SPANISH, ENGLISH, AND IN-BETWEEN:
SELF-TRANSLATION IN THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA
By
Marlene Hansen Esplin

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Hispanic Cultural Studies
2012

ABSTRACT
SPANISH, ENGLISH, AND IN-BETWEEN:
SELF-TRANSLATION IN THE U.S. AND LATIN AMERICA
By
Marlene Hansen Esplin
Spanish American and/or U.S. Latino authors Manuel Puig, Ariel Dorfman, Rosario Ferré,
Gloria Anzaldúa, and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas challenge notions of authorial, textual, linguistic,
and national integrity through their bold, literary translations of their own texts. Through their
strategies of mistranslation, non-literal translation, translation via context, or non-translation,
these writers manipulate words such that they foreground language, make the negotiations of
translation visible, approximate the aesthetics of exile, expose dynamics of the literary
marketplace, and, as a result, engage contradictions and ambiguities that complicate linguistic
and national identities. Since their texts both are and are not translations, the often substantive
differences between their texts combine to create an elusive ―third‖ space in literary and
translational practice. The unlikely status of an equally authoritative translation enables talk of
―versions,‖ ―variations,‖ ―renditions,‖ or ―interpretations‖ in place of terms that implicitly
subordinate subsequent versions of a text to a more sacrosanct ―original.‖ I provide an overview
of how these authors approach translation in the context of the late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century North American literary marketplace and emphasize the postcolonial possibilities of
their non-traditional approaches to their texts. By comparing the disparate Spanish and English
versions of their texts and examining the translational strategies within their texts, I show how
these multilingual authors are uniquely positioned to challenge and/or succumb to the pressures
of nationalism and globalization that are reinforced by rigid perceptions of language, nation, and

authorship. Whether as political exiles, ―domestic foreigners,‖ willing ―traitors‖ of their
multilingual competencies, or as cultural mediators, these self-translators extend the parameters
of one or both of their assumed languages and advocate a fluid if not harmonious relationship
with each.

Copyright by
MARLENE HANSEN ESPLIN
2012

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Kristine, Salah, Miguel, and Marilia for their input and encouragement, and I am
most grateful to Emron, my best and most patient reader. Thanks also to Moses, Anya, and Ansel
for the perspective they bring to my writing.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
APPROACHING A THEORY OF SELF-TRANSLATION …………………………………… 1
CHAPTER 1
SELF-TRANSLATION AND EXILE:
THE DIALECTICS OF EXILE IN MANUEL PUIG‘S ETERNAL CURSE ON THE READER
OF THESE PAGES/ MALDICIÓN ETERNA A QUIEN LEA ESTAS PÁGINAS AND ARIEL
DORFMAN‘S HEADING SOUTH, LOOKING NORTH: A BILINGUAL JOURNEY/ RUMBO
AL SUR, DESEANDO EL NORTE: UN ROMANCE EN DOS LENGUAS …..……...………… 27
CHAPTER 2
SELF-TRANSLATION AND CONTRADICTION:
ROSARIO FERRÉ‘S REINVENTIONS IN MALDITO AMOR/ SWEET DIAMOND DUST
AND HOUSE ON THE LAGOON/ CASA EN LA LAGUNA ...........……....…………………… 80
CHAPTER 3
SELF-TRANSLATION AND ACCOMODATION:
MULTILINGUAL STRATEGIES IN GLORIA ANZALDÚA‘S BORDERLANDS/LA
FRONTERA AND MARGARITA COTA-CÁRDENAS‘ PUPPET ..……….……………….. 134
CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………………….. 180
WORKS CITED …………………………………………………………………………….... 189

vi

Introduction
Approaching a Theory of Self-Translation
What constitutes an ―original‖ text? Who is an author? How does literature change across
space and time? Does a source or target language predetermine the possibilities of a text? How
does the event of reading become an act of translation? These questions, anticipated by Jorge
Luis Borges in his inimitable ―Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,‖ are central to current debates
within translation studies and literary criticism. While Borges‘ story has become a point of
critical departure for readers and translation theorists alike, less attention has been directed
toward the texts and rewritings of multilingual U.S. and Spanish American authors who, in a
1

manner that is no less audacious, enact the inverse of Menard‘s creative path. Unlike the
fictional Menard who traverses centuries of time and literary history to write an identical and still
original version of Cervantes‘s immortal Don Quijote, these late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century authors translate or rewrite their texts over a relatively short span of time to produce
original yet dissimilar versions of their own works. Their disparate and also contingent texts are
replete with implications for time-honored concepts of literature, authorship, language,
nationality, and identity.
Through the Spanish and English or Spanish-and-English versions of their texts,
multilingual authors such as Manuel Puig, Ariel Dorfman, Rosario Ferré, Gloria Anzaldúa, and
1

See, for example, Sergio Waisman‘s Borges and Translation, Efraín Kristal‘s Invisible Work:
Borges and Translation, Edwin Gentzler‘s discussion of Borges and translation in Translation
and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory, N. Katherine Hayles‘
examination of ―Pierre Menard‖ in ―Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality,‖
Suzanne Jill Levine‘s nod to Borges in Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction,
and George Steiner‘s reading of ―Pierre Menard‖ in After Babel. Steiner argues that Borges‘
story ―is the most acute, most concentrated commentary anyone has offered on the business of
translation,‖ and goes so far as to claim that ―What studies of translation there are [. . .], could, in
Borges‘ style, be termed a commentary on his commentary‖ (73).
1

Margarita Cota-Cárdenas emphasize the potential of the translator to amend, revise, contest,
2

multiply, and/or extend the claims of a text in its first instance. In the moments of conflict and
confluence between and within their equally authoritative and intrinsically multilingual works of
fiction, they make the negotiations of translation more transparent and actively illustrate the
mutual dependency of an ―original‖ and a ―translation.‖ They disregard the established hierarchy
between a source and a target text or language and, as result, mandate a critical vocabulary that
includes ―versions,‖ ―variations,‖ ―renditions,‖ or ―interpretations,‖ rather than relying on terms
that implicitly subordinate subsequent translations or instances of a text to a more sacrosanct
―original.‖ As Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour argues about an author rewriting his/her text into
another national language, ―Because self-translation and the (frequently) attendant reworking
makes a text retrospectively incomplete, both versions become avatars of a hypothetical total text
in which the versions in both languages would rejoin one another and be reconciled (as in the
―pure‖ language evoked by [Walter] Benjamin)‖ (112). Whether or not these authors attain a
glimpse of the primal, Ur-language envisioned by Benjamin in his pivotal reassessment of
translation in ―The Task of the Translator,‖ each occasions the need to reexamine perceptions of
an ―original‖ text or of a ―national‖ literature by giving primacy and authority to their
translations via their association with his or her namesake. These authors put into practice
Benjamin‘s insistence that the original attains in its translations ―its ever-renewed latest and most

2

Other authors whose work would qualify for this kind of study include Guillermo Cabrera
Infante, María Luisa Bombal, Casey Calvert, Giannina Braschi, and Rolando Hinojosa. In his
Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature, Gustavo Pérez Firmat examines
cases of both overt and latent multilingualism in the context of U.S. and Spanish American
literature. Steven Kellman attempts a more exhaustive, global catalogue of trans- or multilingual
writers in The Translingual Imagination.
2

3

abundant flowering‖ (72). By retaining a measure of control of the processes of translation,
these authors elevate the task of translating, and by their typically strong or literary revisions of
their works they visibly question whether a more cautious and measured approach to translating
is correct, possible, or even desirable.
These authors emphasize the shifting, dynamic conception they maintain of themselves
and of their relationship with their work by either purposefully or tacitly sanctioning semantic
and ideological differences between or, even, within their texts. As Steven Kellman argues in
The Translingual Imagination, ―Authors invest their identities in the texts, to which they sign
their names, and when they not only vary the languages in which those texts are written but
transmute the language of a particular one, they are denying the existence of a stable self‖ (33).
How, for example, to account for the many national and linguistic uncertainties between the
Spanish and English versions of texts by exilic authors Manuel Puig and Ariel Dorfman? Are
these suggestive revisions the cause or the result of the authors‘ decision to rewrite their works in
an adopted or once-forsaken national language? Why does Rosario Ferré alter the
characterization of the mulatta prostitute Gloria Camprubí in Sweet Diamond Dust as compared
to the previous Maldito amor? Does her increased awareness of her mainland readership prompt
her to endorse a more exoticized feminism? Finally, how do Chicana authors Gloria Anzaldúa
and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas champion and/or undercut the polemic multilingual aspirations of
their texts through their varied intra-textual strategies of translation? Do their summary decisions
to translate, partially translate, or not translate the second or ―other‖ language in their
3

I draw from Harry Zohn‘s English translation of ―Die Aufagabe des Übersetzers,‖ ―The Task
of the Translator.‖ Steven Rendall examines certain problems and/or interpretative dissonances
within Zohn‘s version of the essay and claims that ―Because of copyright restrictions, Zohn‘s
version continues to be the main form in which Benjamin‘s famous essay is known to Englishlanguage readers‖ (23).
3

multilingual texts reinforce or undermine their efforts to transform a dominant, monolingual
Anglo-American imaginary? In the case of each of these authors, self-translation entails both the
revision by and of the self; the processes of translation become indistinguishable from the
processes of textual and personal reinvention.
These authors trounce what Lawrence Venuti has termed ―the invisibility of the
translator‖ (The Translator‟s 1) by virtue of having authorized two divergent and conditional
originals (or in the case of the Chicana authors, by writing inherently multilingual texts) that both
defy and foreground the practice of translation. However, instead of adopting Venuti‘s
prescriptions for a ―foreignizing‖ (97) approach to translating—one which resists smooth and
fluent translations that domesticate and/or mitigate the linguistic and cultural peculiarities of an
original or source text—Puig, Dorfman, and Ferré craft what is, from the reader‘s perspective, a
generally fluent and unconstrained revision of the first version of their texts, while Anzaldúa and
Cota-Cárdenas create texts whose language strategies both domesticate and foreignize either
4

English or Spanish. Their approach borrows more from Borges insomuch as each takes full
ownership of translating or rewriting and is apparently uninhibited by concerns that his or her
literary translations are adequate, ―equivalent,‖ or ethical. As Borges says concerning the
―hermosa discusión Newman-Arnold,‖ which he references in both ―Las versiones homéricas‖
and ―Los traductores de 1001 Noches‖ (241, 400), ―Traducir el espíritu [del texto original] es una
intención tan enorme y tan fantasmal que bien puede quedar como inofensiva; traducir la letra,
una precisión tan extravagante que no hay riesgo de que la ensayen‖ (―Los traductores‖ 400).
Borges discounts resolute postures of either literalism on the one hand (Newman) or loose
4

Venuti, for example, gives attention to resistant strategies of translation such as ―abusive
fidelity‖ (The Translator‟s 256), the inclusion of ―unidiomatic‖ language in the target text (98),
and resistance by translators ―choosing marginal texts‖ to translate (228).
4

paraphrasing on the other (Arnold), and he also playfully suggests that he favors those heavyhanded translators who either willingly or inadvertently impose their altered temporalities and
cultural contexts onto the world of the first text. Concerning six differing translations of a
passage from the Odyssey, Borges vies for the least literal and most transformed of the
translations saying that, ―No es imposible que la versión calmosa de Butler sea la más fiel‖
(243), and about the various translators of The Thousand and One Nights, he praises the brazen
efforts of Richard Burton to transform the distant and marvelous stories for the English
gentlemen of his time, for those ―pícaros, noveleros, analfabetos, inifinitamente suspicaces de lo
presente y crédulos de la maravilla remota [. . ] señores del West End, aptos para el desdén y la
erudición y no para el espanto o la risotada‖ (404). Sergio Waisman explains that ―Burton
becomes the perfect figure of the translator/recreator for Borges: a translator who irreverently
(re)writes the original in order to (re)create a version capable of supplanting/displacing it‖ (70).
Similarly, the bilingual writers examined in this project create irreverent continuations and/or
contestations of their own works of fiction. However, like Borges himself, each of these writers
departs from the ―model‖ translators described by Borges in that, for the most part, each
approaches translation from the periphery. From this vantage point, their translational poetics are
less suspect and are more productive of the contradictions and ambivalences that belie
constructions of nation, identity, and language; their self-translations are at once imitative and
creative, contingent and able to stand-alone, domesticating and resistant, self-effacing and selfpromoting, peripheral and dominant. In the end, their works are both utterly faithful and wholly
disrespecting toward the authors‘ (their own) intentions, which they reveal as shifting and
temporal. The lack of restraint these writers exhibit toward core aspects of their original or initial
text extends the parameters of translation and of reading, generally.

5

Presumably, this lack of caution results from the authors being less distanced from the
world of the genesis of the first text. In her discussion of German exilic authors, Verena Jung
explains that having virtually unlimited access to the previous text tends to prompt or animate
the creative impulses of the self-translator. She maintains that self-translators are more apt to
make significant changes to their initial texts than other translators—and that their revisions
―have not been adequately related to the target audience‖ and have more to do with a lack of
deference toward an original text (4). Free from an impossible premise of fidelity to a prior text
by another writer, multilingual authors who choose to translate, or translate within, their own
literature often embrace the opportunity to amend, extend, or reinterpret aspects of their fiction.
As Gustavo Pérez Firmat quips, ―No writer wants to play second banana to another writer, least
of all to himself‖ (108). Through their infidelity toward their texts and/or themselves, these
authors both disrupt and open up the usual processes and products of literary creation. Their
overtly transgressive approaches to translating highlight the political tensions surrounding
language, bilingualism, ethnic identity, and literary production. The meta-textual dissonances
occasioned by translations of the authors discussed in this project are markers or signposts by
which we can locate problems and instabilities that permeate constructions of language, nation,
and identity: e.g., the perceived intrinsic possibilities or limitations of one or another language,
the linguistic and emotional strains of exile, the changes in a author‘s conception of his/herself or
his/her literature over time, and the porous borders of national and ethnic identity, particularly in
the volatile context of twentieth-century relations between the U.S. and Latin America.
Arguably, all acts of communication are acts of translation, and all acts of interlingual
translation evidence the internal negotiations that constitute speaking, listening, reading, and
writing. Each of these events involves a transfer of information across time and space, whether

6

short or lengthy, close or distant. As George Steiner claims, ―On the inter-lingual level,
translation will pose concentrated, visibly intractable problems; but these same problems abound,
at a more covert or conventionally neglected level, intra-lingually‖ (49). He suggests that
bridging ―The time-barrier may be more intractable than that of linguistic difference‖ and
insinuates that theorizing interlingual translation will have implications for how to think about
language, generally (29). Thus, examining translational negotiations between languages becomes
a way of surmising the choices, omissions, and shifting variables that an individual encounters
within the language or languages that he or she speaks. Steiner explains,
The process of diachronic translation inside one‘s own native tongue is so
constant, we perform it so unawares, that we rarely pause either to note its formal
intricacy or the decisive part it plays in the very existence of civilization. History
is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense. [. . .] We have no total history, no
history which could be defined as objectively real because it contained the literal
sum of past life. To remember everything is a condition of madness. We
remember culturally, as we do individually, by conventions of emphasis,
foreshortening, and omission. (30)
Accordingly, translation is ingrained in every act of speaking and of remembering; it makes
possible our attempts to order the past, imagine the future, and create narration. Interlingual
translations can never occur out of time, just as the individual‘s inability to account for the
totality of time assures that one must translate, parse, or select in order to communicate.
Translators between languages must attempt to account for temporal displacements as much as
linguistic and cultural differences. As Waisman indicates concerning Borges‘ theorizations of
translation in ―Las versiones homéricas‖ and ―Los traductores de 1001 Noches,‖ ―The issue

7

becomes how to translate a text from one context to another. [. . . ] it is the context (including
class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, time period, historical, political, and cultural conditions),
and not just the language that changes as one goes from source to target text‖ (69). Interlingual
translations stand as visible reminders of some of the linguistic, cultural, and temporal
instabilities that pervade all acts of communication.
In this sense, the linguistic and semantic dissonances between and within the texts of
authors who translate their own works reiterate the extent to which temporal concerns are bound
with linguistic and cultural concerns in shaping a text and its varying historical context. In their
strong revisions of their texts, self-translators illustrate how, like other translators, they are
instantly displaced from the total motivations and circumstances that shape the parts of their
works—as well as the combined processes through which their ideas are transformed into a
written or, usually, a nationally-identifiable language. The distance between self-translators‘
successive versions of their texts (or, even, the distance between the translations within their
texts) reveals how the sum and/or individual ―intentions‖ of a text are only estimable, even for
the authors themselves. These authors‘ strong, literary translations contest the impossible
formula for slavish and ―perfect‖ imitation and artistry while translating, as Vladimir Nabokov
famously advocates in ―The Art of Translation.‖ Nabokov rails against writerly translators who
liberally transform texts for a new target readership, arguing that ―The [. . .] worst, degree of
turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely
beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is
a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days‖ (315). Yet, even
Nabokov concedes, in the end, that perfection is elusive—he withholds from his readers his
translation of the opening lines of a Pushkin poem, ―because to give my version at this point

8

might lead the reader to doubt that perfection be attainable by merely following a few perfect
rules‖ (321). Self-translators make some of the impossible demands of translation apparent.

5

They are, at once, the most ideal and most ill-suited candidates to rewrite their texts, given that
they are both the most qualified to represent and the most liable to betray the initial claims of
their works. The differences in and between their texts show how authorship varies with context
and how translating inevitably combines with authorship.
Self-translated texts stand as complications or wrinkles in deceptively stable and/or linear
narratives of literary and national history because of how they unsettle foundational romantic
notions of a solitary author and a revered original and challenge conceptions of nation and
5

The paradoxical demands of translation are incisively noted by T.H. Savory, in his memorable
catalogue in his The Art of Translation:
1. A translation must give the words of the original./ 2. A translation must give
the ideas of the original./ 3. A translation should read like an original work./ 4. A
translation should read like translation./ 5. A translation should reflect the style of
the original./ 6. A translation should possess the style of the translator./ 7. A
translation should read as a contemporary of the original./ 8. A translation should
read as a contemporary of the translator./ 9. A translation may add to or omit from
the original./ 10. A translation may never add to or omit from the original./ 11. A
translation of a verse should be in prose./ 12. A translation of a verse should be in
verse. (50)
Moreover, in her ―Twenty Theses on Translation‖ presented in The Translation Zone: A New
Comparative Literature, Emily Apter lays out some of the contradictions within contemporary
discussions of translation within comparative literary studies:
•Nothing is translatable./ •Global translation is another name for comparative
literature./ •Humanist translatio is critical secularism./ •The translation zone is a
war zone./ •Contrary to what U.S. military strategy would suggest, Arabic is
translatable./ •Translation is a petit métier, translators the literary proletariat./
•Mixed tongues contest the imperium of global English./ •Translation is an
oedipal assault on the mother tongue./ •Translation is the traumatic loss of native
language./ •Translation is plurilingual and postmedial expressionism./
•Translation is Babel, a universal language that is universally unintelligible./
•Translation is the language of planets and monsters./ •Translation is technology./
•Translationese is the generic language of global markets./ •Translation is a
universal language of techne./ •Translation is a feedback loop./ •Translation can
transpose nature into data./ •Translation is the interface between language and
genes./ •Translation is the system-subject./ •Everything is translatable. (xi-xii)
9

language as autochthonous and self-containing. As André Lefevere argues, ―A writer‘s work
gains exposure and achieves influence mainly through ‗misunderstandings and misconceptions,‘
or, to use a more neutral term, refractions. [. . .] An approach to literature which has its roots in
the poetics of Romanticism, and which is still very much with us, will not be able to admit this
rather obvious fact without undermining its own foundations (―Mother‖ 234).‖ Lefevere
indicates that ―refractions‖ transform or ―refract‖ a text over time and that, often, they become
the principal points of access—e.g., many U.S. readers encounter Bertold Brecht ―vicariously‖
through the translations and critical work of Eric Bentley (235). Likewise, for many readers Leo
Tolstoy is the author refashioned by Constance Garnett, and Gabriel García Márquez is the
6

author represented by Gregory Rabassa. Also, as Borges illustrates, The Thousand and One
Nights, The Illiad, and The Odysessy are but the sum of all their divergent translations and
commentaries. Refractions undermine approaches to literary study that presuppose the stability
of a text or its author by exerting significant or, perhaps, primary influence on the perception and
reception of a text through time. Lefevere explains that these ―romantic‖ approaches:
[rest] on a number of assumptions, among them, the assumption of the genius and
originality of the author who creates ex nihilo [. . .]. As if Shakespeare didn‘t have
―sources,‖ and as if there had not been some writing on the Faust theme before
Goethe. Also assumed is the sacred character of the text, which is not to be
6

To this end, García Márquez is said to have remarked that 100 años de soledad is better in
English. In his memoir, Gregory Rabassa somewhat cryptically recounts, ―García Márquez is
said to have remarked that he liked my English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude better
than his own original Spanish one. I can only humbly assume that the credit lies with the English
language, that the book should have been written in English and I was only trying to correct that
mistake. My mystical feeling, however, is that Gabo already had the English words hiding
behind the Spanish and all I had to do was tease them out. Against this, however, is the fact that
when I reluctantly reread my translation I keep seeing things that I should have done better by‖
(43).
10

tampered with—hence the horror with which ―bad‖ translations are rejected.
Another widespread assumption is the belief in the possibility of recovering the
author‘s true intentions, and the concomitant belief that works of literature should
be judged on their intrinsic merit only, [ . . .] as if that were possible. (―Mother‖
7

234)

