On Loss and Gain: The Translation of Linguistic Simultaneity in This is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz (original) (raw)
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Radical bilingualism in Junot Díaz’s texts
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 2019
This paper analyzes Junot Díaz’s most recent works The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007. The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead) and This is How You Lose Her (2012. This is how you lose her. New York: Riverhead) by using Muysken’s (2000. Bilingual speech. A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: CUP) typology of code-switching to illustrate the types of language mixing devices present in these two texts. I point out that Díaz’s innovative use of radical bilingualism is not due to the quantity of sentences including Spanish, rather to the quality of mixing and switching in his works. Further, I elaborate on Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia. (2013. Radical code-switching in the Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90. 475–487) study using Torres’ (2007. In the contact zone: Code-switching strategies by Latino/a writers. MELUS 32(1). 75–96) categorization of code-switching strategies utilized by U.S. Hispanic authors. I find that instead of Díaz...
Code-Switching, Language Emotionality and Identity in Junot Díaz’s “Invierno”
Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies, 2020
Code-switching (CS) is a linguistic activity typical of bilingual speakers, and thus, a central feature characterising Latino/a literature. The present study reads Junot Díaz’s “Invierno,” a short story from This Is How You Lose Her (2012), with a focus on the oral code-switches that the bilingual Latino/a characters make from English—their second language (L2)—to Spanish—their first language (L1). More specifically, it explores the relationship between CS, language emotionality and identity. The Spanish code-switches are analysed in terms of the emotionality degree they elicit and, linguistically, according to frequency and type— intersentential CS, intrasentential CS and tag-switching. The results reveal a low percentage of Spanish vocabulary, which, nevertheless, fills the story with Latino-Dominican touches and transports the reader to the Caribbean lifestyle. This is probably due to the fact that most are emotionally charged words and expressions, which supports the idea that t...
The Translation of Multilingual Literature in a Migrant World. The Case of Junot Diaz
FOLIA LINGUISTICA ET LITTERARIA, 2016
Due to emigration waves in recent decades, multilingual literature has become increasingly common (Knauth 2007). It is therefore natural that there should be an increase in the research on this kind of literature (Grutman 2009). Countries like the United States have been an economic attraction pole for many years and have had a Latino literature for half a century. Being one of the most representative migrant groups in the United States the Latino community, whose migration tradition and miscegenation goes back so far in time, gave rise to a language of its own: Spanglish. Over the last fifty years a group of writers has been making use of this "language," emblematizing some sort of "Latino identity." Their literature is multilingual in that it mixes two languages, even in a same sentence (Stavans 2013). Are these expressions of "group belonging" being preserved when they are translated? Can we discover some sort of "identity" when we collect the expressions of Spanglish in literature and does this identity vanish when it is translated? In this article we analyse the translations into Spanish of the Dominican migrant writer Junot Diaz. We try to answer the question if the Spanglish component in his literature is essential to Junot Diaz’s art and is it an essential expression of the writer’s own identity? The answer to this question might not be straightforward.
Compulsive Translators: Are Narrators in Javier Marías's Novels Beguiled by Language
Hispanic Research Journal, 2017
Javier Marías’s novels are renowned for revolving around his digressive narrators, who, amongst other subjects, persistently reflect upon language and translation. This article discusses the role of these constant reflections and examines the narrators’ engagement with different forms of translation by using Roman Jakobson’s categorisation (intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation) in four novels that correspond to Marías’s mature novelistic period (Todas las almas (1989), Corazón tan blanco (1992), Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) and Tu rostro mañana (2002–2007)). It briefly discusses the effects of intralingual and intersemiotic translation on the narrators before moving on to analysing in detail the impact of interlingual translations. The latter is a prominent aspect in Marías’s fiction; its significance is examined through the use of foreign terms and their translations (or lack thereof ), as well as the narrators’ reflections upon them. The ultimate aim of this article is to establish the link between the all-pervasive uncertainty in Marías’s novels and the narrators’ fascination with translation, especially of the interlingual kind.
Review of Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature
Translation Today, Volume 17, Issue 2, 2023
The Western etymology of the term ‘translation’ has contributed to the development of certain enduring notions in the field, including the notions of ‘faithfulness’ and an excessive preoccupation with the concept of an ‘original’. The term ‘translation’ originates from the Latin language, specifically from the verb translatio, which translates to “to bear/carry across” (Bassnet 1998:38). The traditional concept of translation necessitates the translator to remain unquestionably faithful to the original text while carrying its meaning from the source language to the target language. Being an intricate art of conveying meaning and intent across a binary divide, translation enables communication, fosters cultural exchange and bridges gaps between distinct linguistic communities. Due to the interaction of cultures and languages, the potential for mistranslation and error arises. Contrary to the traditional definition, Kripper advocates the role of the translator as an actor who is playing the more foundational and fundamental part rather than being invisible. However, she not only negates the image of the translator as a bridge between cultures and languages but also questions the fluid transnational discourse in translation. Kripper further extends her focus to the relevance of the translator’s ‘bad translation’ or the flawed translation, supporting Lawrence Venuti’s statement, “Translation is radically transformative” (2019: 176). Her book “Narratives of Mistranslation” destabilizes the traditional conceptual notion of translation and supports mistranslation as an intentional and conscious strategy to translate, which further acts as the resistance against the power dynamics of authorial authority that governs the translation practice. This book is also a part of Jacob Blakesley’s and Duncan Large’s literary translations series entitled Routledge Studies in Literary Translation.
