Don Quijote in Spanglish: Translation and Appropriation

During a lecture tour through Orwell’s Catalonia in the summer of 2002, I participated in a radio discussion, broadcasted live, on the origins and nature of Spanglish. Among the participants, who were either present or connected by satellite, there was a language purist affiliated to the Real Academia Española de la Lengua Castellana. There was some discussion on the capacity of a language to express emotions and the challenge Spanglish faces in this area. In his diatribe, this caballero stated that the mongrel tongue should not be taken seriously until and unless it produced a masterpiece of the caliber of Don Quixote of La Mancha, the magnum opus of Iberian letters, published by Cervantes in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second one in 1615. My immediate response was one of agreement. It’s too early to say what pattern Spanglish will take in its development, I suggested. While it isn’t impossible that in a couple of hundred years such a masterpiece might be composed in a variety of Spanglish unfamiliar to us today, a “translation” of the novel isn’t at all impossible, and neither is it improbable. Ipso facto, the program host asked me to improvise a few sentences. How would such translation “feel”? I spontaneously complied to his request-con enorme placer. Upon my return to the downtown hotel, I spoke with Sergio Vila-Sanjuan, an editor for the daily La Vanguardia. After some discussion with his colaboradores y colegas, he wanted me to send him a.s.a.p. my translation of Part I, Chapter 1. Poco después, at home in Massachusetts, me dediqué de lleno to the endeavor. The piece appeared in the supplement Cultura/s. An international controversy ensued. The strategy I took to render the text is easy to summarize. Spanglish remains, for the most part, an oral vehicle of communication, spoken predominantly by individuals of different national backgrounds in the United States. Although there is much in common among these national groups, each has devised its own linguistic modality. I refuse to choose a single modality; instead, my objective, similar to those on Spanish-language TV north of the Rio Grande and, more important even, to the one used assiduously in the Internet, is a middle ground-de ningún lugar y de todas partes. Mine isn’t a standardized Spanglish because for now no such composite exists. Maybe soon, but not yet… So mine is an “artificial” language, isn’t it? Sure, it ought to be. Until and unless Spanglish moves from the oral to the written mode-and it’s showing signs of doing so already-any literary attempt is, inevitably, una afectación. As translator I let myself be permeated by any and all varieties of Spanglish (Pachuco, Dominicanish, Cubonics, Nuyorrican, etc.) in the hope of producing a version that might be “read” by Latinos of different national backgrounds and by non-Hispanics and non-Spanglish-speakers as well. A journalist for La Nación in Buenos Aires, not without sarcasm, described the effort as joyceano. In Spanish, joyceano means Joycean; in Spanglish, joyful. And why did I dare to translate Don Quixjote? Again, the answer is easy: translation is always a form of appropriation. If there are eighteen different full-length translations of Cervantes’s novel into English-several Victorian attempts, a handful of modern ones, a postmodern version, etc.-available for readers across the Atlantic Ocean, it should also be made accessible to the new breed, e.g., Latinos in the United States, whose culture is the result of a new mestizaje, part Hispanic and part Anglo, part Spanish and part English. La version en Spanglish d’Ilan Stavans du premier chapitre de Don Quijote …