Self-translated texts underline the fragility of all of these assumptions. In and between these
texts, authorship becomes an incomplete and collaborative endeavor, the inviolate original is
made conditional to the claims of an equally authoritative translation, and the so-called
―intentions‖ of the first text are deliberately and/or inadvertently discarded.
Moreover, multilingual authors who translate their own texts emphasize the tenuous
binds that connect nation and language. By inserting themselves into the canons and sub-canons
of national literatures that are traditionally observed as distinct, these authors reveal
categorizations of literature based on national or linguistic identity as inadequate. They illustrate
the permissiveness of linguistic identity on the one hand and the enforced exclusivity of national
identity on the other. As Benedict Anderson argues, ―Seen as both a historical fatality and as a
community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and
7

In addition to Lefevere, both Steiner and Leonard Forster substantiate the Romantic emphasis
on the individuality and originality of the author and his/her text. Forster argues that following
the Romantics,
We are interested in personal expression of personal experience, something
unique and individual which is peculiar to the poet, which constitutes his
originality an his personal note, and which increases and deepens our knowledge
of human nature. Until the Romantics poetry was concerned with the statement
and presentation of socially acceptable themes; the poet was not talking for
himself, in his own name, he was speaking to his society on behalf of that society;
and because he had the gift of eloquent statement he was able to formulate
familiar things in a new, surprising and moving way. Powerful originality would
have seemed idiosyncratic, unrepresentative and jarring, and would thus have
defeated its own purpose. (26-27).
11

closed‖ (146). Through their capacity to simultaneously inhabit multiple national literatures these
authors disrupt narratives that project national and cultural integrity. As Lefevere argues
concerning the emphasis on the relation between nation and language among Western
Romantics,
Romantic critics tended to identify the work of literature with the language in
which it was written. They also emphasized language as the main, if not the only,
constitutive factor of a nation. [. . .] Language was seen as perhaps the most
obvious expression of that genius because it was both the past and present of a
whole nation. If languages were unique, translation between them was extremely
difficult, if not impossible. Every shift in the translation could be, and was seen
as, a betrayal of the genius of a language, of a nation. Thought of in this way,
translation almost amounted to high treason, and translators have, accordingly,
been called traitors to their nations, usually because they were thought to weaken
that nation‘s spirit by exposing it to foreign entities. (Translating 136)
Of course, manipulating language to build, wield, and consolidate cultural and political power is
8

not an aptitude unique to the history and traditions of Western Europe. The transgressive selftranslators discussed in this project are not the unwilling heirs of a European Romantic tradition

8

For more about the connections between nation and language, see, again, Steiner‘s After Babel,
Forster‘s The Poet‟s Tongues, and, also, Anderson‘s Imagined Communities. Anderson provides
many non-Western examples of language-unification as a means of building national
consciousness and consolidating national power, e.g., the Thai government actively prohibiting
missionaries from providing tribal minorities with their own transcription system, Attatürk
imposing mandatory Romanization to build Turkish nationalism and quell wider Islamic
identification (45-46), and the nineteenth-century English who hoped to diminish the cultural
impact of Hinduism by educating Indians in English (91). I focus on how the transgressive
poetics of certain U.S. and Hispanic authors complicate the perceived or ―imagined‖ relation
between an individual‘s language or languages and his/her national identity.
12

so much as they are products of the volatile relations between the U.S. and Latin America in the
late twentieth century and are keenly aware that their language loyalties and cultural
competencies do not align with a conventional national narrative. They approach translating
from both the center and the periphery and are both culprits and activists in the struggle against
the global dominance and imposition of English in the global literary marketplace. Their
personal and fictional narratives are complicated by the linguistic and historic strains of exile,
whether as actual political dissidents or as a perceived foreigners in their ―home‖ country or
countries. The meta-textual narrative in between their texts and translations attests to how their
emotional, familial, social, and/or political ties to one or another of their languages are not
readily circumscribed into an exclusively national or monolingual literary tradition.
Through the lack of correspondence or ―equivalence‖ between the Spanish and English
versions of their texts and/or the translations within their texts, these authors reiterate the
multiplicity already extant within any one language. Their contingent and also contesting texts
and translations point to the layers of pretense involved in discussing national literatures,
multilingualism, or inter-lingual translation. As Jacques Derrida posits in the two central theses
of his Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin: ―1. We only ever speak one
language/ 2. We never speak only one language‖ (7). In other words, all the languages of an
individual are in some way dependent upon and relational to other languages; and, inherently,
any language is already mixed or differentiated. The very notion of a single language or the
presumption of the possibility of interlingual translation partakes of certain nationalist
assumptions about the essentialist or stand-alone nature of a complex, relational linguistic
system. As Venuti argues,

13

Both foreign text and translation are derivative: both consist of diverse linguistic
and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates,
and that destabilize the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and possibly
conflicting with their intentions. As a result, a foreign text is the site of many
different semantic possibilities that are fixed only provisionally in any one
translation, on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices,
in specific social situations, in different historical periods. (The Translator‟s 13)
The bilingual and biscriptive authors examined in this project draw attention to the derivative
and provisional character of both language and translation by favoring a strong translation praxis
that emphasizes the historical and/or temporal stakes of translation. By authorizing two divergent
originals they imply that their works are the sum of their revisions and their language or
languages—which are neither Spanish nor English but a shifting combination of both languages
and their diverse parts. They insinuate the meta-text outside of the versions of their texts or their
individual translations and underline the need for a critical vocabulary and a literary practice that
takes into account the complex and variable whole of their works.
These multilingual authors draw light onto the ambivalences and instabilities that pervade
constructions of national, literary, and linguistic identity. While self-translation in literature is
hardly new—it has existed as long as writers have spoken and written in more than one
language, and it was commonplace for Medieval and Renaissance authors to write in different
languages for different audiences (Forster 18)—an increasingly formidable cadre of late
twentieth- and early twenty-first-century authors have turned to translating their own texts. I
maintain that the resurgence of multilingual writing and/or rewriting among these authors speaks
to increased skepticism toward both the pressures of nationalism on the one hand and

14

globalization on the other. As Kellman posits, ―Colonialism, war, increased mobility, and the
aesthetics of alienation have combined to create a canon of translingual literature‖ (7). Puig,
Dorfman, Ferré, Anzaldúa, and Cota-Cárdenas join bilingual twentieth-century authors such
Vladimir Nabokov, Rabindranath Tagore, Karen Blixen/Isaak Dinesen, Guillermo Cabrera
Infante, Samuel Beckett, Rolando Hinojosa, Giannina Braschi, and María Luisa Bombal in
writing and translating their own texts. Several other multilingual authors write in only one of
their languages, though the latent influence of their other language(s) often surfaces in their
9

literature. All of these authors are highly attuned to how translating transforms a text, and
because or in spite of the enormity of the task of translating, many of them choose to translate or
rewrite their own texts. Wresting momentary control of the passage of their texts through time
allows them to extend their claims of authorship and to create a forum in which they can try to
come to terms with some of the uncertainties and ambivalences occasioned by their ability to
inhabit linguistic worlds that are traditionally observed as independent from each other.
In the context of the relations between the U.S. and Latin America, acting as author and
translator provides a way of resisting the dominance of English as the global language of
publication and of combating the domestication of their texts by and for others; by translating
and/or translating within their own texts, self-translators such as Puig, Dorfman, Ferré,
Anzaldúa, and Cota-Cárdenas challenge the prevailing standards for determining both how a text
is translated and which texts are translated. They utilize their peripheral and central positioning
within the Latin American and U.S. literary marketplaces to take ownership, for better or for
worse, of their texts through time and space. As Waisman argues,

9

See Pérez Firmat‘s Tongue Ties for more on the implicit or, even, repressed multilingualism of
authors such as Richard Rodriguez, George Santayana, Pedro Salinas, and Luis Cernuda.
15

[T]he ethics and the aesthetics of translation are fundamentally different in the
periphery than they are in the center. To use a crude metaphor: it is not the same
when a king steals from a serf as when a serf steals from a king [. . .]. In Latin
America, a domesticating translation can represent an appropriation from the
Metropolis through linguistic acculturation, and a way to challenge not only the
supposed supremacy of the original, but also of the cultural political power of the
society in which it was produced. (81)
In relation to the demands of the literary market, the bilingual, Spanish-English self-translator
can either be thought of cynically, as a mercenary who sacrifices or prostitutes integral elements
of his/her linguistic or cultural expertise for profit, or idealistically, as an agent of resistance
countering a massive, hegemonic, and for-profit enterprise. The reality is likely both, neither,
and/or somewhere in between the two extremes. Still, because of the difficulty of accessing any
tangible record of the interchange between authors and editors or authors and publishers, the
disparities occasioned by these authors‘ translations are even more fascinating. The revisions of
self-translation provide a trail according to which we can make more educated guesses about the
social, political, and economic pressures that prompt the transformation of a text.
In an increasingly global society in which innumerable texts are translated from English
into other languages and very little is translated into English, self-translators writing from and/or
for the periphery act as cultural mediators and, in this capacity, can mitigate problems of access
and representation that limit individuals and communities whose native language is not

16

English.

10

As Gayatri Spivak argues, ―I think it necessary for people in the Third World

translation trade now to accept that the wheel has come around, that the genuinely bilingual postcolonial now has a bit of an advantage‖ (404). Spivak insinuates how self-translators can resist
the neutralizing or neutering of their literature into a bland and innocuous sort of English, that
In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the
democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literature
of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the
literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble in the feel of its prose,
something by a man in Taiwan [. . .] For the student, this tedious translatese
cannot compete with the spectacular stylistic experiments of a Monique Witting
or an Alice Walker. (400)
She implies that a more literary or, at least, a less mechanical approach to translating can better
serve both the source and target-text constituencies. Her prescriptions for translating resonate
with Venuti‘s calls for ―more visible‖ practices of translation that underline the dominance of
English as ―the language that prevails in teaching and research‖ (―Translating‖ 259). Venuti
advocates that translation ―be practiced, in various genres and text types, so as to make their
users aware of the social hierarchies in which languages and cultures are positioned‖ (259).

10

Only an estimated 3 percent of books are translated from other languages into English—
which grim statistic is reiterated by the aptly named ―Three Percent‖ website, run by the
University of Rochester‘s translation program and press and dedicated ―to providing reviews and
samples of books in translation and those that have yet to be translated.‖ The authors assert,
―And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the
number is actually closer to 0.7%.‖ Even a cursory investigation into the global practices of
translation and publication attests to the weighted odds favoring English language and
Anglophone culture. As Claire Squires argues, this disparity is impoverishing not only to those
writers who do not have access to a larger readership, but for readers in the U.S. and the U.K
who ―have very limited access to texts created beyond their own cultures‖ (408).
17

Insomuch as translating becomes a crucial means of resisting the cultural clout of Standard
English, the ethical and cultural capabilities of the translator are imperative. Multilingual authors
able to write both in English and Spanish are uniquely posed to either challenge, succumb to, or
at least make more problematic the pressures of nationalism and globalization that the patterns
and assumptions of linguistic communities reinforce. These authors‘ very political decisions
about language—as evidenced through the various multilingual strategies they employ in and
between their texts—have the potential to make more apparent the inaccuracies of language, the
aesthetics of exile, the market forces of literary production, and the uncertainties of ethnic and
linguistic identities.
All of these tensions are multiplied in connection with the unequal or hierarchical
relationship between the U.S. and Latin America. As Waisman indicates, ―translation has
completely different cultural political implications for ‗younger‘ literatures than it does for
‗older‘ ones; and the motivations and effects of translation are fundamentally different for
writers in the margins than [they are] for those in the center‖ (21). By translating their own texts,
authors such as Puig, Dorfman, Ferré, Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas undertake negotiations that
become opportunities to reopen, patch, and/or avenge wounds resulting from their
marginalization in both or either of their home and adopted countries. Rewriting enables them to
emphasize the false cohesiveness of national narratives and literatures and to manipulate
language to account for their exilic, dual, hybrid, double, or hyphenated positioning in the world
outside of their texts. As Edwin Gentzler argues, ―translation in the Americas is less something
that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more something that is constitutive of
those cultures‖ (5). In the discrepancies between and within their texts these authors bring to

18

light the always multilingual and multicultural underpinnings of the languages and cultures that
they constantly combine and also separate in their lives and literature.
By self-translating they counter cultural institutions that advocate ―English-only‖ or
―English-first‖ on the one hand and, on the other, those that equate the creative use of English by
multilingual authors as assimilation.

11

As Pérez Firmat explains, ―In the Americas, the two

languages are and have been for centuries not only in contact but in competition‖ (9). He
indicates how in Latin America, and especially in Mexico and Puerto Rico, there are ―equally
vigorous‖ efforts to lessen the impact of English on the Spanish language, and he claims that
―[i]n the New World, English and Spanish represent countries and cultures that, when not
engaged in outright war, have been consistently hostile to each other‖ (10). The multilingual
authors examined in this project attempt to reconcile or, at least, agree to disagree with the
perceived effects of each of their literary languages. They implicitly rebut divisive, either-or
conceptualizations of language usage and underline the postcolonial possibilities available to
them as bilingual Hispanic authors—a positioning that Dorfman describes as being a ―bigamist‖
of language (―The Wandering‖ 29), and Ferré describes as being ―ambidextrous‖ (―Blessing‖ 9).
While each of these authors hails from distinct historical and sociolinguistic circumstances, they
all align in their revisions of U.S and/or Hispanic identities through their translations between

11

For perspectives implying that the creative use of English by multilingual writers is a
concession to assimilation, see Ana Lydia Vega‘s criticisms of Rosario Ferré in ―Carta abierta a
Pandora,‖ Pedro Salinas‘ Aprecio y defensa del lenguaje, or the impassioned perspective of
Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who argues in his ―farewell to English‖ in his Decolonising
the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature that African writers should write in
their native languages to resist the colonial and cultural imposition of English and other
dominant languages. He indicates, ―The choice of language and the use to which language is put
is central to a people‘s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social
environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe‖ (4). Calls for English-only, in the U.S.
particularly, are loud enough that I assume they do need to be contextualized.
19

and within their texts. Their approaches recall Homi Bhabha‘s claim that ―it is the ‗inter‘ —the
cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the
meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national anti-nationalist histories of
the ‗people.‘ And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and
emerge as the others of ourselves‖ (56). These self-translators approximate this ―Third Space‖ by
locating themselves in the interstices of nationalist and linguistic imaginaries.
These writers are rare practitioners and implicit theorists of translation, in a field that has
been largely defined by theorists and translators from Europe and, more recently, the U.S.,
Canada, and Brazil. Spanish-American voices on translation have been less visible contributors
to the conversation on translation, arguably, because for Spanish-American writers the theory of
translation is tied to the act of translating and of writing, generally—as is verified by the effusive
but belated critical attention to Borges‘ theorizations of translation, which are characteristically
interwoven with his labyrinthine fiction or fictions. In addition to his overview of the burgeoning
scholarship on translation in Canada and Brazil, Gentzler points to the significance of translation
in the works of the some of the most celebrated twentieth-century Spanish American authors,
including Borges, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. He goes so far as to argue that
―translation is perhaps the most important topic in Latin American fiction, more important even
than the widely circulated magic realism theme featured by most (North American) scholars‖
(108). Authors such as Puig, Dorfman, Ferré, Anzaldúa, and Cota-Cárdenas are surely familiar
with the works of these Latin American authors and, while highlighting the ambivalences of their
own personal and national identities, they join these Boom behemoths in interrogating and
deconstructing a larger Latin American identity through and in between their texts and
translations.

20

By translating their own texts they prompt questions fundamental to both the theory and
practice of translation, including: the problem of ―equivalence,‖ the debates concerning what
constitutes a ―good‖ translation and who should evaluate a translation, the very question of how
to define translation, and, especially, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concerning the supposed
control or power that a language wields over those who think, speak, and/or write in it—the
concept of linguistic determinism. Do these self-translators make changes to their texts because
the target language necessitates that the changes be made? Or, do these authors‘ revisions result
from thoughts and decisions independent from the syntactical structures in which they were
formulated? As Pérez Firmat concludes concerning literary bilinguals and the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, ―the ultimate validity‖ of the notion of linguistic determinism ―is irrelevant‖ (13).
More important, he suggests, is the idea that ―many bilinguals relate to their languages in ways
that enact some version of this hypothesis‖ (13). In my examination of how these bilingual
authors rewrite and realign their texts when writing in one or another national literary tradition, I
engage the authors‘ own observations about the extent to which they feel at the mercy of a
particular language and its accompanying literary tradition, and I emphasize the dissonances
between their theorizations and their actual translations. For instance, Ferré describes Spanish as
more florid and ―baroque‖ than English which, for her, is more ―precise‖ and ―direct‖ (―On
Destiny‖ 160-61); Dorfman insinuates Spanish speakers‘ inherent capacity for passivity and
avoiding responsibility through their use of the Spanish ―se‖ (Rumbo al Sur 158); and Anzaldúa
claims that Chicano Spanish is the language to which those who do not identify with either
standard Spanish or standard English ―can connect their identity‖ and ―communicate the realities
and values true to themselves‖ (55). I do not aim to establish the accuracy of these statements so
much as I show how these multilingual authors‘ perceptions about their language or languages

21

reiterate the temporal stakes of translation and the emotional and political conflicts occasioned
by their efforts to transform their language for a national literary audience. For them, selftranslating awakens both a revision of the self and a renewed awareness of the limits of firm
linguistic and national identities. Their translations provide a rare window into the collaborative
forces that comprise authorship, the collective pressures that fuel monolingual narratives of
language and nation, and the always individual and historical tensions that shape, shift, and
recreate a text through time and space.
This project centers on the differences between self-translators‘ versions of their texts,
whether deliberate or inadvertent, and on the national and socio-linguistic ambivalences that
surface in the space between their texts or between the translations within their texts. Through
their strong or literary strategies of translating, these authors illustrate the extent to which both
―original‖ texts and translations are never separate from the time and circumstances surrounding
their genesis, production, and consumption. As Gentzler argues concerning the unconventional
approach to translating that Borges appears to endorse in his ―Los traductores de 1001 Noches,‖
rather than focusing on fidelity and equivalence, [Borges] emphasizes instead the
differences, digressions, and accidents. Many of the embellishments and contrasts
by the translators he cites are not due to mistakes or errors but instead are
attributed to the literary traditions and values of the respective cultures of which
the translators form a part and to which they contribute. (113)
Like the translators favored by Borges, multilingual authors such as Puig, Dorfman, Ferré,
Anzaldúa, and Cota-Cárdenas take active and renewed ownership of the texts they are translating
and/or rewriting. However, unlike the heavy-handed translators playfully celebrated by Borges,
these authors utilize their peripheral or, at least, intermediary status in society to lend greater

22

preeminence to the ―task‖ of translating and to challenge the formulation and perpetuation of
national literatures in the global literary marketplace. In the meta-text surrounding their texts and
translations, they reveal a heightened awareness of the limits and the possibilities of language, a
willing tolerance for contradiction, and a self-reflexive posture toward the political and social
implications of language usage. Their language choices highlight the emotional and linguistic
strains of exile, the long-standing polemics surrounding language usage in border regions, and
the divisive question of how to represent marginalized linguistic communities and whom should
represent them.
The first chapter of my project explores the linguistic tensions of exile in the formally
disparate but thematically similar works of South American exilic authors Manuel Puig and Ariel
Dorfman who illustrate and develop exile‘s emotional and linguistic toll in and between the
English and Spanish versions of their texts. A side-by-side examination of their revisions reveals
how for both of these multilingual authors the event of translating is intimately connected to the
ambivalences that each harbors toward both their home and adopted countries. In and in-between
Puig‘s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1982) and his Maldición eterna a quien lea
estas páginas (1980), he emphasizes such divided loyalties through the reeling and self-reflexive
conversations between Mr. Ramírez, an infirm Argentine political exile, and Larry, Ramírez‘s
wheelchair attendant and a former graduate student with Marxist leanings. Through the often
contentious conversations between these two characters, Puig creates a dialogue about the
positive and negative implications of life in translation and indicates how the limitations of
language and memory can be both a curse and a blessing in relation to a traumatic past.
Likewise, in and in-between the English and Spanish versions of his memoir, Heading South,
Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998) and/or Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte: un romance

23

en dos lenguas (1998), Dorfman weighs the costs and benefits of having to and also choosing to
move between his two languages. He recounts his tortuous journey to and from English and
Spanish as literary languages and then, eventually, his reconciliation with both languages. He
displays, through translating, his internal deliberations about whether or not writing in another
language and for multiple national audiences calls for a change in literary strategy. In their
textual and translational negotiations, Puig and Dorfman interrogate and complicate the linguistic
tensions that shape their historically and personally specific depictions of exile.
The second chapter of my dissertation charts the linguistic and political transformations
of Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré through the course of her writing Spanish and English
versions of two sets of related novels, first Maldito amor (1986) which she rewrote into English
as Sweet Diamond Dust (1988) and then House on the Lagoon (1995) which she rewrote into
Spanish as Casa en la laguna (1996). The creation, translation, and publication of each of these
works follow, in a somewhat parallel trajectory, Ferré‘s individual evolution from a national
Puerto Rican author and an ardent advocate for the island‘s independence to a cross-over U.S.
Latina author and a proponent of Puerto Rican statehood. While the motivations of each of her
texts and translations cannot be so grossly simplified, a comparison of the versions of her texts
yields several contradictions that underline the ―different instinct‖ (―On Destiny‖ 160) that Ferré
adopts when writing in either English or Spanish. In her willingness to engage the firestorm of
criticism that she knew would accompany her decision to write House on the Lagoon first in
English and through her related shift to supporting statehood, Ferré acknowledges the political
weight of her language decisions and all but drags her reader into the polemics surrounding her
texts and her translations of them.

