Last year, because I'm apparently an Anastasia Steele-level masochist, I wrote my MA dissertation on about a dozen different authors. One of these authors was the Argentine short story writer and fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, specifically his tale 'The Garden of Forking Paths', which is probably one of the less mind-bending of his writings, although still pretty damn cool. So I ventured down Durham University's 'Bill Bryson Library', which is sadly not a library just containing Bill Bryson books, in order to find some secondary criticism on Borges. The library was actually pretty well stocked as far as books on the guy went, except a problem presented itself. Upon closer examination, I found that about half of these tomes were in Spanish.
I don't know why I was surprised. After all, Borges is more the preserve of the Spanish Literature department, and of course they read him in the original tongue. So this was frustrating, but understandable. My Spanish extends to what I remember from some Linguaphone CDs I listened to ahead of a trip to Spain seven years ago (this was in that lull after my GCSE exams, and I figured that I should do something more productive than watch countless episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer). That is to say, not much, although for some reason I remember two separate words for stamps (sejos and estampillas, in case you're interested. Who am I kidding, you're definitely not). Whatever, I thought, I'll just take out all the Borges books written in English.
It got worse. Quite apart from the fact that I only managed to find a few salient quotes about 'The Garden of Forking Paths', there was a curious quirk to a few of the critical studies that I couldn't quite get my head around; namely, that although they were written in English, whenever they quoted Borges' stories they did so in the original Spanish. So the writer would make an interesting and perceptive point, which they'd back up by referring to a passage from 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' or some other such gnarly, befuddling piece of wonder, and I'd have no idea which part of the story they were citing. I found this fairly baffling; if you're going to quote in Spanish, then you assume that the readers of your book have enough of a grasp of Spanish to understand Borges (and I barely have a good enough understanding of English to fully comprehend translations of his work!). So why not just write the whole book in Spanish? Otherwise, you're just targeting the bilingual.
I've been thinking about my Borges experience because I'm currently about halfway through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the Dominican-American author Junot Diaz. Let me be clear, it's damn good, especially the amusing Sheldon Cooper-esque nerdiness of the eponymous protagonist, the by turns chilling and heartrending depictions of life in the Dominican Republic under the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and the evocation of the immigrant experience that is so central to Diaz's writing. On the basis of what I've read so far I'd recommend it, but with a caveat. And it's a fairly big one.
Spanish, my old nemesis, rears its head again! By which I mean I'm encountering the same problem I came across when trying to research Borges. It's not sentences of untranslated Spanish this time, but odd words sprinkled into conversation here and there, which ties in with the idea of the immigrant experience; we have exiles from the Dominican diaspora whose knowledge of Spanish is less than total (though obviously still superior to mine), but who pepper their speech in the US with odd words here and there. It's be churlish and pretty damn racist of me to complain about the fact that this happens in real life; America has a large (and growing) Hispanic population who speak in this sort of manner. Spanish is more and more becoming a part of American life and culture - when you arrive at JFK Airport in New York there are signs in both English and Spanish, and this is by no means unusual in a city which boasts a Hispanic population of 29%, and which is the setting for most of Oscar Wao.
However, it makes for a frustrating reading experience. It's rare that there's a page in the novel without any Spanish. I know enough to translate 'hija de la gran puta' (p. 60) as 'daughter of a big whore' but that's about my lot. Sometimes you get a passage like, 'Forget that hijo de la porra, that comehuevo. Every desgraciado who walks in here is in love with you. You could have the whole maldito world if you wanted.' (p. 113) Here, the approximate meaning is apparent from the context - clearly, there's some insulting going on. But the precise sense of such epithets remains obscured. And finally, there's whole sentences of Spanish which I, as a non-speaker, cannot even begin to decode; 'Oye, pariguayo, y que paso con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tu todavia tienes hambre?' (p. 108)
I will say at this point that I feel like such a massive jerk for lamenting about something that results from an insufficiency on my part. And it's not as if in the modern age you can't simply use the internet to translate unfamiliar terms, or to look things up in general. In fact, some thoughtful soul has set up a website - www.annotated-oscar-wao.com - which gives you the meanings of the Spanish words in the novel, and also informs the reader about the cultural context. But what if I wanted to read Oscar Wao on the underground? I can't lug a laptop around with me all the time so I can fully understand the Spanish. And I don't have the money for a smartphone, or the inclination to buy one, considering that my procrastination is bad enough without having the whole internet in my pocket.
This happens a lot in contemporary fiction, which is the field in which I work. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children contains a decent amount of Hindi words (and those from other Indian languages), which produces a similar testament to the adaptability of English, and the possibilities for linguistic syncretism, to that which can be found in Oscar Wao. But Diaz uses the interpolation of foreign words into Western speech on a far, far greater scale. The other thing about contemporary fiction is that you will generally require a computer to uncover the meaning behind anything you don't understand; it's different to when you read your Penguin or Oxford World's Classics edition of Dickens, or Austen, or Defoe, and the editor has meticulously created pages and pages of endnotes pointing out every single allusion, and glossing any words, terms or expressions which have fallen out of use in the modern world. Obviously, I'm not saying that modern writers can't use language that is unusual or foreign - that would be an absurd statement - and I still like Oscar Wao as a novel, and feel like a philistine for writing this. But a glossary would have been nice.
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