Bilingualism, Code-Switching and Lexical Borrowing in Literature
Frank Nuessel (ed.), Linguistic Approaches to Hispanic Literature (New York/Ottawa/Ontario: Legas, 2000). Pp. 115-131. , 2000
My article “Bilingualism, Code-Switching, and Lexical Borrowing in Literature” appeared in Frank Nuessel (Ed.) Linguistic Approaches to Hispanic Literature (New York/Ottawa/Ontario: Legas, 2000, pp. 115-131). The study provides detailed definitions and literary manifestations of these three processes in Spanish literature. Selected authors include Rodolfo Gonzales, Tino Villanueva, Gloria Anzaldúa, and René Marqués. The essay also discusses biculturalism and diglossia.
POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention, 2017
As an oral rhetoric strategy, code-switching is aggressively exclusive of monolingual participants or those with a different set of languages at their disposal (Myers-Scotton, 2006). This doesn’t seem the case, however, when we start close-reading multilingual, code-switching texts. Indeed, both Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Derek Walcott’s Omeros with their dense code-switching prove far from being exclusive. Strategies employed by them in written code-switching mode seem to differ significantly from oral practice in their dynamic, structure, and communicative purpose. Upon closer examination it can be argued that the phenomenon we are considering is not code-switching at all but a literary device that actively engages the reader and to a certain point ensures partial transparency of languages other than English. This device both complicates and simplifies the text repulsing and attracting the readers inevitably engaging them with a previously unknown culture. Both Borderlands/La Frontera and Omeros are constructed in such a way as to make the reader experience their writerly aspects, as Roland Barthes conceives them, on epistemological level (Barthes, 1974). Understanding the code-switching practice as inclusive and accommodating rather than as exclusive and alienating has major implications for what literary texts we may consider as accessible for our monolingual English-speaking students. Using empirical data collected from student-readers without Spanish specialization, I would like to show that both authors, but particularly Anzaldúa, have created certain more or less stable conditions for new readability for their texts (Venuti, 1994). Further, I would like to suggest that because of the shared desire to expose the reader to the new culture and its language between the writers discussed here and translators of foreign literature, the conditions and tools of newreadability in Anzaldúa’s and Walcott’s texts could also be borrowed and practiced in literary translation in general.
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 2018
This article investigates the linguistic and social functions of bilingual pragmatic marker pairs in Susana Chávez-Silverman's volume of essays Killer Crónicas. It has recently been recognized that written multilingual discourse is an under-researched area, as opposed to conversational code-switching which, since the 1970s, has been the subject of a growing body of work (Sebba 2012:1). Indeed, written code-switching lacks a coherent framework that could serve as background for the analysis of concrete data. This study argues for an integral approach to written multilingual discourse, relating linguistic phenomena of mixed-language to the literacy context in which they are produced and read. In that way it aims at contributing to a better understanding of the social and pragmatic functions of code-switching in written texts. 1 As such, the article ties up with a more general discussion on the value of written data to study phenomena typical of orality. Authors who adopt a rather moderate viewpoint consider certain discourse genres -such as theatrical works, personal letters, monologues, trial proceedings, and dialogues in fictional texts -to come rather close to how spontaneous spoken language is (e.g. Sell 2000 among others). In this range of ideas, Koch and Oesterreicher propose a general typology of texts which, according to a series of parameters, can be placed on a continuum between written and spoken language. The degree of orality of a text would then not exclusively relate to the medium itself, but also depend on 2 features such as its private vs. public nature, its subject matter, the presence of a certain emotional tension, the degree of interaction between the interlocutors (being the personages themselves, or the writer and the addressee/reader), the planned vs. spontaneous nature of the discourse, etc. However, critical voices argue that fictional texts create an illusion of linguistic authenticity ), and, in fact, illustrate what Goetsch (1985 calls put-on orality.
Lost and Found in Translation: Readers as Translators
Technium Social Sciences Journal
In this cosmopolitan era where the distance between different ethnicities and races has collapsed, we find a new form of literature which employs code-switching, examples being diaspora literature. An important notion to consider with regards to bilingual literature is to see what effect it has on the readers because, in this context, the readers become the translators. By leaning on linguistic and sociolinguistic theories about codeswitching as well new findings in translation studies, this study intends to investigate what is lost and found during reading texts like Meatless Days by Sara Suleri and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie when the readers become the translators. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and a thematic analysis was carried out on the qualitative data which found that readers translated code-switching along themes of legitimacy, identity and resistance to western knowledge. It was determined that when readers become translators, they have an unpreceden...