24

The third and final chapter of my dissertation explores the possibility of an openly
bilingual literary praxis of writing and/or translating and the concomitant questions of how to
represent marginalized voices in literature and society and who should make these
representations. I compare the pioneering multilingual strategies of translation or non-translation
in Gloria Anzaldúa‘s Borderlands/La frontera (1987) and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas‘ Puppet
(1985), and I examine how and if these Chicana authors ultimately offset the overtly multilingual
gestures of their texts with their efforts to accommodate the monolingual Anglo-reader. In their
varied approaches to translating, these authors attempt to create a literary forum for the unofficial
and/or bastard voices of Chicano Spanish, and by attempting to represent these extra-national
voices, they both foreground and deny the need for translation. As Gentzler argues about border
writers similar to Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas, these authors‘ transgressive poetics invite
questions such as: ―What is it like to think about a nation when one has no home? What is it like
to think about translation when one has no native language? How is one‘s identity affected if
one‘s homeland has been dissolved?‖ (145). I ask whether the literatures of English and/or
Spanish are large enough for an unapologetically multilingual text like Cota-Cárdenas‘ 1985
edition of Puppet—which remained in virtual obscurity until the relative success of the new
―bilingual‖ edition of the novel in 2000. If a translation into English becomes the primary point
of access to texts such as Puppet, what can be done to further emphasize the extent to which a
translation or ―refraction‖ transforms a literary text?
All of the authors and texts approached in this project offer an implicit answer to this
question with their bold strategies of translation between and within their texts. By authorizing
English and Spanish, Spanish and English, and/or Spanglish interpretations of the claims of their
texts, they reveal translation as tantamount to authorship and illustrate how a text assumes the

25

image or weight of the time in which it is produced or received. By lending their namesakes to
the processes of translation they do not lament the violence of translation so much as they make
more transparent the passage of a text through time. As Steiner emphasizes, ―One thing is clear:
every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a
word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in
specific historical time‖ (24). Moreover, by self-translating they insinuate a larger, total text
outside of their individual works and/or translations. As Borges declares in ―La flor de
Coleridge,‖ ―Durante muchos años yo creí que la casi infinita literatura estaba en un hombre. Ese
hombre fue Carlyle, fue Johannes Becher, fue Whitman, fue Rafael Cansinos Assens, fue De
Quincey‖ (23). Literature becomes an explicitly collaborative endeavor in the event of selftranslation. Self-translation reveals the instability and temporality of the cardinal literary notions
of authorship, originality, language, nationality, and textual integrity.

26

Chapter 1
Self-Translation and Exile: The Dialectics of Exile in Manuel Puig‘s Eternal Curse on the
Reader of These Pages/ Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas and Ariel Dorfman‘s
Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey/ Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte:
un romance en dos lenguas
The turbulent history of twentieth-century Latin America—considering only the Mexican
Revolution, Peronismo in Argentina, the Cuban Revolution, the rise and fall of Salvador Allende
in Chile, and the numerous military coups, dictatorships, and foreign interventions throughout
the region—led to an unprecedented exodus of Spanish-speaking nationals to other parts of the
world. The list of exiled authors, artists, and intellectuals is extensive and includes, among many
others: Miguel Angel Asturias, Victor Montejo, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante,
Casey Calvert, Pablo Neruda, Ariel Dorfman, Angel and Isabel Parra, Luisa Valenzuela, Cristina
Peri Rossi, and Manuel Puig. Whether as an active or lurking presence, the backdrop of exile
inserts itself into the creative processes of these individual artists. In reaction to a foreign setting,
some authors, like Spanish poets Pedro Salinas and Luis Cernuda, cling to Spanish as their
preferred literary medium; both became more resolute hispanophones in response to their
circumstances of exile in the United States. Other writers, like the versatile Cabrera Infante,
experiment with polyglot poetics, and still others decide to write in their second native or newlyadopted language. The latter of these options is the least common, the most obvious reason being
that most writers are not able to write equally well in more than one language.
Yet, the decision to self-translate is also the most fascinating because by writing in a
foreign, second, or politically alien tongue these biscriptive authors create opportunities for
personal revision or, even, reinvention—as they take ownership of the linguistic, cultural, and

27

political ambivalences that arise from authoring two similar yet always distinct narratives.
Argentine author Manuel Puig learned U.S. English at an early age and also came to speak and
1

write in French, Italian, and Portuguese. He wrote the vast majority of his creative work in
Spanish, withstanding the fact that he spent the majority of his professional career as an exile
abroad. However, Puig wrote Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1982)/ Maldición
eterna a quien lea estas páginas (1980), which more directly centers on exile and more
2

powerfully interrogates the limits of language than his other works, first in English. Likewise,
Argentine-Chilean-U.S. author Ariel Dorfman, a ―native‖ speaker of both Spanish and English
since childhood, relates how his language decisions have loosely conformed to the ―rights‖ and
―lefts‖ of his own political trajectory. In his self-translated memoir, Heading South, Looking
North: A Bilingual Journey (1998) and/or Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte: un romance en dos
lenguas (1988), he recounts that as a young boy and adolescent who identified most closely with
North American popular culture, he refused to speak or write in Spanish. However, upon
identifying with the leftist ideals that shaped Chile and much of Latin America in 1960s and 70s,
Dorfman forsook writing in English. In his more mature years, as a resident writer and academic
3

teaching at Duke, he now espouses a more bilingual kind of poetics. For Dorfman and for Puig,
deciding to write in either English or Spanish is unavoidably connected to the personal and

1

Suzanne Jill Levine, Puig‘s friend, translator, and literary biographer claims that for Puig was
motivated to learn ―the languages of the cinema,‖ which for him were English and, also, French
and Italian, following the arrival of post-war European films in Argentina (Manuel 60).
2
While Puig wrote his ―original‖ manuscript in English, he actually published his own Spanish
―translation‖ of the English text with Seix Barral two years before he published the English
version.
3
Dorfman published simultaneous English and Spanish versions of his 1998 memoir and, in
2002, published his first-ever overtly bilingual text, In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land.
28

complicated relationship each has with the volatile past of the Americas in the late twentiethcentury—the raging politics of the Cold War; the repeated interventions of the U.S. in Latin
America and the Caribbean; the rise, fall, and aftermath of dictatorial and/or militaristic rule in
the southern cone and elsewhere in the Americas; the debates over dependency, subalternity, and
globalization—and, ultimately, the authors‘ mixed loyalties toward both the original and the
adoptive homelands that have shaped them as citizens and as individuals.
Both authors self-consciously and even conspicuously conflate the ties between life,
literature, and language, especially in and between the English and Spanish versions of their
works. I argue that Puig and Dorfman, among the many authors in Latin America and elsewhere
whose writings reflect and reproduce the tensions of exile, complicate the larger discussion on
exile as ―first of all, a linguistic event‖ (Brodsky 32) through their acts of self-translation. As
translators and/or re-writers of their own texts, both authors engage much self-reflexivity in their
writing. Each alludes to and, often, underscores the linguistic and social problems occasioned by
choosing to write or rewrite in another language and, at the same time, neither fully embraces the
notion that deciding to write in one or another language controls or shapes the processes of
literary production for them. Rather, both authors/translators explore and eventually reject the
idea that a chosen language and/or the linguistic pressures of exile fully determine their texts
and/or their personal identities. Through their self-translations or rewritings, Puig and Dorfman
adopt a critical and dialectical stance toward the said political, social, and linguistic tensions of
exile. Certainly, their experiences and recollections of ―exile‖ are historically distinct,
generically dissimilar, and individually raw. However, discussing their texts—or their different
versions of their texts—in the same stroke provides a window into a mature and reflective

29

conversation on exile, one that seeks to move beyond monolithic and/or monolingual notions of
national, individual, linguistic, and textual identities.

Self-translation and Exile in Puig‘s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages and Maldición
eterna a quien lea estas páginas
The emotional and linguistic tensions of exile are the lifeblood of both Puig‘s Eternal
Curse on the Reader of These Pages and his Spanish revision of the same, Maldición eterna a
quien lea estas páginas. The two versions turn around the largely unimpeded and filmic dialogue
between Mr. Juan José Ramírez, an elderly and infirm Argentine political exile who is said to
have amnesia, and Larry Johns, a middle-aged North American divorcee who works as
4

Ramírez‘s overeducated wheelchair orderly. In their outings, the two engage each other with
mutual antagonism, suspicion, deceit, and, at times, ill-intent. Larry complains that Ramírez is a
―prying bastard‖ (EC 151) and a ―parasite‖ (EC 105) who feeds off of the lives of others, and he
(Larry) looks to secure an academic appointment as a result of his work decoding and
interpreting the notes Ramírez recorded while a political prisoner. Ramírez maintains that Larry
is an ungrateful and unsympathetic confidant (EC 211), and he frequently manipulates Larry on
account of Larry‘s supposed poverty and his own (Ramírez‘s) infirmities, which he uses to

4

―Ramírez‖ is only accented in Puig‘s Spanish version of his novel. I accent the surname
throughout but leave the the name as is when cited in primary or secondary texts.
30

5

engender guilt and sympathy. It appears that while Larry depends on Ramírez for physical and
temporal sustenance, Ramírez turns to Larry for mental and emotional stimulation. Seemingly,
he besieges Larry with questions and hypotheticals so that he can acquaint himself with a new
language, culture, and setting, and, at the same time, redress or rewrite both the traumas of his
forgotten past and his repressed memories of wrongs toward his wife and, especially, his son.

6

The narrative strain in Puig‘s Spanish and English texts, however unreliable, revolves around
Ramírez‘s need to know and, simultaneously, his need to forget. The affective tensions drudged
up by Ramírez‘s character—the conflict between wanting to reconnect and remember and also
wanting to forget and rewrite—evidence the novel(s)‘ critical and ―dialectical‖ relation toward
exile. As Sophia McClennen explains in her The Dialectics of Exile, for late twentieth-century
exilic authors like Juan Goytisolo, Dorfman, or Cristina Peri Rossi, exile is neither entirely a
state of loss and profound nostalgia nor a state of creative liberation from national and local
strictures. Instead, these authors approach exile as a complex, historically-specific experience
that engages and challenges binary theorizations of exilic experiences (2-3). Likewise, I suggest
that Puig approaches Ramírez‘s emotional experience of exile both as a time of loss and

5

In an interview with Jorgelina Corbatta, Puig explains that Larry‘s character derives, in part,
from a man that Puig encountered while living in New York. Puig took extensive notes on this
man‘s life and returned to them in writing the English version of the novel (620). Moreover,
Levine, explicitly connects Larry with ―Mark,‖ an embittered divorcee and non-tenured lecturer
at NYU who was somewhat friendly toward Puig but did not reciprocate his sexual advances
(Manuel 295).
6
In the same interview with Corbatta, Puig claims that Ramírez is modeled after his own
father—―En esta novela no me intereso yo como personaje, sino que la contrapartida del
norteamericano es mi papá‖ (620). Levine extends and complicates this claim by arguing that,
―In his relationship with Mark, Manuel at first saw himself as the older displaced Latin American
who clearly sees through a self-centered younger North American: it was the psychodrama of the
critical father and the rebellious son; the narcissist is the parental figure, producing a son who is
a mere reflection of himself‖ (295).
31

estrangement from the known and familiar and as an opportunity for personal revision and,
possibly, absolution from a traumatic and unrelenting past.
Of course, in the case of Ramírez, and in the case of Puig himself, the emotional
experience of exile is virtually indistinguishable from the linguistic and/or translational tensions
that inform the event of exile. Puig foregrounds the linguistic strains of exile through Ramírez‘s
heightened if not compulsive awareness of the ways in which his life and perceptions are altered
or colored by speaking in another language, in this case English. Ramírez‘s anxieties are
immediately apparent in the first exchange between Ramírez and Larry.
—What is this?
—Washington Square, Mr. Ramirez.
—I know ―square‖ but not ―Washington.‖ Not really.
—Washington is the name of a man, the first President of the United States.
—Yes, I know. Thanks so much. (EC 3)

—¿Qué es esto?
—Plaza Washington, señor Ramírez.
—Plaza sé lo que es, Washington no. No del todo.
—Washington es el apellido de un hombre, del primer presidente de los Estados
Unidos.
—Eso lo sé. Gracias. (ME 9)
Through his clipped responses (in both the English and Spanish texts), Ramírez indicates his
dissatisfaction with Larry‘s answers to his question, with Larry‘s assumption that it is merely the
denotative meaning of ―Washington‖ that eludes Ramírez. Puig‘s Spanish translation is more

32

explicit as to the source of Ramírez‘s frustration. With the pointed ―Eso lo sé‖ (ME 9), Ramírez
insinuates that he is searching for meaning beyond a rote familiarity with the facts associated
with the name ―Washington.‖ After Larry continues to brusquely reply to his follow-up questions
and refuses to engage the larger questions of language that Ramírez insinuates, Ramírez retorts,
―—I know. What I don‘t know is what one is supposed to feel when one says ―Washington‖ (EC
7

3). Larry eventually brushes off Ramírez‘s reservations, telling him, ―—Yes, and they told me
to wheel you around and nothing else. The pay is lousy. And if I also have to give you English
8

lessons, I want more money. The cost of living is high in New York‖ (EC 3). Larry identifies
Ramírez‘s questions as mere indicators of the difficulties posed for him by the English language.
For Larry, the gaps in Ramírez‘s knowledge are not significant; they could as easily trouble any
given English-as-a-foreign-language learner as they could rankle a political exile under the
protection of a prominent Human Rights organization or, at the same time, an author who has left
his homeland for political and sexual dissidence and is attempting for the first time to publish a
novel in English. However, for Ramírez, as for Puig himself, the lapses in meaning and in
linguistic context appear to signify something more—they recall the placelessness, strangeness,
and emotional liminality of exile.
Perhaps because of Puig‘s own attention toward those literary markers in the English text
that belie his authorial preoccupations with the crossover into English, Ramírez almost
immediately discounts the possibility that his need to recover the fuller meaning of English

7

―—Gracias. Eso lo sé. Lo que no sé …es lo que tendría que sentir, cuando se dice Washington‖
(ME 9).
8
―—Sí, me dijeron que tenía que sacarlo en la silla de ruedas y nada más. No pagan gran cosa,
pero si encima tengo que dar lecciones de inglés voy a pedir más dinero. La vida es cara en
Nueva York‖ (ME 10).
33

9

words and names results solely from his linguistic displacement. He dismisses this notion
outright when he tells Larry, ―Mister …. Larry. I know English, I know the words. I know the
words in French and Italian. I know all the words in Spanish, my native language, but…‖ (EC
4).

10

Through this pause and in the explanation that follows, Ramírez implies a kind of

emotional amnesia or uncertainty toward abstract, unfamiliar, and/or not readily translatable
words and the webs of meaning in which they are presented. He tells Larry, ―—In my country I
was very ill. I remember all the words, the names of things that can be seen, heard, smelled,
tasted, touched. But other things that are . . .‖ (EC 4).

11

He insists that these words are alien to

him because they draw upon and incite emotions and feelings that he has never before
experienced, at least not in the same context. He explains to Larry that when he encounters
words like ―nervous breakdown, depression, euphoria . . . [he] doesn‘t know what these words
mean‖ (EC 4),

12

and that he ―understand[s] them only up to a point‖ (EC 4).

13

Through these

exchanges, Puig uses Ramírez to advance the idea that the linguistic problems of exile are
symptoms rather than the source of exile‘s emotional toll.

9

Levine recounts that Manuel ―got uncomfortable when critics emphasized his linguistic
displacement—as when an Argentine academic in Paris attributed Ramirez‘s linguistic aphasia
and illnesses to Manuel‘s ‗somatization‘ of exile or transference of his linguistic limbo into
physical disease.‖ Levine writes that, ―The loss of language was a delicate point, if, on the one
hand, Manuel himself spoke of somatizations or pychosomatic manifestations, he was worried
about a possible impoverishment of his language‖ (Manuel 300).
10
―—Señor…Larry. Yo sé inglés, sé todas las palabras. En francés, en italiano, sé las palabras.
En castellano, mi lengua original, sé todas las palabras, pero…‖ (ME 10).
11
―Estuve muy enfermo, en mi país. Me acuerdo de todas las palabras, de cómo se llaman las
cosas que se pueden tocar, y ver. Pero otras cosas, que no están más que en… en…‖ (ME 10).
12
―colapso nervioso, depresión, euforia, eso no lo [sabe]‖ (ME 10).
13

―[entiende] el significado… hasta cierto punto, nada más‖ (ME 10).
34

However, can we take Ramírez at his word? Moreover, can we trust that he is a reliable
mouthpiece for Puig as the author and translator? A close comparison of the English and Spanish
versions of the novel reveals that the vast majority of Ramírez‘s questions and linguistic doubts
develop from the differences or disproportions between English and Spanish and not from the
abstract, unfamiliar, or unrealized emotional context of the words that he encounters.

14

For

example, as a part of the aforementioned conversation between Ramírez and Larry, Ramírez
inquires as to the meaning of English words and phrases such as ―named‖ (EC 3), ―I‘m sorry‖
(EC 5), and ―jogging‖ (EC 6). It is unclear whether Ramírez (or Puig for that matter) is thinking
first in English or Spanish. Yet, Puig‘s translations or recastings of the same words and phrases
into Spanish help to internalize the trans- or inter-lingual dissonances that frustrate Ramírez.
―Named‖ is paired with ―le pusieron nombre‖ (ME 9), ―I‘m sorry‖ with ―Lo siento‖ (ME 12),
and ―jogging‖ (EC 6) with ―haciendo ejercicio‖ (ME 12).

15

While adequate, these translations

are all somewhat unequal. Ramírez‘s uncertainty reproduces for the reader Puig‘s own awareness
of the disjunction between certain words and phrases in English and their Spanish counterparts;
More often than not, Ramírez‘s linguistic conundrums reflect the difficulty of Puig‘s own
decisions as translator. In another example, Ramírez grapples with the word ―memory‖ (EC 12),

14

Lori Chamberlain points to Puig‘s similar preoccupation with the dissonances between
Argentine Spanish and Mexican Spanish in Pubis Angelical, the novel previous to both Eternal
Curses and Maldición eterna (265).
15
I find it uncanny that Dorfman also points to both the linguistic/cultural oddity of ―jogging,‖
in a Chilean context. In both the English and Spanish versions of his memoir, Dorfman reflects
on cultural/linguistic strangeness of jogging by relating how his insistence on jogging in the
streets of Santiago made him out of place or ―desubica[do]‖ (306); he recounts that his imported
ritual of daily jogging upset the local dogs and sparked a confrontation with a political enemy
who claimed that he was disturbing the peace. Dorfman reinforces the cultural oddity of
―jogging‖ by translating or rendering it as the overly literal ―hacer jogging‖ (305) or the
disparate ―salir a correr‖ (305).
35

which Puig translates as ―memoria‖ (ME 17), an inequivalent substitute since ―memory‖ in
Spanish is doubly rendered.

16

Similarly, when Ramírez mulls over colloquial and not readily

translatable words like ―shrinks‖ (EC 40) or ―snitch‖ (EC 53), Puig first translates the former as
the somewhat disjunctive ―reductores de cabeza‖ (ME 54) and renders the latter as the more
formal ―delatora‖ (ME 69).

17

I maintain that Ramírez‘s visible linguistic qualms and hesitations

provide a vehicle through which Puig can signal the lack of equivalence or the relative
incompatibility between and among words and expressions in Spanish and English. Through
Ramírez, Puig adopts a discernible and reflective translation process that underscores the
instabilities that shape both the processes of translation and the experiences of exile.
Puig shows his sensitivity to the linguistic and/or translational stakes of exile by
foregrounding imbalances between English and Spanish and, at the same time, differences
between the English and Spanish versions of his novel. I interpret Ramírez‘s contention that by
persistently questioning Larry he means to account for emotional and not linguistic deficiencies
as an indication of Puig‘s own heightened awareness of, or overcompensation for, the fact that he
is writing in English. In Puig‘s conversation with Corbatta about the difficulties he faced while
writing Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages in English, he concedes his linguistic
insecurities. He admits, ―Antes, el lenguaje era vehículo de psicología y de caracteres, un
lenguaje del que tengo todas las claves; ahora tengo todos los datos de un idioma del que no
tengo las claves‖ (620). I maintain that through Ramírez‘s character Puig reiterates his concerns

16

Generally, ―memoria‖ refers to a person‘s faculty or capacity to remember, while ―un
recuerdo‖ designates a past recollection.
17
Later in the Spanish text, Puig translates ―shrinks‖ as ―jíbaros‖ (ME 157). To my mind,
―reductores de cabeza‖ (ME 54) is an overly literal translation and ―delatora‖ (ME 69) is a rather
stiff translation of ―snitch,‖ a word better paired with ―informer‖ in English.
36

about both misinterpreting and being misinterpreted. While Ramírez insists that Larry
misunderstands his questions as revealing language-specific rather than emotionally-driven
anxieties, comparing the English and Spanish versions of the novel establishes that, more often
than not, Ramírez‘s emotional vexations stem from his being frustrated or alienated
linguistically. For example, Puig makes light of the strangeness or unfamiliarity of English when
Larry tells Ramírez, ―—You‘re a pain in the ass‖ (EC 73), to which Ramírez responds ―—That‘s
gross‖ (EC 73). The cleverness of the exchange derives from the fact that Ramírez is a native
speaker of Spanish and not English; it is likely that were Ramírez a native English speaker he‘d
be already desensitized to the coarse literality of the expression. In the Spanish text, Puig
reproduces the coarseness but not the idiomatic wit of English exchange. Larry tells Ramírez,
―—Un dolor fuerte de barriga, de diarrea, ese efecto me hace usted‖ (ME 91), to which Ramírez
responds ―—Qué grosería‖ (ME 91). Especially in the English version of the text, Ramírez
monitors and/or makes strange the words that Larry takes for granted as an English speaker.
Ramírez also takes issue with Larry‘s use of English when Larry cynically bombards
Ramírez with a number of expressions and phrases that overstate the Freudian overtones of his
(Larry‘s) past:
—I already told you. I‘m guilty of lusting after my mother, of wanting to take her
away from my father, of not caring what became of him, of throwing him out in
my mind, letting him wander and starve, killing him—it didn‘t matter—anything
to get him out of the way. Someone I loved, but wanted to destroy to satisfy my

37

own needs. And, yes, take, steal his property, seize what was rightfully mine. (EC
18

132)

Ramírez‘s response to Larry‘s tirade is interesting because he recognizes Larry‘s phrases as trite
and ―ready-made‖ (EC 132), in spite of or even because of the fact that he is a relative newcomer
to the world of the English language. Ramírez retorts, ―—You say that at the slightest
opportunity; you‘re so quick to say that. You have ready-made phrases. Is that what the shrinks
tell you to get rid of you? Or do you think it‘s amusing? Isn‘t it terribly unpleasant, and
inaccurate besides?‖ (EC 132).

