maintained the Spanish of the original, they seem to refer to an implied Dominican author. The use of Dominican Spanish still creates an in-group effect, but it does not just affect the relation between the protagonists of the novel, but also the relation between Díaz and his implied readers.

4. Concluding Remarks

According to May (1994: 4; quoted in Munday 2008: 16) translations have a tendency to reduce the heteroglossia present in the ST, i.e., “the heteroglossia ‘from below’” is often replaced with “greater literariness ‘from above.’” While these expectations were confirmed to some degree, a more complex picture emerged from our analysis of the Spanish-language editions of BWLOW. It is true that the I’s and you’s of the translation are underspecified in relation to the original, thus confirming the view that complex narrative voices are simplified in translation (Taivalkovski 2002, quoted in Chesterman 2004). As the binary racial regime of the U.S. proves difficult to export, the narrator and narratee are to some extent depersonalized or decharacterized, i.e., they are lifted from an intra- to an extradiegetic level, bringing them closer to the implied author and reader of the TT. These, too, are less ambiguous than those of the ST. Both the Mondadori and the Vintage edition are directed towards a more stable, monistic audience than the original, which simultaneously addresses insider and outsider readers.

However, this does not therefore entail that the solidarity-effects in BWLOW are entirely neutralized or that the narrative voice is centripetally redefined “from above.” The Spanish-language versions of BWLOW have a decidedly regional inflection, perhaps even more so than the original. Rather than unifying the various voices “from below” in a more literary, authoritative standpoint “from above,” Obejas’s translation profiles Díaz as a typically Caribbean, or specifically Dominican, author through the insertion (and not just the retention) of local idioms and speech forms. Here, a marked difference emerges between the two Spanish editions. While Mondadori brings Díaz’s bestseller within the orbit of Spanish literary traditions, the Vintage edition has exported the author back to the North American context, which apparently required the insertion of an extensive footnote apparatus, explaining cultural references from both U.S. and Dominican culture. Quite ironically, therefore, the Vintage volume constructs an implied reader who is ignorant of the fluid, bilingual cultural background out of which Díaz’s novel emerged and which constitutes the shared heritage of a majority of Spanish-language speakers in the U.S.