19

It seems that Ramírez‘s distance from English (and,

simultaneously, Puig‘s closeness to it as an exilic author and self-translator) leads him to
question or police Larry‘s casual use of words and phrases that Ramírez finds inaccurate or
misleading. Ramírez‘s paranoiac tendencies speak to Puig‘s own compulsions and fears as an
exilic writer. If, on the one hand, he is concerned about his inadequacies as a writer in English,
he is, on the other hand, doubly concerned about the dissolution of his abilities as a writer in
Spanish. When discussing the different versions of his novel with Corbatta, Puig himself is rather
dismissive of the Spanish of Maldición eterna—describing it as ―un castellano de traducción,

18

—Ya se lo dije, soy culpable de desear a mi madre, de querer quitársela a mi padre, de no
importarme por la suerte de él, de echarlo a la calle, de abandonarlo, de dejarlo perdido y muerto
de hambre, de matarlo, de lo que sea, con tal de apartarlo para siempre, alguien a quien también
amé mucho, pero que lo mismo quise destruir, para poder satisfacer mis necesidades. Quitársela
a él, ella que era de su propiedad, según él, y empuñar lo que por derecho me pertenecía. (ME
157)
19
―—A la menor insinuación usted sale con ese cuento. Está siempre listo para repetir lo mismo,
ya tiene las frases hechas. ¿Es eso lo que le cuentan los jíbaros para sacárselo encima? ¿o lo
repite por diversión? ¿no le parece que en vez de divertido es inexacto y desagradable?‖ (ME
157).
38

desangrado, ficticio‖ (620).

20

I argue that Ramírez‘s hypersensitivity toward language

foregrounds the careful balancing act and/or the mental conundrum into which Puig as author
and translator is caught.
Ramírez reiterates his fears of being misinterpreted when he insists that Larry has
incorrectly decoded the messages and correspondences that Ramírez inscribed into a series of
French novels that he kept while in prison. To decode Ramírez‘s notes, Larry either transcribes
and then translates the sentences that Ramírez underlined in a number of French novels, or, he
transcribes, puts into order, then translates into English the individual words that Ramírez
numbered in the same novels.

21

This complicated, meta-fictional scheme allows Puig to signal

the multiple filters and layers through which meaning and content are transmitted or decoded in
his own ―original‖ text and in his rewriting of it.
Thus, Larry‘s rereading of his rewriting of Ramírez‘s recasting of a letter that Ramírez
received from his estranged son underscores and anticipates the act of rewriting that Puig himself
undertakes—both as he writes in English and translates into Spanish. The self-reflexive
implications of this episode become evident when Larry reads to Ramírez his interpretation of
Ramírez‘s introduction to the letter he has recreated, ―I write for my own relief. If I had his letter
in front of me it would be so easy, what was he saying? They didn‘t even give me time for a

20

Likewise, Levine insinuates that one of the factors driving Puig to abandon his life in Brazil
(from 1980-1988) was his fear that his immersion in Portuguese was negatively impacting his
writing. She cites Puig‘s awareness of his linguistic displacement in Brazil in the excerpts of
―portuñol‖ in his Sangre de amor correspondido, the novel immediately after Eternal Curse and
Maldición eterna (Manuel 328-29).
21
Chamberlain expands on how Puig lifts significant portions of text from French romantic
novels: La Princesse de Cleves, Adolphe, and Les liasons dangereuses, particularly excerpts
from a letter in the latter novel in which Madame de Tourvel reveals her undecided feelings
toward the Vicomte de Valmont (270).
39

second reading; they tore the letter away from me and put it back in that big box they carry. I‘m
going to rewrite it. I hope not to change it. I hope I could change it. Its content is still burning in
me, but the words?‖ (EC 214).

22

Per Puig‘s own commentary on the novel, Ramírez‘s rewriting

of his son‘s letter suggests both a way in which Ramírez can revisit his troubled father-son
relationship and a way in which Puig himself can return to or even rework his own turbulent
relationship with his father. Yet, beyond the autobiographical ramifications of this moment in the
text, I suggest that Puig‘s care to emphasize the emotional paradox that rewriting invites and his
attention toward the disjunction between ―content‖ (EC 214) and ―words‖ (EC 214) recall Puig‘s
own careful negotiations with English and Spanish as both a translator and an exilic author. Puig
makes light of Ramírez‘s linguistic confrontations and, as a result, enunciates his role as a
biscriptive author and creates an opportunity to revisit his complicated relationship with his
fatherland or patria. Through Larry‘s interpretation and/or misinterpretation of Ramírez‘s
recreation of his son‘s letter, Puig approaches the act of rewriting as a complex and highly
filtered process that occasions both painful remembrance and willful forgetting.
In the moment when Larry reads aloud to Ramírez his (Larry‘s) interpretation of a
segment of Ramírez‘s notes, which notes comprise Ramírez‘s introduction to his rewriting of his
son‘s letter (via underlining sentences in four French novels!), Larry forces Ramírez to
reencounter his strained relationship with his son and to reflect upon the language choices that
have further strained their relationship:

22

―La es tal que escribo para mi propio alivio. Si tuviese su carta delante mío sería tan fácil,
¿qué pretendía decirme? ni me dieron tiempo a leerla por segunda vez, me la arrebataron y la
volvieron a colocar en esa gran caja que llevan. Voy a reescribirla. Espero no cambiarla. Ojalá
pudiese cambiarla. Quedo marcado a fuego su contenido ¿pero y las palabras?‖ (ME 256).
40

Relinquish that language I cannot wish to understand; renounce that sentiment
that offends me, and frightens me, and to which, maybe, you should be less
attached, knowing that it‘s the obstacle that separates us. This sentiment, is it the
only one you know? (EC 213-14)

Olvidemos el lenguaje, que no puedo dejar de aspirar a comprender, renuncie
usted a un sentimiento que me ofende, y me asusta, y al cual, tal vez, usted
debería sentir menos apego, sabiendo que es la barrera que nos separa. Ese
sentimiento, es el único que usted conoce. (ME 255)
Presumably, the language in question is French—judging from a latter portion of the
translated/transcribed letter that describes how Ramírez‘s son left for Europe to become a theater
director only to later marry a stagehand and become an instructor of Spanish in a Parisian
secondary school (EC 215)—Larry reads aloud Ramírez‘s sarcastic reference to ―the triumph of
my son in Paris‖ (EC 215).

23

However, the passage cited above could as easily refer to a kind of

language usage, a way of speaking harshly or with injury. Moreover, it could implicitly recall
Puig‘s own attachment to English, the language of Hollywood and North American popular
culture that is so prevalent in his other works. What is most likely is that Puig is fully aware of
the ambiguities prompted by the command to ―Relinquish that language‖ (EC 213) in the English
text and by the first-person plural injunction of ―Olvidemos el lenguaje‖ (ME 255) in the Spanish
text. Through these ambiguities, Puig subtly marks his awareness of the ways in which he as a
bilingual author and translator must mediate and/or move beyond pressures to be loyal to one or
another national language.
23

―Ese fue el gran triunfo de mi hijo en Paris‖ (ME 257).
41

Puig further emphasizes the emotional and political ambivalences that arise from
language choices by liberally translating excerpts of Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages
into Spanish, taking to heart his friend and confidant Cabrera Infante‘s playful dictum that
―writers dare where translators fear to tread,‖ (qtd in Levine Manuel 233). In the passage of text
quoted above, Puig chooses to rewrite more than to translate; or, at least, translating becomes
rewriting. While the English text of Ramírez‘s recreated/reinterpreted letter to his son reads,
―Relinquish that language I cannot wish to understand‖ (EC 213), the Spanish reads ―Olvidemos
el lenguaje, que no puedo dejar de aspirar a comprender‖ (ME 255). The statement that Ramírez
―cannot wish to understand‖ the language spoken by his son conveys, possibly, disdain or
resentment toward ―that [particular] language‖ (EC 213) which divides father and son or, as
likely, it shows how Ramírez acknowledges the futility of mastering the language that is so dear
to his son. Conversely, the revelation that ―no [puede] dejar de aspirar a comprender‖ his son‘s
way of speaking betrays a near compulsion for trying to understand or more fully grasp a
baffling, ―other‖ tongue or way of speaking. In the Spanish translation, Puig does more to
acknowledge the strong pull or draw of the other language—a revision that reflects on his own
meta-textual deliberations about writing in English or rewriting into Spanish. A small, but
significant change to the punctuation in the Spanish version reiterates the semantic realignment
of this section in translation. While in English, Larry reads aloud Ramírez‘s question: ―This
sentiment, is it the only one you know?‖ (EC 214), in Spanish the sentence is not an
interrogative: ―Ese sentimiento, es el único que usted conoce‖ (ME 255). As a result, the Spanish
sentence is more emphatic as to the emotional distancing caused by the son‘s attachment to his
second or other tongue—which distance is already more pronounced in Spanish through the use

42

of the formal ―Usted.‖

24

I find it curious that, in the Spanish text, Puig is less coy as to the

impact and pressures of adopting another tongue. In the slippages of meaning between the
English and Spanish texts, he seems to vacillate as to the determining influence of one or another
language. Larry‘s resurfacing of the linguistic tensions between Ramírez and his son becomes a
convenient medium through which Puig can continue his own interior dialogue about the
implications of self-translating and, ultimately, rewriting.
Ramírez‘s response to Larry‘s rereading and/or reinterpretation of his (Ramírez‘s) notes
spawns a conversation that I have reproduced at length because of the degree of self-reflexivity
that characterizes the exchange. I maintain that Puig reveals his own preoccupations about
writing first in English and then translating or rewriting into Spanish by having Ramírez and
Larry argue as to whether or not Larry has willfully revised Ramírez‘s rewriting of his son‘s
letter. Through their heated discussion, Puig playfully anticipates critical attention toward the
differences between the English and Spanish versions of his text.
—I don‘t believe a word of it. It‘s all twisted, according to your whims. I can‘t
see what you got out of that. Changing the text.
—What was it that you wanted to say, then?
—I see very clearly that you‘re not qualified to do this work.
—Thanks for your support, but the text has not been altered. These are your
thoughts, and you felt them so deeply that you took the trouble to encode a
French text to express yourself.

24

The difference in punctuation could be a problem overlooked in the processes of editing or
typesetting. However, I find this unlikely as questions in Spanish are normally set apart by both a
concluding and an introductory question mark.
43

—Yes, all that trouble to have an irresponsible young man come along and play
with it, erase the numbers, change them, write a whole new text . . . for a motive
beyond my understanding. (EC 216-17)

—No creo ni una palabra de todo eso. Está todo tergiversado, siguiendo su antojo.
No sé qué tipo de necesidad estaba usted satisfaciendo al hacer tal cosa. Cambiar
un texto entero.
—¿Qué es lo que quería decir entonces?
—Veo muy a claras que usted no está capacitado para hacer ese trabajo.
—Gracias por su apoyo, pero el texto no ha sido alterado. Esas son sus ideas, y las
sentía tan hondo, que se tomó el trabajo de codificar un texto en francés para
expresarse.
—Sí, tanto trabajo para que un joven irresponsable venga y juegue según su
capricho, borre los números, los cambie, y escriba una cosa completamente
diferente… por un motivo que escapa a mi entendimiento. (ME 259)
This exchange parodies the inquiry that drives the text—that of interrogating the limits of
language and, at the same time, unfolding the emotional stakes of exile, of having or choosing to
live or recount life in translation. Seemingly, the linguistic demons inside Puig's head are
grappling with whether not Puig himself has irrevocably changed the essence or core of his text
by writing English and Spanish versions of his novel. Through Ramírez, Puig pokes fun at the
translator and/or himself, as ―an irresponsible, young man‖ (EC 217) who would dare to
transform or try to recreate the instincts and intentions of an ―original‖ text. Through Larry, Puig
makes a stirring defense of the salience and resilience of content, despite the filters of translation.

44

Larry insists, ―These are your thoughts, and you felt them so deeply that you took the trouble to
encode a French text to express yourself.‖

25

I argue that Puig avails himself of the dialogue

between Larry and Ramírez to mark the extent to which he is invested in the questions of how
and if using one or another language places parameters on what one can experience or express in
the form of words.
Puig throws his hat into an ongoing debate of translation, the discussion of how and
whether or not a translator can ―responsibly‖ communicate the thoughts and ―intentions‖ of an
―original‖or source text. Following the school of translation that advocates utmost loyalty to the
creative intentions of the author, a self-translator like Puig would be the ideal translator because
of his less mediated access to the world of the genesis of the first, initial, or original text.

26

However, in the conversation that occurs in between the lines of the dialogue between Larry and
Ramírez, Puig implicitly debunks the notion that even the author him/herself could recover the
intentions or motivations of a sacrosanct original or first text. When Larry asks, ―—What was it
that you wanted to say, then?‖ (EC 216), and Ramírez responds, ―—I see very clearly that you‘re
not qualified to do this work‖ (EC 216), Puig thereby insinuates his own distancing from the first
text; he voices the perception that translation cannot recuperate intention and/or the belief that

25

―Esas son sus ideas, y las sentía tan hondo, que se tomó el trabajo de codificar un texto en
francés para expresarse‖ (ME 259).
26
See, for example, Nabokov‘s aforementioned ―The Art of Translation,‖ in which he argues,
playfully, that the ideal translator must be able to mimic as nearly as possible the feelings and
intentions of the original text (319), or see Edith Grossman‘s Why Translation Matters, in which
she emphasizes that ―what we read in a translation is the translator‘s writing‖ and that ―a
translation should be evaluated on its own terms‖ but still holds to the idea that ―The inspiration
is the original work, certainly, and thoughtful literary translators approach that work with great
deference and respect‖ (31-32).

45

27

intention is irrecoverable.

While Puig does not fully align himself with either Ramírez or Larry

as a character, his interpolations in and between the versions of his novel as author and translator
suggest that, withstanding all of the tongue-and-cheek between the two men, Puig mediates the
otherwise unmediated dialogue to imply that he, too, is damned and/or cursed to misread and
misinterpret as he rewrites his own text.
The dialectic that Puig engages as author and translator—the need to recover the
meaning(s) of the original paired with his desires to move past the world of the first text and
create anew—mirrors the presentation of exile in the text; Ramírez‘s desires to remember and
reacquaint himself with the feelings and emotions of language and, conversely, his anxieties to
forget painful incidents from an unrelenting and unreliable past are always tempered with the
knowledge that neither remembering nor forgetting is fully attainable. In this sense, Puig adroitly
approaches the strangeness, incompleteness, or liminality of exile by deciding to write the novel
first in English. As Lori Chamberlain argues about Puig‘s presentation of the exiled subject
primarily in the English version of his novel, ―Writing in another language, then, is a way of
objectifying the entirely unmetaphoric experience of alienation and exile, an objectification we
28

can see in the detachment of Puig‘s flat prose style in Eternal Curse‖ (265).

The additional

filter or added distance occasioned by taking on an ―other tongue‖ provides Puig with a tangible
method for trying to account for the intangible effects of exile.
Chamberlain argues that, ―For a novel about exile—political and psychological—the
English (translation) of this work survives as a sign of the novel‘s ―truth,‖ much as Argentine
27

―—¿Qué es lo que quería decir entonces?/ —Veo muy a claras que usted no está capacitado
para hacer ese trabajo‖ (ME 259).
28
Here Chamberlain refers back to Puig‘s statement to Corbatta that the Spanish of Maldicion
eterna is ―un castellano de traducción, desangrado‖ (620).
46

idioms located Puig‘s earlier novels set in Argentina‖ (262). I extend Chamberlain‘s
observations by arguing that the existence of a frequently dissimilar and equally author-itative
Spanish translation (which appeared in print in 1980, two years before the original English
manuscript) further punctuates and/or calls into question the assumptions or truth claims about
exile that are advanced in either the English or Spanish text. Often, even the slightest differences
between the two texts or versions of Puig‘s novel complicate attempts to tease out a thesis about
exile or the experience of exile in one or another linguistic milieu.
For example, in the previously cited argument between Larry and Ramírez, Puig tinges
the meaning of Ramírez‘s statement about why he thinks Larry felt prompted to change the letter
that Ramírez attempted to recreate while a political prisoner. While in the English text Puig
writes, ―—I can‘t see what you got out of that. Changing the text‖ (EC 216), in the Spanish Puig
renders the same as, —No sé qué tipo de necesidad estaba usted satisfaciendo al hacer tal cosa.
Cambiar un texto entero‖ (ME 259). The Spanish text is more explicit as to the compulsion or
the almost physical need, ―[la] necesidad‖ (ME 259), that Ramírez claims Larry is trying to
satisfy by transgressing the bounds of the ―original‖ text (which is hardly ―original‖ as it is
Ramírez‘s attempt to rewrite a cursorily read letter from his son via lifting words and sentences
from the French novels he has with him in prison). In addition, Puig more clearly concedes the
dramatic and substantive transformations that have taken place in the processes of translating or
rewriting his own text by adding the adjective ―entero‖ to modify ―texto‖ in the Spanish version.
These slight modifications in the Spanish text cast curious shadows on Puig‘s own decision to
self-translate and/or completely revise the English version of his text. Ramírez‘s insinuation that
Larry‘s act of translating and/or rewriting is a rash endeavor or a thrill-seeking experience
prompts questions like: Why would Puig want to more firmly emphasize the dramatic

47

transformation occasioned by translation in the Spanish text? Was Puig‘s decision to write first
in English and then translate into Spanish born of necessity, despair, or mere curiosity? Do these
changes suggest that Puig‘s own narrative of exile is different in English than in Spanish? I don‘t
aim to force answers to these questions so much as to emphasize that by self-translating Puig
opens up the processes of textual transmission and obscures the notion that the experience of
exile is language-specific.

29

Admittedly, a side-by-side comparison of the English and Spanish versions of Puig‘s
novel doesn‘t yield many startling contradictions. Still, many of Puig‘s self-translations into
Spanish from the English version are scrupulously or, even, overly literal—which labored
literality is in and of itself a kind of transgressive, non-fluent, and/or more ―visibile‖ translation
practice. Moreover, Puig disrupts or unsettles conclusions about one or both of the versions of
novel through even his slightest revisions: changes in word choice, phrasing, connotation that
lead to changes in context and characterization, as well as innumerable aural changes (of rhythm,
meter, sound, etc.) that can alter the tone of the narrative. Drawing from Thomas Tanselle‘s
distinction about the character of textual revisions, I maintain that several of Puig‘s translations
are ―vertical revisions‖ (335) in that they alter ―the purpose, character, direction, or character of
[the] work, thus attempting to make a different sort of work out of it‖ (335); unlike ―horizontal‖
(335) revisions which continue and/or emend the supposed intentions of an ―original‖ text or
manuscript, these rewritings realign and/or challenge the claims of first text. In these instances,
29

Levine intimates a more pragmatic motivation behind Puig‘s language decisions. She explains
that while Puig, generally, perceived translations to be ―pale clones‖ (Manuel 225-26) of an
―original‖ text, he ―knew he needed to publish beyond national borders to survive‖ (225). Levine
writes, ―He was an Argentine, after all, for whom Paris and New York were the capitals of the
civilized worlds.[. . . ] having done subtitle work in film, and industry that depended upon global
marketing, Manuel was preconditioned to think of the Spanish version as a small cog in a vast
publishing apparatus‖ (226).
48

Puig as translator resists the already hotly contested assumption that respecting the intentions of
a first text is possible or even desirable. Especially through his suggestive revisions, Puig creates
two contingent and contesting texts and, as a result, signals the ambiguities and multiple
meanings that surface in the highly filtered processes of reading, writing, translating, and
rewriting.
A particularly curious revision occurs near the end of the novel, in the few letters which
close the novel (in English and in Spanish) and summarize the events that lead to Mr. Ramírez‘s
eventual death and Larry John‘s reentrance into the world of the unemployed. In a letter to Larry
from the Internal Secretary for the Human Rights organization that had been financing Mr.
Ramírez‘s stay in the Greenwich Village nursing home, the secretary to this organization
explains to Larry why he does not feel it correct to release to Larry Ramírez‘s manuscripts,
which documents represent for Larry his future livelihood as he planned to work in coordination
with the University of Montreal to recover, decode, and eventually publish these texts. The
secretary, Eli Margulies, writes to Larry that Ann Lewis (a nurse at the home and Larry‘s said
former love interest) recounted for him her last conversation with Ramírez before his health
rapidly declined and he was transferred to facilities in the western U.S. In the English version,
Margulies recalls that nurse tells him, ―[Ramírez] had called her to say good-bye, because she
was the only person he had got along with at the Village Home. She found him very depressed‖
(EC 229, my emphasis). In the Spanish version, he recounts, ―El señor Ramírez la llamó para
despedirse, porque según la señora Lewis ella había sido la única persona con quien había
congeniado en el Hogar ―Village.‖ Ella lo encontró muy eufórico y lleno de planes, coincidiendo
así con mi propia impresión‖ (ME 275, my emphasis). In both texts, Ramírez‘s final words to
Lewis implicate Larry as an antagonist instead of a friend and collaborator and, also, corroborate

49

Ramírez‘s final will and testament, in which he leaves his prison notes to the Greenwich home‘s
library and thereby prohibits Larry from retaining the books for his collaborative project with the
University of Montreal. Effectively, Ramírez condemns Larry to a continued life of working jobs
for which he is undercompensated and overeducated. However, the kind of vengeance enacted
by Ramírez in the Spanish version is not born of sadness, despair, or betrayal but of excitement
or ―eufori[a]‖ (ME 275) and deliberate malice—a revenge wrought by a dying man who is still
―lleno de planes‖ (ME 275). Puig‘s modification of Ramírez‘s behavior is reiterated through the
nurse‘s subsequent assurance to Margulies in the English version that ―although he sounded very
sad, he was composed and lucid‖ (EC 229. my italics) and, in the Spanish, ―que le pareció
sobreexcitado pero lúcido‖ (ME 275, my italics). In both texts, Ramírez thwarts Larry‘s attempts
to recover, translate, and eventually publish Ramírez‘s prison notes—which final action speaks
to Puig‘s own meta-textual efforts to thwart or complicate readings of his text by creating a
Spanish-language original that calls into question the reliability of his first, English manuscript.
Yet, while Ramírez plots a more mean-spirited revenge on Larry in the Spanish text, as author
and translator Puig plans a similar (though likely less mean-spirited) fate for the reader of either
his English or Spanish novel. By creating an occasionally dissonant and still equally authoritative
―translation,‖ Puig condemns the reader of only one or the other versions of his text to a similarly
incomplete interpretation and also muddles the larger text that comprises both of his novels.
The elusive manuscript that Ramírez bars Larry from translating and interpreting recalls
the elusive narrative of exile that Puig himself recounts for readers of English or Spanish. While
Puig‘s texts are works of fiction independent of their author, the biographical conditions of their
creation provide added insight into the problems of language, communication, and misprision
that move Puig‘s English and Spanish texts. As Levine argues,

50

As with each novel [of Puig‘s], Eternal Curse was directly connected to a
moment in his life: Ramirez suffers a loss of nationality; he says he knows words
in different languages but not what he should feel; he suffers amnesia because of a
repression that is psychological but determined in good part by the political. As an
Argentine, he rejected roots in the old country, feeling totally removed from
Europe, but he has also rejected/been rejected by Argentina. (Manuel 299)
Of course, determining why Puig felt prompted to write the English version of his text before the
Spanish version cannot be so simple as to argue that writing in English provided Puig with an
outlet through which he could exorcise his exilic angst. Rather, as Levine also recounts, Puig
resisted the notion of being characterized as a prototypical exile (272). While he did leave
Argentina upon fearing for his family and his personal safety, even receiving death threats from
Triple A, a far-right, anti-communist group linked to Isabel Perón (241-42), Puig was not said to
wallow with nostalgia or feelings of alienation whilst elsewhere. Levine writes that for all his
desires to be accepted and appreciated in his home country, in his circles abroad he found
warmer acclaim and a larger market for his works, welcome anonymity from Argentine
judgment (291), and increased opportunities for romance (especially in and around New York‘s
Christopher Street, the gay mainstay of Greenwich village) (272).

30

Moreover, by writing first in

English, Puig may have simply wanted to avoid the ordeal of dealing with translators. Levine
recounts that Puig, like Cabrera Infante, was accustomed to viewing translators as a ―hassle‖
(299), as ―necessary evils‖ (225); Puig may have been hesitant to deal with or to relinquish

30

Levine recounts how Puig emphasized to the Scottish writer and translator Alastair Reid, ―‗It
wasn‘t so much that I was fleeing . . . you‘ve got to understand,‘ pointing in the directions of two
young men kissing on the corner of Christopher Street and Sheridan Square. ‗This for me is
Mecca; why would I want to be anywhere else?‘‖ (272).
51

control to another writer. Finally, Puig may have simply wanted to more accurately represent the
period of life that the texts reflect—as he tells Corbatta, ―Fue un problema vivido en inglés y yo
quería escribir sobre eso‖ (620). Whatever the most pressing motivation behind Puig‘s decision
to work out his narrative of exile in English and/or Spanish, his texts remain—with all of their
assorted political, social, and literary implications.
It is clear, however, that through the ambivalences within and in between the Spanish and
English versions of his novel, Puig more fully develops the thematic of exile recurrent in his
fiction and emphasizes and/or makes light of the linguistic tensions of exile in and between his
texts. Puig the author and translator appears to be ever aware of the dissonances between the
English and Spanish versions of his text and, as a result, he actively resists the notion that writing
in one or another language determines and/or delimits what he as an author can recount or create.
Puig voices through his revisions his own unspoken insistence that what is lost in translation (in
either text) is partially regained through the highly self-reflexive and carefully-coded attention to
language and its limits in both versions of his novel. Chamberlain argues that these texts, along
with Puig‘s previous Pubis Angelical (published in 1979) and his later Sangre de amor
correspondido (published in 1982), ―indicate a preoccupation with language as the place of
exile‖ (265) and that by ―foregrounding the otherness of language, Puig provides another
perspective as a way of probing the issues of sexual and political repression that consistently
appear in his works‖ (265). I add that only in and between Eternal Curse on the Reader of These
Pages and Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas is Puig able to visibly engage and/or cast
doubt on the linguistic tensions that are said to characterize the event of exile. By creating a
space between the English and Spanish versions of his novel, he muddies the waters of authorial
intention and textual transmission, and he approaches translation and exile both as opportunities

52

for reinterpretation and as openings for misprision or misinterpretation. In his ―Traducción y
exilio,‖ José Francisco Ruiz Casanova asks if translation is a choice or condition of exile (142).
Puig grapples with this same question as he takes on the role of both author and self-translator.

Dealing with the Discovery of Self-translation and Exile in Dorfman‘s Heading South, Looking
North: A Bilingual Journey and Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte: un romance en dos lenguas
While with Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages and Maldición eterna a quien
lea estas paginas Puig writes a largely fictional text that has latent autobiographical overtones,
with Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey and Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte:
un romance en dos lenguas, Ariel Dorfman crafts an unabashedly personal memoir, the artifice
of which is deftly understated. Yet, even as the two authors frame the event of exile from
different vantage points, both emphasize the linguistic tensions that inform the experience of
exile and call attention to how these tensions complicate a firm sense of self, place, community,
nation, and text. Both foreground the linguistic strangeness or dual awareness of their narrative
selves or characters and, through their narrative voices, each writer highlights the interlingual
liminality and/or the cross-cultural dexterity amplified by choosing to act as author and
translator. The implicit questions and motivations of Puig‘s text—trying to account for the
emotional stakes of having to maneuver in one or another language; attempting to revisit or to
atone for mistakes in past and distant relationships; wrestling with whether or not essential
content is lost in the decoding or translation of a manuscript; deciding whether or not to soften
and/or embellish episodes or characterizations when translating or rewriting; approaching a host
language as either a means of refuge or as a cruel necessity; grappling with the possibility of self
before language or self because of language—are all explicit points of departure in Dorfman‘s

53

carefully crafted life story. Dorfman‘s deliberations in and between the two versions of his
memoir manifest the extent to which he, too, has internalized the wiles, woes, and satisfactions
of writing and translating as a multilingual author. Reading the English and Spanish versions of
the memoir side-by-side reveals Dorfman‘s personal investment in elucidating exile as an
individual, historical, and linguistic event.
As the disparate English and Spanish titles of his memoir suggest, Dorfman is keenly
aware of ways in which he creates different versions of himself in either language. ―Heading
South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey‖ paints a picture of a divided traveler on a fairly
direct journey and also evokes the tragic gesture of looking back, e.g., Orpheus looking for
Eurydice or Lot‘s wife stealing a glance at the home she is leaving. In line with these images,
Dorfman insinuates that his dividedness—his anguish and concern for whom or what he has left
behind—is also a kind of deviance, an act of defiance toward the gods or God who ordered that
one should not stray from the path set for him/her; the physical act of looking back transgresses
the established order set by the gods. Likewise, Dorfman‘s portrayal of a split or bilingual self
transgresses established norms of language, nation, and self in society and literature. His
insistence that his journey is ―bilingual‖ speaks to his belated yet ardent defiance of the
traditional parameters of a monolingual literary culture. Shades of Dorfman‘s non-compliance
are echoed in the subtitle of his English memoir. ―Journey‖ strongly recalls the Spanish
―jornada,‖ such that the English word is arguably a calque for the Spanish term which is rich in
its evocations: of a day‘s work, a day‘s wage in Chile, a day‘s journey, a theater act in classical

54

Spanish drama, and of a more figurative, possibly endless journey through life.

31

As significant

as the varied meanings of journey/jornada is the fact that Dorfman‘s text recalls the meanings of
the word in both English and the Spanish—evidence that while he is writing in one language he
is thinking of or in the other. As author and translator, he frequently fuses English and Spanish
together such that the languages combine instead of compete. More often than not, Dorfman‘s
translations reaffirm the larger thesis of the two versions of his memoir—his determination to
counter the political, emotional, and linguistic traumas of exile with a message of positive
hybridity, dual consciousness, and/or multi-cultural awareness.
―Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte: un romance en dos lenguas‖ reiterates the apparent
implications of the English title, but with added drama. ―Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte‖
conveys the same sense of direction as ―Heading South, Looking North‖ but the Spanish words
are more florid and emotional, an affirmation of a kind of baroque sensibility that Latin
American writers as varied as Rosario Ferré, Jorge Luís Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo
Carpentier, and Roberto González Echevarría have projected as an intrinsic characteristic of
Spanish, the language of Góngora, Cervantes, and Quevedo that is revitalized by twentieth-

31

In her definitive article on Heading South, Looking North, Sophia McClennen expands on the
temporal implications of ―jornada‖ in Spanish as compared to ―journey‖ in English. She
explains,
[A]s revealed more overtly in the Spanish jornada, a journey signals both the
events of one day as well as a trip that knows no limits. On one level, the subtitle
indicates how it is only at the end of this journey that Dorfman finally comes to
accept himself as a bilingual, to reconcile himself to the two forces of his two
languages, and to more comfortably inhabit a world where both English and
Spanish function compatibly. At another level, though, ―journey‖ suggests that his
travels in bilingualism and cross-culturalism persist, that they began well before
his exile from Pinochet, and that they have not ended. (―The Diasporic‖ 6).
55

century ―boom‖ authors such as Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, and García Márquez.

32

As opposed

to the Orpheus-like gesture of ―looking north,‖ deseando speaks to a more internal conflict of
interest, a passionate longing that is not marked by physical movement.
Dorfman‘s classification of the Spanish version of his memoir as ―un romance‖ is also
evocative. Presumably, Dorfman refers not to the ballad form of poetry but to the romance, the
main form of popular medieval fiction and a precursor to the famed works of the Spanish Golden
Age.

33

Dorfman, an active student and professor of Hispanic literatures, with a son named

Rodrigo after ―El Cid, the first Iberian hero‖ (Heading 155), playfully conflates the events of his
text within the traditional parameters of the romance. As Alan Deyermond explains in his
defense and overview of the genre,
The romance is a story of adventure, dealing with combat, love, the quest,
separation and reunion, other-world journeys, or any combination, of these. The
story is told largely for its own sake, though a moral or religious lesson need not
be excluded, and moral or religious connotations are very often present. A

32

Dorfman refers to this notion of ―the baroque‖/ ―el barroco‖ when describing his ―schizoid‖
(Heading 191) and/or egregiously hybrid behavior as a youth in Chile, recounting how he still
clung to English as his intimate language while publicly making a name for himself as political,
anti-imperialist activist in Spanish. Dorfman writes, ―There was something monstrous and
bizarre and twisted in my journey. But wasn‘t that also that also the story of Latin America, what
it had baroquely permitted, admitted, submitted, remitted, since its origins?‖ (191). Curiously,
Dorfman chooses not include this more explicit reference to ―the baroque‖ in the Spanish version
of his memoir, eliminating the whole paragraph in which the above statement is the concluding
sentence. In both texts, however, he also talks around ―the baroque‖ when he reflects on
Fernández de Oviedo‘s attempts to translate the ―fantastic composite‖ (193)/ ―la composición
fantástica‖ (Rumbo 261) of the New World for his European audience.
33
For early histories and discussions of the generic characteristics of el romance see Alan
Deyermond‘s 1971 ―The lost genre of medieval Spanish literature‖ or Northrup Frye‘s 1957
Anatomy of Criticism. Famous examples within the span of the genre include Amadís de Gaula
and Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro.
56

commentary on the meaning of the events is normally given, with special
attention to the motives of the characters, and descriptions are fairly full. The
audience aimed at is generally more sophisticated than the audience for the epic.
(793)
Deyermond explains that writers of romances frequently recur to ―[t]he marvellous‖ (793), they
relay a world that is ―remote from the audience in time, space or social class‖ (793), and that
their romances ―can be episodic, [. . .] have a unitary linear structure, or follow the more
complex pattern of interlacing‖ (793). Dorfman‘s complex, interweaving narrative of self and of
exile proves a worthy heir to the romance, to mention only his personal battle and quest for the
political and social ends of the socialist government of Salvador Allende, his forcible separation
from and later reunion with his wife and son in the aftermath of the military coup, and his
reflections on his numerous marvelous or provident escapes from death. Dorfman‘s Spanish title
frames with greater incisiveness the heroic and/or mock-heroic proportions of his text. Readers
familiar with the conventions of the romance will be more highly attuned to the ways in which
Dorfman both pays homage to and plays with the attributes of this Hispanic literary ancestor.
With his divergent Spanish ―translation‖ of the title, Dorfman enlarges and brings into sharper
focus a significant literary context for his English language ―original.‖
In an interview with Ilan Stavans, Dorfman claims that his ―Spanish is haunted by
English, and vice versa‖ (308) and agrees with Stavan‘s assertion that his writing is ―a written
English with a Spanish accent‖ (308). The Spanish presence in Dorfman‘s English text is
particularly evident in the individual chapter titles to his memoir, which all begin with the
circuitous phrase, ―A Chapter Dealing With the Discovery of . . .‖ either ―death‖ or ―life and
language.‖ In Spanish, the chapters begin with the phrase ―En el que,‖ which is still indirect but

57

less cumbersome. McClennen explains how these titles ―parallel the chapter titles from Don
Quijote, many of which begin with the phrase ‗which deals with…‘ or ‗que trata de…‘ and ‗de lo
que . . .‘‖ (―The Diasporic‖ 2) and indicates how like those titles in Cervantes, ―Dorfman‘s
chapter titles are a ruse and what they signal is not always what the reader encounters‖ (2-3).
McClennen cites the chapter on ―life and language‖ in which a young Ariel and his family mourn
the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (5). Dorfman credits a looming literary predecessor
by both employing the syntax of Cervantes‘ Golden Age Spanish in his chapter titles and by
similarly exploiting readers‘ expectations of his individual chapters. These two-faced chapter
titles evoke larger duplicities and/or continuities of both content and form in Dorfman‘s English
and Spanish texts. In the case of Heading South, Looking North, Dorfman uses English that
speaks of Spanish to recount a narrative of life, hope, and bilingualism that is, at the same time, a
story of death, disillusion, and language loyalty. In the case of Rumbo al Sur, Deseando el Norte,
Dorfman accomplishes the same via accented Spanish prose that both is and is not a translation.
In either text, language is not just a vehicle of meaning but a generator of it.
The co-presence of English and Spanish in the two versions of Dorfman‘s memoir both
reinforces and undermines the fundamental dualisms that motivate much of Dorfman‘s narrative
of life and language, e.g., North and South, English and Spanish, monolingualism and
bilingualism. As McClennen argues, ―Dorfman points to a flawed binary, an opposition that is
inclusive rather than epiphenomenal, since what we have is not north versus south, but rather
north and south, which in keeping with the title of the book, suggests Dorfman as a Janus face, a
being who straddles the north and the south, always tied to both to some degree‖ (―The
Diasporic‖ 5). While Dorfman plays with the literary currency that these oppositions hold and
flirts with the notion that he is someone or something in Spanish that he is not in English, he

58

ultimately undercuts these oppositions in the processes of writing and translating. Rather,
Dorfman‘s poetics resonate with Derrida‘s seemingly paradoxical insistence that while we ―only
speak one language,‖ we can ―never speak only one language‖ (7). Through the many hybrid
moments in his texts, Dorfman visibly deconstructs the idea that a writer is actually able to fully
demarcate or separate his/her shared language(s)—the autonomy of either his English or his
Spanish is undone by the persistence of either language within the other.
Still, in his writing and in his critical commentary, Dorfman seems rather ambivalent as
to whether or not he controls or is at the behest of his language or language(s). While discussing
his writing with Stavans, Dorfman reiterates Derrida‘s either/or and/or neither/nor thinking about
language and goes on to express his nearly unconscious, passive role in making language
decisions:
In a way, I think I‘m married to both languages, but marriage implies divorce and
separation. Perhaps I have two mothers: two origins, two beginnings. Or is it two
mother wives? This does not preclude the fact that oftentimes I feel as if I don‘t
have a language at all—a sort of aphasia: I can stumble, lose my sense of what
language I‘m using, and not find a word in either tongue; I can search for the
word but the word is not there. Probably the deepest side of myself inhabits that
no-language geography. When I‘m writing, if the voice, the inner voice, comes to
me in one language, I will follow through: I let the language choose me. (306)
In his memoir, Dorfman follows this kind of language logic by depicting numerous instances in
which his narrative self is acted upon by language. His Spanish or castellano, ―catche[s]‖
(Heading 12), ―cradle[s]‖ (12), ―pull[s] him back from the abyss‖ (12), ―take[s] care of him‖
(13), ―endures‖ (60), ―resist[s]‖ (60), ―waits‖ (60), and ―flow[s] out of him like a river‖ (245).

59

Likewise, Dorfman‘s English causes him to ―surrender‖ 40), ―adopt[s]‖ (49) him, acts as ―a
constant companion and best friend‖ (160), ―call[s] to [him]‖ (219), ―persists[s]‖ (221), ―flirt[s]
[…] with his mind‖ (269), and ―grows indispensable‖ (270) to him. He depicts both English and
Spanish as animate and active forces in his development as an adult and as a writer and, at times,
even casts himself as a kind of amanuensis, a mere scribe to the larger upheavals of exile and
language that have shaped him, instead of a willing participant in the unfolding of the same
narrative. He claims that, ―Spanish and history had different plans for [him]‖ (Heading 86) when
as a twelve-year-old aspiring writer he forswore his language loyalty to English, and he writes
that ―History played a trick on [him]‖ (Heading 198) by sending him to Berkeley, California in
1968 near the center of the U.S. counterculture movements of the 1960s, just as was he wrestling
with his own identity as an ―American‖ author.

34

Moreover, he asserts that ―history may [have]

forc[ed] [him], against [his] will, to become bilingual‖ (Heading 269) when he used his English
language skills, in part, to secure his passage to Argentina from Chile in the aftermath of the
military coup.

35

In all of these moments, Dorfman implies that the pressures of history and

language conspire to shape him rather than recounting how as an autonomous agent he
influences the tensions of language and history through his individual actions.
However, in many other instances in his texts, Dorfman underscores his free will in
making (and also portraying) language decisions. As author and translator, he intervenes in and
between his texts to show that he consciously mediates or negotiates the linguistic stakes of

34

In Spanish, Dorfman renders the phrases cited above as ―El castellano y la historia me tenían
reservado un plan diferente‖ (Rumbo 120), and ―Te llames como te llames, te espera una
América sorprendente‖ (Rumbo 268).
35
―la historia puede que me esté forzando, contra mi propia voluntad, a hacerme bilingüe‖
(Rumbo 359).
60

exile. In the first guise, Dorfman engages a tension between the active and passive portrayals of
his narrative self. McClennen aptly describes this textual dialectic when she argues, ―Dorfman
wavers between emphasizing agency and choice in his use of language versus admitting his
submission and passivity to the circumstances of his cultural displacement‖ (―The Diasporic‖ 3).
Indeed, Dorfman asserts his linguistic independence early in both texts in his admittedly
unreliable account of his hospital internment as a two-year-old. He insists that this experience
prompted his near physiological refusal to speak Spanish, that as a toddler he effectively willed
himself to be monolingual. McClennen points to Dorfman‘s contradictory insistence that he
―instinctively chose‖ (Heading 42) to speak only English despite his being only two (―The
Diasporic‖ 3).

36

Likewise, Dorfman emphasizes his willfulness in persisting in speaking only

English into his childhood and in crafting an ―American‖ identity for himself: ―I reject that voice
in Spanish [. . .]. This is how I create, day by day, my identity. This is how I deny, day by day,
the brother who is in my mind and understands Spanish, how I deny him the chance to resurrect‖
(Heading 61).

37

In addition, Dorfman later recounts how as an adult in Berkley he ―willed

[himself] to become monolingual again‖ (Heading 101), deciding to ―renounce English‖
(Heading 101) and to make Spanish the ―love of [his] life‖ (Heading 101).

38

He reveals his

thoughts as ―What was I doing here, making believe I was a gringo, writing in this language that
suddenly seemed an alien script? I was not from here. I was Latin American‖ (Heading 100-01).
36

―rechazar en forma instintiva‖ (Rumbo 59).

37

―rechazar la voz que me habla en castellano [. . .] Es así como me voy creando, día a día, mi
identidad. Es así como refuto, día a día, al hermano que se oculta en mi mente y que comprende
el castellano, es así como le impide a él la posibilidad de resucitar‖ (Rumbo 84).
38
He translates these phrases as ―Monolingüe, de nuevo quise ser, hacerme monolingüe‖
(Rumbo 140), ―renunciar al inglés‖ (Rumbo 139), and ―En adelante sólo el castellano sería el
amor de mi vida‖ (Rumbo 140).
61

In all these moments, Dorfman is a very active arbiter in his language decisions; he is the ―I‖ or
the ―yo‖ that acts to craft both his linguistic and national identity.
Remarkably, Dorfman‘s last two emphatic statements as a newly discovered Latin
American in Berkeley, ―I was not from here. I was Latin American‖ are taken out of the Spanish
version of the memoir (Heading 101, Rumbo 139). The Spanish version reads simply, ―¿Qué
demonios estaba haciendo yo acá, fingiendo ser gringo, escribiendo en este idioma que de pronto
me parecía absolutamente ajeno?‖ (Rumbo 139). Did Dorfman remove these statements for fear
of their sounding insincere or disingenuous to a Spanish-readership and/or a predominantly Latin
American audience? Was he merely accounting for redundancies in content?

39

Did the very act

of translating cause him to feel insufficiently Latin American? In any event, the deleted
sentences represent an intervention and not an oversight on the part of Dorfman as translator
and/or rewriter of the English version of his text. In the guise of translator, Dorfman continually
inserts himself in and between his texts—leaving a visible trail marking the extent to which he
tries to control, mediate, and/or mitigate the cultural implications of his language decisions. His
literary translations attest to how actively he represents and, ultimately, resists being controlled
by the larger demands of an animate History or Language.
Through his translations, Dorfman depicts himself as a consummate cultural mediator,
―un hombre puente‖ (Rumbo 59), an ―in-between person‖ (Heading 42). He makes pains to
accommodate and/or provide context for readers less familiar with the history or the culture
behind a textual referent and, at the same time, endeavors to affirm his individual credentials as a

39

Toward the very end of the text, he does firmly state, in both versions, to the North American
wife of the Argentine ambassador, ―I am American. Latin American. Soy chileno‖ (Heading
267)/ ―Yo le contesté que yo era americano, era latinoamericano. Soy chileno, le dije, finalmente
en castellano, para que me creyera‖ (Rumbo 257).
62

cultural mediator and translator. The vast majority of the changes that he makes in translating or
rewriting evidence his desires to add context, provide comparable cultural equivalents, or to
ground himself as both a North American and Latin American author and cultural authority. For
example, as seen in the passages below, Dorfman substantially revises and/or adds to his Spanish
text, perhaps to balance his nostalgic catalogue of several cultural markers of his New York
childhood in English:
But my bizarre ally, General Perón, saved me for English and America, he saved
me for the Teddy Bears‘ picnic and for Burt Lancaster as The Crimson Pirate and
for Joe DiMaggio hitting one more home, he saved me for the smell of hot dogs
sizzling at Nedick‘s and for the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue and for the Three
Musketeers candy bar and for the infinite aisles of toys at Macy‘s and the buzz of
the yellow cabs of New York and the icy excitement of skaters at Rockefeller
Center and the little train that could and the Great Gildersleeve. (Heading 63)
Below, I underline the main deviations from the English in the Spanish version to illustrate the
extent to which Dorfman changes this passage, possibly to make the many North American
allusions relevant to a Latin American readership and/or to brandish his knowledge of Southern
cultural alternatives.
Pero mi castellano no volvería de la muerte. Para eso estaba, ―Perón, Perón, qué
grande sos‖. Ese insólito aliado mío permitió a este compatriota suyo seguir a la
caza de la vida norteamericana que el general nacionalista tanto aborrecía. Fue él
quien me salvó para que tarareara a Frank Sinatra antes que a Gárdel, para que mi
héroe fuera Burt Lancaster en The Crimson Pirate en vez de Hugo del Carril en
Las aguas bajan turbias, para que jugara béisbol y no con la pelota de soccer,

63

para que gozara de los hot dogs chicharreando en el Neddicks de la Forty-Second
Street y jamás de un asado a la criolla, fue el peronismo triunfante en Argentina el
que me abrió la aventura vibrante de Nueva York, los yellow cabs de la ciudad y
las hileras infinitas de juguetes en Macy‟s y la Easter Parade con su flotillas de
gigantescos muñecos multicolores bajando por la Quinta Avenida y los
patinadores del Rockefeller Center; fue Perón el que me abrió las delicias de la
radio y los comics y los libros infantiles de gringolandia, el que me alejó del
Patoruzú para que soñara con Batman y la Pequeña Lulú. (Rumbo 86)
The translator that surfaces through the course of these revisions is a voice conversant with two
worlds, an avid student of popular cultures North and South. Dorfman positions himself as a
―human bridge‖ between his readerships and, in doing so, buttresses his own cross-cultural
and/or translational credentials. He formally renders the spirit of the paragraph—much better
than if he had done a word-for-word translation.
From his clarification in English that Guatemala is a part of Central America (Heading
120, Rumbo 166) to his added explanation in Spanish that he is translating from an English
original (Rumbo 9, Heading 3); from his added details about Angel and Violeta Parra (Heading
139, Rumbo 193) to his extra illumination in Spanish that his mother was greatly impacted by the
death of ―el presidente‖ Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Rumbo 65, Heading 46); or from his use of
―Spanish‖ instead of ―castellano” to his careful use of the more specific term destierro (Rumbo
190) instead of exilio when translating ―exile‖ (Heading 137) into Spanish, Dorfman‘s revisions
play into the question of his identity and the manner in which he perceives himself and/or seeks
to portray himself for two potentially diverse and competing readerships or hemispheric
audiences. Certainly, he leaves many cultural references unexplained or without added context in

64

either version of his memoir, but his eagerness to intervene on so many other occasions suggests
that he clearly embraces his role as a cultural mediator—that he views himself as having the
cultural credentials to straddle the ideological, political, and physical borders that divide North
and South. Through his self-translations, Dorfman posits this hybrid perspective as the net
positive of the exilic upheavals of his lifetime. The translational extra- and/or inter-text
surrounding both versions of his memoir is the story of how Dorfman survives the traumas and
tragedies of exile by and through his linguistic dexterity or doubleness.
Dorfman projects a future recounting of his ―linguistic bigamy‖ toward the end of either
memoir, when his narrative self prepares to leave the Argentine embassy. He reflects,
Time is on its side, history is on its side, and the years will pass and I will
not be returning to my Chilean homeland so soon, until the day comes when
English grows indispensable and my two languages call a truce after forty years
of raging for my throat, my two languages decide to coexist. But how I became a
bigamist of language, how I shared them or they shared me, how I married them
both, is in the future, as I head North and look to the South where I can no longer
live, [. . .].
So this is where this part of my life ends? Poised on the verge of a
bilingual future, about to plunge into a world that will force me, in order to
survive, to accept that I belong to two cultures, that I straddle a space between
two cultures? (Heading 270)
He reinforces and/or complicates this notion of his bilingual, ―straddling‖ self when he renders
this English passage into Spanish. He writes:

65

El tiempo está de su lado, la historia está de su lado, y los años pasan y no
regresaré a mi patria chilena tan pronto como creía, y llegará un día cuando mi
inglés se vuelva enteramente indispensable, una vez que haya dejado atrás mis
tres años en París y mis cuatro años en Holanda y haya fracasado en mi tentativa
de irme a vivir en México, y Pinochet me expulsa por segunda vez de Chile, una
vez que me quede, casi en contra de mi voluntad, en los Estados Unidos, es
entonces cuando mis dos lenguas han de declarar una tregua después de cuarenta
años de pelear emperradamente por la posesión de mi garganta. Pero no se trata
de describir acá cómo me hice un bígamo del lenguaje, cómo me casé con ambos,
Rumbo al Norte y deseando el Sur donde ya no vivo, [. . .].
De manera que aquí se acaba esta parte de mi vida? ¿En el borde de un
futuro bilingüe, a punto de zambullirme en un mundo globalizante y multicultural
que me obligará a aceptar, para sobrevivir, que pertenezco a dos culturas, que yo
existo en el espacio doble donde chocan y se encuentran esas dos culturas.
(Rumbo 360-61, my emphasis)
The most dramatic departures from the English are Dorfman‘s added accounting of the
placelessness that followed his first exile from Chile and his grim assertion that he now resides in
the United States of near obligation instead of choice, ―una vez que me quede, casi en contra de
mi voluntad, en los Estados Unidos‖ (Rumbo 361). Finally, only in Spanish does he explicitly
place himself in a ―mundo globalizante y multicultural‖ (Rumbo 31), adding with these
adjectives a possible defense for why he opted to write his memoir first in English. Thus, the
composite Dorfman looks forward to his hybrid, bilingual future, but with more resignation
and/or possible defensiveness when he revisits the same moment in translation. These

66

textual/translational emendations, however slight, point to the intensely personal stakes of selftranslating for Dorfman. By liberally translating his memoir, he frees himself to reconstruct
aspects of his narrative self that may not align with the later version of himself that he wants to
project as he translates or rewrites.
Many of Dorfman‘s revisions, translations, or narrative reconstructions underscore the
fluid and/or vulnerable nature of his national or transnational identity. When translating or
rewriting, he seems eager to balance and/or counterbalance the extent to which his narrative self
identifies with one or another homeland; he wrestles with his own previous attempts to ―place
himself‖ or ―ubicarse‖ (Heading 229, Rumbo 306) in either North or South America. McClennen
calls for further investigation into the identitarian stakes of these revisions—claiming that the
disparities between the versions of his memoir are ―all the more significant because, for the most
part, translations of Dorfman‘s earlier work have tended to be meticulously literal‖ (―The
Diasporic‖ 8).

40

Why, for example, would Dorfman declare ―I am at home‖ when hiding out in a

lower class Chilean ―shack‖ (Heading 143) or ―cabinita‖ (Rumbo 198) as he awaits safe passage
to another location (Heading 144), and then express the same with the more ambivalent ―Estoy
en el lugar que me corresponde‖ (Rumbo 200) in Spanish? Why delete from the Spanish a
reference to Chile as ―my country‖ (Heading 137, Rumbo 190), or not translate into Spanish the
seemingly innocent admission that as a youth he forsakes empanadas for U.S. chocolate bars,
―empanadas I hardly wasted time on then, obsessed as I was with Milky Ways‖ (Heading 118,
Rumbo 163)? Moreover, why would he eliminate from his Spanish memoir emotionally-charged
references to sharing American (U.S.) shame and horror at Vietnam (Heading 212-213, Rumbo
40

Dorfman, for example, translated his own Mascara from Spanish into English. Upon an initial
investigation, the English version of his text does not depart from the Spanish version to the
same extent as the English and Spanish versions of his memoir.
67

283-284) or add to the Spanish text the declaration that ―Chile siempre fue mi principal
obsesión./ No sólo el paisaje de América, sino siempre gente y más gente‖ (Rumbo 262, Heading
194)? Conversely, why does he translate, on several occasions, ―America‖ (Heading 50) as
―América gringa‖ (Rumbo 69) or add to the Spanish a lengthy aside about the rich significance of
the word ―compañero‖ (Rumbo 189, Heading 137) in castellano or reiterate in Spanish the irony
of the fact that he escapes to the Argentine embassy ―después de haber jurado tantas veces que
jamás me iba asilar‖ (Rumbo 269, Heading 200). Charting the implications of all the statements
added to, taken away from, or rewritten in Dorfman‘s translation of his memoir makes for a
mind-bending game of ping pong—as it becomes increasingly difficult to place Dorfman‘s
national allegiances as he bounces from North to South and back again.

41

41

His constant tinkering

Many more of Dorfman‘s edits are relevant to the question of his national identity. He, for
example, deletes from the Spanish a passage that links the process of naming of himself ―Ariel‖
with how he ―became a Latin American‖: ―More than the name Ariel itself, it was the process of
naming, the process of situating myself on the border between the continent of my birth and the
world outside, which signals how I became a Latin American. Because there you have, in a
nutshell, in that process of redefining my identity, the way in which Latin America captured me‖
(Heading 161, Rumbo 222). Dorfman also does not include in translation a portion of text in
which he bemoans the difficulty of becoming a Chilean citizen, ―Something similar happened in
my quest for a new nationality. Except that reincarnating an identity depends on your will to
belong and the willingness of people to accept that need and recognize you, whereas the
transition toward becoming a citizen of Chile, dependent as it was on the acquiescence of the
state and not on my own desires, turned out to be a far bumpier road‖ (Heading 162, Rumbo
224). In addition, he handily revises in Spanish his polemic assessment of Latin American
history, stating that ―it had a history that was never sufficiently autonomous of foreign forces to
be really free but also never so submissive and subordinate as to be blotted out, so that the
struggle itself for a story that made sense ended up being the sole defining element, its heart‖
(Heading 194, Rumbo 262), as well his insinuation that his refusal to write in English while at
UC Berkeley partially fell in line with the ―extreme nationalism‖ of the 1960s: ―You were one
thing or you were another, you had to be on this side or that side of the conflict for the soul and
the wealth of the world, and the mental maneuvers whereby I had disassociated my love for
English from my everyday existence and political options had finally become inoperable
(Heading 220-21, Rumbo 294-95), and his assertion that a ―real‖ revolution arises from
―discipline,‖ ―purpose,‖ and ―order‖ as opposed to American/ ―norteamericana‖ excess,
―egocentrism,‖ and ―naïveté‖ (Heading 225-26, Rumbo 301).
68

with the national and/or transnational implications of his writing in translation evidences his
compulsive need to revisit and/or reshape his already fluid portrayal of his national loyalties in
either version of his memoir.

42

Through his many revisions, Dorfman further complicates his

already messy or split portrait of himself as a man divided between allegiances North and South.
Yet, other changes that Dorfman makes when translating suggest that he edits simply to
avoid offending readers more likely to encounter his text in Spanish. On numerous occasions, he
revisits potentially derisive characterizations of a specific individual or groups of people in the
Spanish version of his text. He, for example, softens his depreciative and/or unflattering
description of a Chilean school teacher whose mouth smelled of ―poorly digested pork and fried
garlic‖ (Heading 110); the Spanish speaks only of her ―aliento lleno de ajo‖ (Rumbo 152).
Dorfman also eliminates an explicit reference to his Spanish language teacher (the same teacher
whom he later met at a conference of the MLA) as ―abusive‖ (Heading 113, Rumbo 156), and he
removes from the Spanish a somewhat pained reflection on how he and fellow activists at the
University of Chile boycotted a banquet in honor of poet Ned O‘Gorman—the English text
specifies that O‘Gorman‘s personal efforts to serve the poor were ―more than any of us, with all

42

What‘s more, Dorfman strengthens in Spanish the claim that he and Armando Matleart both
viewed hegemonic North American popular culture as ―un virus que nos había invadido cuando
éramos mas jóvenes y vulnerables‖ (Rumbo 336, Heading 251), and adds to the Spanish an
emotional retrospective of how he would revisit Allende‘s last moments from exile, ―Durante
años en el exilio, en la clandestinidad, leeríamos esas palabras sobre las anchas alamedas por
donde pasaría el hombre buscando su libertad, pero en ese momento lo que creo que más nos
impactó fue la serenidad con que Allende anunciaba su propia muerte, nos exhortaba a
sobrevivir, sí, pero con dignidad‖ (Rumbo 52, Heading 36). He also adds to the Spanish text a
quieting reflection on how and when he and his family used the phrase ―Mientras que en Chile‖
while living in Berkeley, California: ―Mientras que en Chile. Una frase que usábamos una y otra
vez para confrontar la distancia entre el superdesarrollo y el subdesarrollo que nos saltaba en
cada rincón, cada actitud, cada objeto‖ (Rumbo 288, Heading 216). In short, the sheer number of
these revisions points to a definite compulsion on the part of Dorfman about his treatment of his
national/transnational identity in translation.
69

our socialist convictions, had ever done‖ (Heading 185, Rumbo 252). Likewise, in the Spanish
text, Dorfman redirects his criticism of the intolerance shown by revolutionary militants who
refused to protest the poor treatment of people who had been unjustly hurt by the ascension of
Unidad Popular, those ―Don Patricios.‖ In English he laments, ―(and I was one of the most
tolerant and empathetic of the militants!)‖ (Heading 258), whereas in Spanish his accusations are
more self-critical, ―por muy tolerante que me sintiera [. . .]. Yo los ofendía, los veía como
traidores a la causa de los pueblos‖ (Rumbo 345). Furthermore, Dorfman softens explicit
accusations of corruption among functionaries within the Argentine embassy (Heading 238,
Rumbo 318), takes out a specific reference to Chilean soldiers torturing prisoners blocks away
from Avenida Eleodoro Yáñez (Heading 136, Rumbo 188), and deftly does away with the subtle
interjection that he and his wife Angélica ―uneasily‖ (Heading 197) moved in with his parents as
newlyweds. As to the latter omission, Dorfman instead adds to the Spanish text the more
diplomatic reflection that, ―Por muy hospitalarios y generosos que ellos fueran, se iban
desarrollando tensiones, como es natural cuando dos familias cohabitan bajo un mismo techo‖
(Rumbo 265-266). Whether on his own behalf or the behalf of others, Dorfman‘s many eager
interventions while translating add to the already puzzling meta-text of revisions and rewrites
that inevitably informs both versions of his memoir. Through even the slightest omissions or
oversights in translation, Dorfman puts into question or movement the claims and
characterizations of either of his texts.
He, for example, revises and/or eliminates from his Spanish memoir several possibly
hasty assessments of poverty and underdevelopment in Latin America. He does not translate his
assertion that, unlike the hippies that he encountered while living in Berkeley, ―misery—and not
fashion—[. . .] had tattered [the] clothing‖ (Heading 208, Rumbo 279) of the Latin American

70

poor. Likewise, he removes from the Spanish his declaration that ―[he] was going back to the
reality of people who did not have the obscene luxury of being able to choose poverty like these
sham hippie paupers‖ (Heading 209, Rumbo 280), as well as his claim that while in California
―[he] was haunted by the experience of underdevelopment, [. . .] possessed by the memory of the
penniless people back home‖ (Heading 209, Rumbo 280). Certainly, Dorfman not translating
these statements may indicate that he is merely accounting for undue repetition in the Spanish
version of his text. Still, the consistent redaction of statements about Latin American
impoverishment begs interrogation into his motives, however elusive. Even more suggestive is
Dorfman‘s decision to remove from the Spanish text a rather far-reaching assertion from a
lengthy paragraph about how the Chilean masses are effectively institutionalized to be
submissive and thus resist real social change—which appears in the context of Dorfman
remembering the multitudes of Chilean people that, nevertheless, looked to the newly elected
Allende as a source of hope and change. Only in the English text, Dorfman‘s narrative self
reflects that these masses were ―all their lives taught to bow their heads and lower their eyes so
as to survive, warned to obey or else, the doctrine of submission drilled into every nerve of their
bodies‖ (Heading 244, Rumbo 326). By removing this bold criticism is Dorfman, again,
accounting for redundancies in content? Or, does he change his text for fear that his reflections
on the Chilean multitudes will seem pretentious or affected to a Spanish-language readership?
Does the act of translating itself make him newly anxious about his portrayal of such a diverse
and critical mass of people? Attaining answers to these questions is not nearly as important as
being aware that the claims of either version of his memoir are contingent upon Dorfman‘s
presentation of the same ideas in translation. While there are many jibes, slights, and polemics
directed toward North and South Americans alike that Dorfman does not mitigate or revise in

71

translation, his revisions of his texts in translation make for sibling texts that compete as much as
they combine. He amplifies the linguistic tensions of his experience of exile by making visible
some of the personal and political ambivalences or uncertainties that arise in the processes of
self-translating.
As both author and translator, Dorfman flirts with the possibility of being able to parse or
distinguish between the two linguistic halves of himself, though he ultimately dismisses such a
pursuit as ―discomforting‖ and, even, unnatural (Heading 221, Rumbo 296). Still, on occasion,
he insinuates certain intrinsic differences between Spanish and English and even projects said
differences into his writing and/or translating. These tendencies surface in the moment when
Dorfman recounts his encounter with Spanish‘s ―impersonal se‖ upon breaking his handiwork as
an adolescent in carpentry class. Dorfman writes,
I turned to the carpentry teacher and ―Se rompió,‖ I said, shrugging my shoulders.
His mouth had twisted in anger. ―Se, se, se,‖ he hissed. ―Everything in this
country is se, it broke, it just happened, why in the hell don‘t you say I broke it, I
screwed up. Say it, say, ―Yo lo rompí, yo, yo, yo, take responsibility, boy.‖ And all
of a sudden, I was a Spanish speaker, I was being berated for having used that
form of the language to hide behind, I had automatically used that ubiquitous,
impersonal se, I had escaped into the language, escapé lenguaje adentro, merged
with it. (Heading 114-15)
Via his narrative self‘s interpretation of the reaction of his frustrated teacher, Dorfman engages a
precariously essentialist discourse as to what kinds of grammatical structures or syntactical
mechanisms define and/or control the speech patterns of a Spanish speaker; specifically, he

72

implies that Spanish in and of itself creates passivity or a greater lack of individual responsibility
on the part of the speaker.
However, while Dorfman lends credence to the notion of ingrained passivity in the
speaking patterns of Spanish speakers he undercuts the idea of an overriding linguistic certainty
by actively intervening in his texts as a translator. In other words, he overactively asserts his
passisivity. By reproducing the same grammatical forms in the Spanish version of his text, he
does more than just affirm the ―ubiquitous,‖ ingrained usage of the passive voice and/or the
impersonal se. Dorfman‘s ―translation‖ reads:
Me dirigí al profesor de Trabajos Manuales y…
-Se rompió- le dije, encogiéndome de hombros.
La rabia le torció la boca.
-Se, se, se –me agredió-. Todo en este país es se, se rompió, se cayó, todo sucede
siempre por culpa de otro, por qué no dices yo lo rompí, yo las cagué. Dilo,
muchacho, dilo: Yo lo rompí, yo, yo. Responsabilízate de algo, por Dios.
Y de pronto me había convertido en un hispanohablante, se me estaba
reprendiendo por usar el idioma como un escondite, en forma automática había
utilizado esa forma ubicua e [sic] impersonal, me había escapado lenguaje
adentro, el lenguaje y yo conformábamos una unidad. (Rumbo 158)
He reiterates through repetition or modeling the claims of the disgruntled shop teacher. While in
the English text Dorfman emphasizes the first-person pronoun—―I turned,‖ ―I said,‖ ―I was a
Spanish speaker,‖ ―I was being berated,‖ ―I had automatically used,‖ ―I had escaped‖ (Heading
114-15)—his Spanish text is conspicuously absent of personal pronouns. Aside from the
dialogue in which Dorfman‘s teacher stresses a more responsible course of speech, ―por qué no

73

dices yo lo rompí, yo las cagué. Dilo, muchacho, dilo: Yo lo rompí, yo, yo,‖ the Spanish episode
is replete with impersonal and/or past-perfect constructions, ―se rompió, se cayó, ―me había
convertido,‖ ―se me estaba reprendiendo,‖ ―había utilizado,‖ ―me había escapado‖ (Rumbo158).
Through these recurrent forms, Dorfman visually and/or orally underscores the apparent lack of
agency in the Spanish language. He intimates passivity as an essential marker of his Spanishspeaking self but then undermines this passivity by his marked willingness to emphasize or
enhance in translation this aspect of the language. In his concerted attempts to stack the deck of
linguistic possibilities, Dorfman ultimately creates distance from the idea that an intrinsic
linguistic structure necessarily leads to changes in behavior or perspective.
In the moments before and after his depiction of his encounter with el se in carpentry
class, Dorfman is even more explicit as to the determining influence of language on his behavior.
He reflects that ―Spanish was beginning to speak to me, to infiltrate my habits‖ (Heading 114),
recounts how through ―the proliferation of passive forms and the overemployment of the hay
que, había que, habría que [. . .]‖ Spanish ―allowed its devoutest followers to pass the buck onto
others‖ (115), tells of how he had ―internalized the subjunctive‖ (115), and relates how the
―vocabulary and the grammatical code [were] seeping into my consciousness slowly, turning me
into a person who, without acknowledging it, began to function in either language‖ (115).

43

All

of these statements are precursors to Dorfman‘s eventual conclusion that, try as he might, he

43

Dorfman‘s Spanish renderings of the same statements/phrases are as follows: ―yo me estaba
convertiendo en el portavoz del castellano, en el sentido de que portaba literalmente su voz, que
en vez de hablar yo el idioma era el idioma que comenzaba a hablarme a mí, que había infiltrado
mis hábitos‖ (Rumbo 158); ―la proliferación de construcciones pasivas, el sobreempleo del hay
que, habría que, sería necesario que…,‖ ―ayudaba a sus devoto a responsabilizar a los demás de
sus errores‖ (158); ―había internalizado el subjuntivo‖ (159); ―el vocabulario y el código
gramatical inculcándose en mi cerebro de a gotas; transformándome en una persona que, sin
admitirlo a plena luz todavía, iba a poder funcionar en cualquiera de las dos lenguas‖ (159).
74

cannot and should not try to suppress or stifle any part of his bilingual self. By portraying his
doubleness as inevitable, he supports the idea that history and/or language have conspired to
shape him and, thus, prepare him for his role as a witness, scribe, and eventual translator of the
events of his lifetime. Moreover, by emphasizing the disproportionate influence of language
and/or bilingualism on his life, he lends ethos to his narrative of exile and understates the extent
to which he as an author and translator shapes, frames, and/or rewrites the linguistic, political,
and personal upheavals of his lifetime. As much as he capitulates to language, he manipulates
language to persuade the reader that language and not he is heavy-handed.
Still, aside from his reflections on the many passive forms and structures in Spanish, his
thoughts on the fluid sense of time afforded by the subjunctive, or his speculations as to the
inherently baroque nature of the Spanish language, Dorfman seems generally reluctant to
examine or distinguish between the said differences between Spanish and English, between the
―Northern‖ and ―Southern‖ parts of himself. He seems to recognize that such a pursuit would be
too reductive, and/or he recognizes the futility of trying to parse between the two overlapping
versions of his persona. In this regard, he writes,
But there may be more to my automatic decision not to probe how those
languages affected me, because even now, in fact, even now that I swim merrily
in them both, the mere attempt to establish where one ends and the other begins
and how they overlap causes me acute discomfort, as if I were transgressing a
taboo, getting too close to the mysterious center that unifies me in spite of
language. (Heading 221)
Dorfman implies that dissecting his linguistic self or selves is a self-defeating or ill-advisable
course, one that may result in exposing more sameness or ―unity‖ than difference. He hints at

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having mystical and indissoluble core that resists all his efforts to compartmentalize himself or
his language.
In the Spanish text, Dorfman is even more explicit as to the disconcerting nature of trying
to distinguish between his two idioms—adding that the act of translating the self-same words
that he is writing prompts an almost visceral reaction.
Aunque puede que se agitara algo menos contingente en esa decisión automática
de no sondear la manera en que esos lenguajes me afectaban, porque aún ahora,
cuando voy nadando con aparente alegría en ambos ríos lingüísticos, el mero
intento de establecer dónde uno termina y el otro comienza y dónde los dos se
superponen me causa inquietud y desconcierto, ahora mismo al traducir estas
palabras del inglés al castellano, diferenciar vocabularios diferentes para una vida
supuestamente única e idéntica, me siento mal y me mareo, como si estuviera
transgrediendo un tabú, arriesgando el centro misterioso que me unifica más allá
de mis vicisitudes de lenguaje. (Rumbo 296, my emphasis)
By reminding the reader of the Spanish text that he is self-translating, Dorfman punctuates the
emotional, even, impossible of trying to either project and/or minimize linguistic difference
while also trying to recount an individual life or recreate a single narrative. His awareness that as
a self-translator he is forced to distinguish between aspects of himself and his language that upon
closer examination are whole or indistinguishable gets close to the crux of his dilemma as an
author, translator, and exile—when is it strategic to create or emphasize difference, and when is
it useful to emphasize wholeness or unity? As McClennen argues, ―Dorfman‘s text has two
intersecting and overlapping critical frameworks that shape the way that he narrates his life. The
first is a strategy of duality, where the self is described as interacting with two oppositional

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social forces, and the second is a strategy of polyvalence, where the self is described as a hybrid
that cannot be represented through dualisms‖ (―The Diasporic‖ 2). She explains that as a result of
this approach, Dorfman shows how ―national, territorial, linguistic, and symbolic signifying
systems‖ are both ―inescapable and imaginary‖ (7). In other words, by recurring to both these
strategies, Dorfman emphasizes the possible role of dual oppositions in shaping and discerning
his identity and, at the same time, distances himself from the idea that these binaries are
inevitably formative or definitive. He acknowledges that while he draws creative impetus from
the oppositions between North and South, English and Spanish, as an individual author,
translator, subject, and person he is much more complicated than these unstable dualities.
Dorfman‘s maneuverings as a self-translator reaffirm his attempts to simultaneously
engage and move beyond the tensions between North and South, English and Spanish, self and
community, agency and linguistic determinism. Translating provides Dorfman with an outlet
through which he can reiterate, rewrite, or revisit certain ambivalences as to previous events,
relationships, or allegiances. By adopting a liberal translation practice, he highlights for the
reader the instabilities that inform recounting and then rewriting an already unreliable and highly
volatile past. In this sense, exile unfolds on a word-by-word level as much as on a philosophical
level in and between the two versions of his memoir. Dorfman is, at once, highly attentive to the
linguistic pressures of exile and wary of asserting that these pressures are formative or
determining. His translation stands as an examination of and a challenge to the notion that
content and/or identity are inevitably altered or betrayed across another language. The
continuities and disparities between his texts emphasize for the bilingual reader the multiple or
polyvalent meanings that arise in the processes of reading, writing, translating, and rewriting.

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Unlike the paranoid and embittered amnesiac who is Mr. Ramírez in Puig‘s Eternal
Curse on the Reader of These Pages/ Maldición eterna a quien lea estas paginas, the composite
self in either version of Dorfman‘s memoir is seemingly optimistic about the linguistic strains of
exile. While Ramírez complains to Larry that he feels deficient in and emotionally disconnected
to his languages, ―I know English, I know the words. I know the words in French and Italian. I
know all the words in Spanish, my native language, but…‖ (EC 4), Dorfman‘s narrative self
ultimately comes across as fully ambidextrous and comfortable in linguistic milieus North and
South; he appears confident where the aged Ramírez seems anxious. Dorfman depicts himself as
willing to embrace the complexity of himself, his memories, his language, and his loyalties to the
country and idiom both despite and because of the traumas and upheavals of his past. The shades
of gray between (or within) his languages serve as a source of motivation and not angst for
Dorfman‘s narrative self. He portrays his inescapable hybridity and/or his linguistic duality as
the self-same aspects of his character that enable him to survive and put into words the political,
emotional, and linguistic traumas of his experience of exile.
Dorfman, like Puig in his self-translation of his novella, approaches exile in a way that is
dialectical; he is both indulgent toward and skeptical of the linguistic tensions that shape the
historical and personal specifics of his experience of exile. Despite the apparent generic
differences between Puig and Dorfman‘s texts, both authors align in their refusal to adopt neither
either/or nor neither/nor thinking about the experience and/or the event of exile. Through Larry‘s
counterpoint of Ramírez‘s anxieties about being misinterpreted or being unable to remember—
e.g., Larry insisting on the salience of meaning and content in his translation of the decoded
markings Ramírez made in a series of French novels, or Larry contending that Ramírez relishes
instead of regrets being able to forget certain painful moments from his past—Puig opens up

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dialogue about the costs and/or gains of translation, as well as discussion about the positives and
negatives of the failings of human memory in relation to a traumatic past. Likewise, Dorfman,
through his writing and rewriting, tackles the question of whether or not language and/or
bilingualism plays a definitive role in the shaping of one‘s character and behavior and, in the
same vein, the problem of whether or not writing in another language and being beholden to two
possibly competing national audiences necessitates a change in literary strategy or vocabulary.
Moreover, both authors provide vivid and highly-individualized glimpses at the linguistic and
personal traumas of exile and forced displacement while, at the same time, emphasizing the
unreliability of their memories relevant to these same searing and traumatic experiences. For
both authors, language unfolds as a gift, a curse, an illness, and a mode of survival. Puig is not
Mr. Ramírez, nor is Dorfman the writer and translator necessarily the same incarnation as his
autobiographical self. Yet, a comparison of the interlingual implications in and between the
English and Spanish versions of these authors‘ texts reveals the extent to which Puig and
Dorfman are personally invested in illuminating and interrogating the linguistic stakes of exile.
Through their self-translations, both engage a healthy or, even, moral examination of linguistic
determinism and of the firm nationalism that is often conflated with choices or imposition of
idiom. Withstanding their historical, literary, and/or individual differences, Puig and Dorfman
share a critical distance toward the necessity and/or the possibilities of writing and rewriting in
either English or Spanish.

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Chapter 2
Self-Translation and Contradiction: Rosario Ferré‘s Reinventions in Maldito amor/ Sweet
Diamond Dust and House on the Lagoon/ Casa en la laguna
Of the many processes that shape a text and the reader‘s experience with it—typesetting,
editing, anthologizing, film and television adaptation, or otherwise—interlingual translation is
arguably the most understated of these transformations because of the unseen manner in which it
reshapes a text across time and space. As André Lefevere argues, ―For readers who cannot check
the translation against the original, the translation, quite simply, is the original. Rewriters and
rewriting project images of the original work, author, literature, or culture that often impact
many more readers than the original does‖ (Translation 110). The stealth overtaking of the
―original‖ or ―first text‖ in translation is amplified by expectations among those who produce
and consume the text. Lawrence Venuti explains that,
A translated text, [. . .] is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and
readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic
peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the
foreign writer‘s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign
text. [. . .] What is so remarkable here is that this illusory effect conceals the
numerous conditions under which the translation is made. (The Translator‟s 1)
Since a translation is not as overtly manipulative as an adaptation or rewriting of a text for film,
television, or stage productions, readers often overlook the fact that they are reading refashioned
words and ideas. Those who are more aware resign themselves to the fact that they have only
mediated access to the text—they accept that they are necessarily distanced from the sounds,
rhythms, and conjured associations of a sacred ―original.‖

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Self-translators provide access, however limited, to the world of the creation of the text
and, with it, a window into the ambivalences, hesitations, and/or shifting allegiances of the
author and translator. Along with a willingness to change their texts, these authors embrace or, at
least, invite the temporal and/or cultural contradictions occasioned by rewriting a text. They, at
times, alter characterization, change the direction of the plot, handily add to or take away from
the first version of their text, and/or engage or avoid certain polemics in translation. By liberally
translating and/or rewriting their own texts, they propose an even more dramatic revision to the
―task of the translator.‖ As Pérez Firmat asserts,
Of all the varieties of translation, perhaps none is more faithless than selftranslation. Although the technical challenges are the same, it adds a dimension of
personal and creative reassessment missing from second-party translations. The
author who translates his or her own work knows it too well, rather than well
enough. Unlike the typical translator, the autologous translator works not only
with the finished product; present at the creation, he remembers the gestation of
the work—the false starts, the dead ends, the changes of direction, all of the
decisions and accidents that shaped the finished product. (107)
Self-translators‘ frequent lack of deference for the rhythms and/or reasons of the first versions of
their texts makes for a daring, if not rash, recounting of the original and/or initial text. Pérez
Firmat seconds Steiner‘s assertion that strong writers, particularly, are not ―good‖ translators—
arguing that these authors ―find it even harder to adopt the passive, absorbent posture required, at
least initially, of an effective translator. [. . .] As if the web of tongue ties were not obstacle
enough, the temptation to tinker, to amend, to get it right or righter the second time around, will
tend to alienate the self-translated work from its original‖ (108). Thus, depending on readers‘

81

expectations for the visibility or agency of the translator, self-translators are both the best and
worst of possible translators. Their closeness to the world of the first text often goes hand-inhand with a more free translation process that, withstanding judgments of better or worse, opens
up the processes of textual reproduction and challenges the traditional submissive posture of the
translator.
Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré, like the other U.S and/or Latin American authors
described in this project and like scores of other biscriptive writers, boldly undertakes both the
creation and perpetuation of her own texts as she translates them from Spanish into English or
vice versa. Her translations result in two undeniably ―authoritative‖ versions of a text whose
equal claims to authority unsettle fixed notions of both texts and of Ferré as their author. Her
lack of fidelity to an inviolate original disrupts traditional hierarchies of textual production and,
at the same time, foregrounds the violent transformation that translation, in any event, imposes
upon an a text in its first instance. The semantic and ideological spaces between the Spanish and
English versions of Ferré‘s texts, as well as the audacity with which Ferré speaks against,
betrays, and/or rewrites texts that she has written previously, prompt a vexing inquiry into the
confrontational poetics of her texts and her translations of them.
By liberally translating or rewriting her texts, Ferré engages, if not embraces, a ―tolerance
for contradiction‖ (Anzaldúa 379) as an author and translator. As evidenced by her citation of the
―chauvinist‖ French maxim on translation, ―La traduction est comme la femme, plus qu‘elle est
belle, elle n‘est pas fidèle, plus qu‘elle est fidèle, elle n‘est pas belle,‖ Ferré maintains, both in
purpose and in practice, that only by betraying can a translator better or ―beautify‖ the original
(―On Destiny‖ 162). In her own translations, she is not careful to preserve punctuation,
paragraphing, or even basic indicators of chronology, and she does not hesitate to undertake

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1

several other substantive or ―vertical‖ (Tanselle 335) revisions of her text. In both her actual
translations and in her writings about translating, Ferré connects her method of loosely
translating with her view of translation as a kind of necessary and benevolent prostitution, a
liberal giving of self in order to perpetuate the consumption and reproduction of her texts by
diverse and/or competing audiences. She writes almost messianically of her desires to reach with
her text those mainland ―engineers, architects, [. . .] doctors, [. . .], taxi drivers, elevator
operators, or seasonal grape and lettuce pickers,‖ all of those who ―are often forced to be
merciless with memory‖ and have ―lost the ability to read the literature and history of their
island‖ (163), and she posits the translator as the literal port or ―puerto‖ through which crosscultural intimacy and communication are achieved. She envisions translation as a way of perhaps
―assuag[ing]‖ the ―melancholy of the Puerto Rican soul‖ and of ―reinstat[ing]‖ memory to its
―true abode‖ (163-64), and she touts the role and responsibility of bilingual Puerto Ricans to ―set
the pace for our neighboring Latin American countries, help them enter the modern world, and at
the same time help the United States become more cosmopolitan‖ (―Writing‖ 107). Yet, the
many contradictions and ambivalences between the Spanish and English versions of Ferré‘s texts
both punctuate and complicate the task of the translator that she advocates in her fiction and in
her criticism of it; her personal explanations of why she translates do not actually account for
how she translates or rewrites.
The polemics that surface in the gulf between her texts— the unsettled tension between
Ferré endorsing either one or all of the multiple narratives of history presented in her text, the
shifting politics of Ferré‘s either pro-statehood or pro-independence stance, the varied portrayals

1

Ferré does not self-translate all of her works. She had her friend Diana Velez do a basic version
of Papeles de Pandora, but only under the condition that Velez ―couldn‘t have the final word‖
(Perry 102).
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of Northern imperialism and progress, the uncertain relationship proposed between language and
a national and/or ethnic identity, the tenuous assertion that a language itself dictates what can be
said or written in it, and the implicit question of whether or not a bilingual author has the
obligation to write in or translate into one or another language—all point to a seemingly fluid
and/or ongoing sense of self and text. Pérez Firmat argues that self-translators often revise their
texts so handily that they ―improve the original, [. . .] damage it, or [. . .] produce a version so
unlike it that comparison is all but impossible‖ (108). I maintain that, in Ferré‘s case, the
seeming contradictions between the Spanish and English versions of her texts demand rather
than preclude the possibility of comparison.
Comparing Ferré‘s novella Maldito amor (1986) with its English partner Sweet Diamond
Dust (1988) and, also, pairing her later novel House on the Lagoon (1995) with its Spanish
partner Casa en la laguna (1996) gets to the crosshairs of Ferré‘s conflicted poetics of translation
and her divided loyalties to language(s) and/or nation. As an outspoken representative of Puerto
Rico‘s literary elite and an ardent defender of Puerto Rican literary culture, the ramifications of
the changes she makes in any and all of these texts are far-reaching and inescapably political.
Largely in response to her decision to write House on the Lagoon (1995) first in English, Ferré‘s
national colleagues lambasted her as a cultural traitor or assimilationist, even considering that
2

Ferré published a near simultaneous version of the novel in Spanish in 1996. Ferré appears to
have anticipated such a reaction, given that the meta-narrative that surrounds both House on the
2

Many Puerto Rican writers are ardent defenders of writing in Spanish, part of their efforts to
preserve the island‘s literary independence from the United States. Accordingly, many of these
same authors are also firm supporters of Puerto Rican independence. Ferré‘s changed position on
this issue (which followed her decision to write in English) sparked the following incensed
editorials in El Nuevo Día: Ana Lydia Vega‘s ―Carta abierta a Pandora‖ and Liliana Cotto‘s
―Carta abierta a Rosario Ferré.‖ For a brief summary of the controversy surrounding Ferré‘s
decision to write in English and the rivalry between English and Spanish in Puerto Rico, see
Javier Espinosa‘s ―¿Por qué hiciste eso, Agapito?,‖originally published in El Mundo.
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Lagoon and Casa en la laguna, and to a certain extent, Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond Dust,
reflects Ferré‘s own deliberations about writing in English and/or Spanish, and, at the same time,
historicizes the debate about statehood or independence for Puerto Rico. Shortly after the
publication of House on the Lagoon, Ferré published a controversial 1998 op-ed piece in the New
York Times in which she reversed her position on Puerto Rican independence and advocated
statehood, arguing, ―To be Puerto Rican is to be a hybrid. Our two halves are inseparable; we
cannot give up either without feeling maimed. For many years, my concern was to keep my
Hispanic self from being stifled. Now I discover it‘s my American self that‘s being threatened‖
(A21). Seemingly, Ferré connects the political question of independence vs. statehood with her
internal discussion of whether or not to translate from or into English. I maintain that while her
expressions of a divided self in the Times op-ed appear to arise from her political choice to
support statehood rather than independence, they have as much to do with her decision to publish
a crossover novel in English. The earlier dissensions between Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond
Dust provide a preface to the tensions of language and loyalty that Ferré later more fully
develops in and in between House on the Lagoon and Casa en la laguna. I read these four novels
or sets of ―twin texts‖ alongside each other to bring light to the linguistic, national, and personal
ambivalences that Ferré engages in and in-between her texts and her ―translations‖ of them.

Translation, Prostitution, and Reconciliation in Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond Dust
Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond Dust combine and collide such that they make
apparent some of the political and/or socio-linguistic tensions that Ferré revisits when translating
and/or rewriting. Referring to the dissensions between Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond Dust,
Janice Jaffe asks whether or not Ferré downplays the anti-Yankee sentiment in the English

85

translation (76). Jennifer Beatson argues that the Spanish version is more a story of the life and
travails of the De la Valle family and the English version is more a historical and sociological
study of the Puerto Rican and North American struggle for control of the sugar industry (14).
She includes the loaded assertion that, ―It seems that, in producing the new work in English,
Ferré‘s priority lies less in offering the North American audience a translated Latin American
novel and more in transforming herself into a North American author whom a North American
audience will accept‖ (40). Accordingly, George Handley questions if, in consideration of her
more white-identified readership, Ferré grants Gloria, the novella‘s final, mulatta protagonist,
transcendent narrative authority (174). Among the many great and slight derivations from the
first version of Ferré‘s novel, I specifically examine how and if her concept of history and her
political allegiances shift from one text to the other. Does she ultimately side with Gloria and
thus seek to merely substitute the history of the marginalized, underprivileged female for that of
the traditionally-dominant, privileged male—denying the need to consider diverse perspectives
when constructing a national history? Moreover, by consistently redacting the decidedly proindependence sympathies of Laura and Gloria from the Spanish version of her novella, does she
shift to advance a more conciliatory national agenda as a bilingual author and a Puerto Rican
citizen? Finally, does the very act of translating or rewriting into English prompt Ferré to make
these changes to her text?
These questions arise largely from examining sections of prose that are either added to or
taken from Sweet Diamond Dust. In the first event, Ferré‘s makes significant changes to the
narratives of two of the pivotal female characters in her novel, changes which contest if not
eventually supplant the framing narrative of Don Hermenegildo, the self-interested biographer
and hacendado friend of the De la Valle patriarch, Ubaldino De la Valle. She adds a lengthy

86

section to Doña Laura‘s narrative in which Doña Laura explicitly and unashamedly
acknowledges Gloria as a prostitute and then hails Gloria or Gloria‘s womb as the literal future
of Puerto Rico; and, she includes new dialogue in Gloria‘s narrative that more dramatically
establishes Gloria‘s point of view as resounding or most important. These revisions counteract
Ferré‘s insistence in the preface to Maldito amor that the claims of all of the narrators of her
text(s) are equally unreliable and, at the same time, credible, ―Todo lo que ellos cuentan es
3

chisme, mentira, calumnia desatada, y sin embargo todo es cierto‖ (14). Rather, I argue that
because of these additions to her text, readers of Maldito amor can more readily proclaim Ferré
as an advocate for multiple voices and witnesses to history than can readers of Sweet Diamond
Dust.
This argument hinges on assessing how Ferré revises her portrayal of Gloria Camprubí,
the final, mulatta narrator in both versions of her novel, whom Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouát
describes as ―el personaje en torno al cual se organizan las facciones familiares y que en gran
medida decide el destino del patrimonio familiar‖ (285). Both versions of Ferré‘s text chronicle
the degenerate, Faulkner-esque history of the De la Valle family, as a part of which Gloria is an
alleged prostitute, nursemaid, household servant, wife, shared lover, and potential heiress to the
family‘s estate and sugar mill (―Diamond Dust Sugar Mills‖ in the near eponymous English
text). The reader uncovers the scandalous family story by piecing together the conflicting and
chronologically jumbled stories of five divergent narrators, all of whom are invested in
influencing an official narrative that will protect and perpetuate their own financial and/or
personal interests. Critics are more or less equally divided as to whether or not Ferré lends

3

Ferré reiterates as much in the English preface to the 1996 edition of Sweet Diamond Dust,
―the novel is all gossip, lies, shameless slander—and yet the story remains true‖ (x). There is no
preface to the 1988 English version of Sweet Diamond Dust.
87

Gloria‘s account of the De la Valle mishaps and exploits greater validity than those accounts of
the other narrators. Gutiérrez Mouát heralds Maldito amor as ―polyphonic‖ (290). Jaffe
maintains that from the reader‘s perspective none of the contradictory voices in the novel
establishes clear authority (75). Yet, Carmen Pérez Marín, who interprets Gloria as the character
who eventually recuperates the repressed feminine voice, insinuates Ferré‘s allegiance to
Gloria‘s endeavor to silence the deceitful, patriarchal voices of history (42, my emphasis).
Similarly, Handley claims that Ferré posits Gloria‘s narrative as the ―real‖ History and that Ferré
intimates that ―black female subjectivity is the radical and ultimate witness to the struggles of
Puerto Rican nationalism‖ (171). I reconcile these critical perspectives by comparing and/or
contrasting how Ferré weighs the scales of discourse in the Spanish and English versions of her
novel. Reading these texts together suggests that she ultimately lends greater credence and
finality to Gloria‘s perspective in Sweet Diamond Dust by adding to and/or rewriting sections of
her English text, contradicting her insistence elsewhere that ―You need to see [history] from
many different points of view to really understand it‖ (Perry 90).
As a mulatta, an alleged prostitute, a member of the working class, and a sexual victim
Gloria is the most marginalized of any of Ferré‘s characters. Her character and her narrative are
antithetical to that of Don Hermenegildo. Mouát explains that while Hermenegildo narrates from
the top of the social pyramid, Gloria narrates from the very bottom, not solely because of her sex
and her class, but because she literally lives in the basement (283). He refers to Gloria as ―la loca
del desván‖ (283), recalling Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar‘s discussion of the trope within
nineteenth-century literature of the imprisoned and/or cloistered ―mad‖ woman who does not
conform to expectations of a patriarchal society. Like Jane Eyre‟s Bertha, Gloria‘s character
clouds the official narrative spun by the novel‘s lead male protagonist, the patriarchal and

88

paternalistic Don Hermenegildo. As Ferré asserts in the preface to Maldito amor, Gloria‘s
perspective opposes the blindly self-serving history of Guamaní that Don Hermenegildo is
writing, ―la version official de Puerto ‗Rico‘‖ (14). Ferré claims that, alongside Titina and Doña
Laura, Gloria relates a version of history—―donde todo cambia y no hay realidad segura. Son
ellas las que ponen en entredicho la voz del novelista oficial y desafían el mito del cacique
héroe‖ (14). However, I maintain that by adding to the narratives of Doña Laura and Gloria in
Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré does more than call into question or ―pon[er] en entredicho‖ the
perspective of Hermenegildo. Her additions to the English text dramatically impinge on Ferré‘s
portrayal of Gloria from one text to the other, enough to detract from the certainty of her claims
that Sweet Diamond Dust calls for multiple voices and perspectives in constructing a national
history or histories.
First and foremost, the idea that Gloria is a prostitute is not as explicitly stated in Maldito
amor as it is in Sweet Diamond Dust. In the Spanish text, the idea is only insinuated, particularly
through statements of the male characters (Jaffe 78). Yet, in the English text, Ferré develops a
celebrated and problematic vision of Gloria as a prostitute that very strongly recalls and reaffirms
the vision of ―the translator‖ that she sets forth in her critical writing. As Jaffe explains, ―The
representation of Gloria in Sweet Diamond Dust preserves the deprecatory attitude toward the
prostitute represented by the male characters in the novella, but simultaneously envisions the
potential for freedom in this mutable identity. In this different construction the links between the
transformative power embodied in the translator and the prostitute emerge‖ (79). Doña Laura
admiringly recounts to Hermenegildo that Gloria ―became a sort of legendary prostitute, offering
herself to all those ruined farmers who were about to emigrate to Chicago and New York, as well
as to the new entrepreneurs who came from the north‖ (Sweet 76). She elevates Gloria, as a

89

mulatta and a prostitute, to the very pinnacle of Puerto Rican society and depicts Gloria as the
literal body or Pan-American meeting ground in which countries, North and South can come
together. Laura proclaims, ―In her body [ . . .] both races, both languages, English and Spanish,
grew into one soul, into one wordweed of love‖ (76, my emphasis). Likewise, in her landmark
essay on translation, ―Ofelia a la deriva en las aguas de las memorias‖ or ―On Destiny,
Language, and Translation; or Ophelia Adrift in the C & O. Canal,‖ Ferré depicts translation as a
4

kind of unifying, democratizing prostitution. She claims that translators ―are dedicated to the
pursuit of communication, of that universal understanding of original meaning which may one
day perhaps make possible the harmony of the world. They struggle to bring together different
cultures, striding over the barriers of those prejudices and misunderstanding which are the result
5

of diverse ways of thinking and cultural mores‖ (155). She insinuates that, like Gloria,
translators, particularly bilingual translators, facilitate intercultural and interracial
communication and understanding by prostituting themselves; they sell their knowledge of two
languages, their experience with two ways of thinking and perceiving the world.

4

As these disparate titles suggest, Férré‘s Spanish and English versions of this article merit
further investigation. Jaffe highlights the following differences between the articles:
When she translates her essay about translation, she omits the pejorative image of
English, ―aunque sea en inglés‖ [. . .]. Furthermore, where her essay in Spanish
speaks of Puerto Ricans on the mainland confronting a ―lucha por integrarse a una
sociedad que discrimina cruelmente contra ellos‖ (Coloquio 79), the essay in
English eliminates any mention of discrimination and also refrains from
criticizing the goal of assimilation among these Puerto Ricans who ―struggle to
integrate with and become indistinguishable from the mainstream‖ (163). (74)
5
―[el traductor] tiene como meta alcanzar la comunicación, esa comprensión universal del
significado original de los textos que algún día quizá hará posible la armonía del mundo. Lucha
por conciliar culturas diferentes, salvando las barreras que establecen esos prejuicios y
malentendidos que son el resultado de costumbres muy distintas y diferentes maneras de pensar‖
(―Ofelia‖ 53).
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Just as Laura describes that Gloria makes possible the harmony of the world by bringing
together languages, races, and cultures in her ―wordweed of love‖ and by birthing Nicolasito as
―the child of all‖ (Sweet 76), Ferré intimates that the bilingual translator endeavors to achieve a
consensus of meaning and inter-cultural understanding by creating a mixed text or body of
literature born of and for diverse audiences. By emphasizing the bilingual Puerto Rican
translator‘s capacity to reach Puerto Ricans both on and off the island—the said ―engineers,
architects, and doctors,‖ as well the ―the taxi drivers, elevator operators, or seasonal grape and
lettuce pickers,‖ all of those who ―are often forced to be merciless with memory‖ and have ―lost
the ability to read the literature and history of their island‖ (―On Destiny‖ 163), Ferré
underscores translation as way of offsetting the loss of identity that arises from the loss of
language and the assimilation into another culture. Jaffe posits that, ―Fundamental to Ferré‘s
vision that the translator and the prostitute play prominent cultural roles [. . .] is the idea that they
disseminate knowledge, whether sexually or linguistically, that has potentially transformative
power for society‖ (70). While Gloria offers her body to all, ―ruined farmers who were about to
emigrate‖ and ―new entrepreneurs [. . .] from the north‖ (Sweet 76) alike, Ferré liberally offers
her text ―to those rich and poor, those emigrants and immigrants, and, finally, those who speak
Spanish and those who speak English. Through her revisions of Gloria‘s character in Sweet
Diamond Dust, Ferré advances a vision of the translator as a transformative, transgressive, and
productive figure with the unique potential to bridge or meld together national constituencies
otherwise divided by linguistic and cultural differences.
Effectively, Ferré eschews the traditional role of the translator as a faithful, chaste, and
submissive scribe and instead embraces the transformative however conciliatory possibilities of
being a translator who sacrifices or prostitutes textual, linguistic, and/or national loyalties for

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larger access to her fiction. Laura‘s lofty recharacterizations of Gloria in Sweet Diamond Dust
reaffirm Ferré‘s commitment to her linguistic philandering. As Jaffe argues, ―Fidelity and license
are the binary terms that [. . .] reflect the damaging analogues that have long been established
between the translator and the prostitute, and, hence, are useful for initiating the theoretical
discussion of Ferré‘s treatment of these figures‖ (69). Ferré evidences her unabashed
rejection of these binaries when Laura extols Gloria as ―a priestess of our harbor; pythia of our
island‘s future; of a time when a scanty meager land that for centuries had condemned us to
immobility and backwardness will ultimately have no importance and where our souls, our very
lives will be determined by transformation and daring, in other words, by change‖ (Sweet 76).
While Laura‘s praises of Gloria as a prostitute evince an assimilationist and racially problematic
Pan-American political philosophy—in that she envisions the eventual dissolution of all races,
and thus the whitening and/or Anglicization of Puerto Rico‘s peoples and cultures—her words
also signal Ferré‘s acceptance of and dedication to advancing Puerto Rico‘s inherently bi-, inter-,
and/or trans-national character, especially through her additions to Sweet Diamond Dust. To this
extent, Laura proclaims, ―It‘s our island‘s destiny to become the gate to South as well as to North
America, so that on our doorsill both continents will one day peacefully merge into one. [. . .] for
this reason [. . .] I‘m set on leaving Diamond Dust to Gloria and Nicolasito‖ (76, my emphasis).
Gloria‘s role as a prostitute is essential to Laura‘s decision to bequeath the family property and
legacy to her, as is Laura‘s assurance that Gloria will prostitute and/or judiciously sell off the
family‘s land, ―to aid those who have already begun to emigrate to the mainland by the
thousands, [. . .] as well as to those who will undoubtedly return, perhaps after spending half
their lives reaping California grapes, or driving a taxi through New York, but with enough
money in their pockets to buy a piece of their lost paradise back‖ (76-77). By implication, Ferré

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suggests that the bilingual author and/or translator has the critical responsibility to facilitate the
processes of cultural exchange and transformation for Puerto Ricans both on the island and on
the mainland. She emphasizes the ―duty‖ of the Puerto Rican writer ―privileged enough to learn
both languages, to try to alleviate‖ through the prostitution of his/her linguistic capacity the
―melancholy of the Puerto Rican soul‖ and to ―[appease] its perpetual hunger for a lost paradise‖
(―On Destiny‖ 163-64). By revindicating the role of Gloria as prostitute in Sweet Diamond Dust,
Ferré both defends and promotes her purposefully transgressive poetics of self-translation within
and without her texts.
Laura exuberantly explains to Hermenegildo that, ―Through a chink in our tropical moss
the North will talk to the South and the South will talk to the North, and one day they‘ll finally
understand each other‖ (Sweet 76). For Ferré, both Gloria and the translator clearly represent that
―chink in the wall,‖ the vehicle through which nations and peoples North and South can
6

communicate. Yet, perhaps, an unintended consequence of forging a literary connection
between Gloria as prostitute and herself as translator, of her eagerness to make prostitution and
translation analogous in the English version of her text, is that Ferré unsettles the precarious
balance of perspectives on Puerto Rican history among the novel‘s contesting narrative voices.
Laura‘s heavy-handed favoritism toward Gloria tips the scale of competing discourses in Sweet
Diamond Dust and effectively disqualifies the English text as polyphonic—as Ferré‘s
monological presence as the author becomes more preeminent. With the equation of prostitution
6

The intertext here is A Midsummer Night‟s Dream. Jaffe argues that Ferré ―remind[s] the
reader that for the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, the hole, like the translator's ‗pasaje,‘ both
exposes and weakens the barriers to forbidden love, in Puerto Rico's case between the Anglo and
Hispanic legacies to Puerto Rican identity‖ (80). Moreover, by including this link to Shakespeare
only in Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré endeavors to contextualize the English version of her text
within the larger pool of world literature. Ferré also overtly alludes to the Shakespearean canon
in ―On Destiny, Language, and Translation; Ophelia Adrift in the C & O. Canal‖/ ―Ofelia a la
deriva en las aguas de la memoria,‖ and in her 1998 preface to Maldito amor.
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and translation as sister trades in Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré lends authorial credence to the
claims of the marginalized Gloria and risks sanctioning Gloria‘s perspective as ―correct‖ and
overarching. By emphasizing Gloria‘s unique ability to bring nations, races, and cultures
together through her exalted brand of prostitution or linguistic and cultural translation, Ferré
shifts the focus of her text from that of a fairly balanced account of differing takes on Puerto
Rico history since 1898 as in Maldito amor to more an caustic repudiation of a patriarchal and
hacendado-favored history and literature as in Sweet Diamond Dust.
The other addition to the English text that, perhaps, more dramatically plays into Gloria‘s
emergence as a more dominant and conclusive character and narrator is the dialogue added to
Gloria‘s narrative in Sweet Diamond Dust. Her character in Sweet Diamond Dust has stronger
viewpoints than her counterpart in Maldito amor and, as Beatson argues, her opinions are less
attenuated by the male characters (129). For instance, it is only in Sweet Diamond Dust that
Gloria tells Titina,
Facts have a strange way of facing down fiction, Titina, and if Don
Hermenegildo‘s aborted novel was to have been a series of stories that
contradicted one another like a row of falling dominoes, our story, the one we‘ve
taken the authority to write, will eradicate them all, because it will be the only one
in which word and deed will finally be loyal to each other, in which a true
correspondence between them will finally be established. (82)
This statement is the strongest evidence that Ferré offers Gloria‘s history or narrative as
singularly correct and preeminent. Gloria establishes her story, and also that of Titina—that of
the marginalized and misrepresented female—as the one that will ―eradicate‖ all others, denying
the need for other witnesses to history. She claims that if she were to write her story, ―it [would]

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be the only one in which word and deed will finally be loyal to each other.‖ Her words directly
contradict Gutiérrez Mouát‘s claim that Ferré ―trabaja con contradicciones específicas sin
intentar resolverlas y les permite desquiciar el texto o los textos del libro‖ (283). Rather, Gloria‘s
narrative, especially through the added dialogue, becomes the unraveling strand in Sweet
Diamond Dust, the story that finally undoes the claims of all the other narrators, even Titina, to a
lesser extent.
In both texts, Gloria chastens Titina for appealing to Don Hermenegildo, for thinking that
he would ever have interest in infusing truth into his romantic novel. Yet only in Sweet Diamond
Dust does Ferré include Gloria‘s added statement to Titina. She chastens her saying, ―You must
understand that everything he wrote about us was a lie, and that the only thing that will remain of
his novel will be the allegiance between fire and words‖ (85, my emphasis). With these words,
Gloria demonstrates her loyalty to ―word and deed‖ and proceeds to reveal to Titina her plan to
―light up the cellar of the house‖ (82). This disclosure about burning the cellar is another
addition to Sweet Diamond Dust. It conveys an image of complete inversion; Gloria will destroy
the plantation and, as a consequence, the lying witnesses to the De la Valle history from ―the
bottom up.‖ The additions to Gloria‘s narrative shape and veritably transform Sweet Diamond
Dust. Because of her revisions of Gloria‘s voice, character, and narrative authority in the English
version of her text, Ferré appears less invested in recreating the past through multiple voices or
histories.
By privileging Gloria‘s account of the De la Valle family‘s scandalous history in Sweet
Diamond Dust, Ferré risks merely reinforcing the opposition set up between the marginalized
female on the one hand and the dominant male or colonizer on the other. In her 1998 preface to
Maldito amor, Ferré implies that nationality poses ―un problema tan agudo‖ for Puerto Ricans

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because they are perpetually mired in binary or polarized thinking (13). Yet, ironically, by
inverting the players on ―bottom‖ and the players on ―top,‖ Ferré perpetuates binary thinking in
Sweet Diamond Dust. Specifically, Ferré lends authority to Gloria‘s character by linking
prostitution and translation, and she establishes Gloria‘s story as the one that ultimately
eradicates and dismisses the truth-claims of the other narrators by embellishing Gloria‘s narrative
7

with additional dialogue. As Beatson argues, ―Gloria‘s chapter is both a resounding conclusion
to the work and a conclusive resolution to the themes and tensions contained in it. [. . .] Ferré
privileges the perspective of two female characters in the novel, Doña Laura and Gloria, and
thereby offers what appears to be a more accurate version of the island‘s history‖ (123-24). The
additions to both Laura and Gloria‘s narratives in Sweet Diamond Dust lessen the polyphonic
timbre of the work as whole. Sweet Diamond Dust becomes, in the end, more of a concerto than
a symphony.
Of course, the very act of translating or rewriting into English may prompt Ferré to
concede the polyphonic nature of her text. Creating a stronger narrative voice for Gloria may be
the inevitable outcome of crafting a voice for herself as an author-translator and attempting to
account for potential criticisms that she ―prostitutes‖ or is unfaithful to her text in Spanish by
publishing an English-language version of it. Indeed, Ferré‘s concerns about writing in English
seem to overtake her anxieties that she is even-handed or impartial in her presentation of
perspectives on Puerto Rican history. On the one hand, she seeks to challenge and/or redeem the
negative perception that by self-translating she is betraying her original text and/or selling out to

7

Di Iorio Smith, in her discussion of Sweet Diamond Dust, suggests that Laura‘s narrative is
more convincing than Gloria‘s—that Gloria‘s claims seem more attenuated, theatrical, and
histrionic than those of the other characters (41-42). I maintain that the affected and/or
apocalyptic aspects of Gloria‘s narrative do not detract from its resounding and conclusive
nature.
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a more lucrative market. On the other hand, her maneuverings for and on behalf of those Puerto
Ricans whom she describes as having ―lost the ability to read the literature and history of their
island‖ (―On Destiny‖ 163) appear to cause her to newly embrace the inherently transformative
and/or ―esquisinfrénico‖ (Maldito 13) character of Puerto Rico that she later emphasizes in her
8

preface to Maldito amor. Portraying Gloria as a stronger narrator and as a beneficent prostitute
in Sweet Diamond Dust provides Ferré with a means of addressing both of these ends. As Jaffe
maintains,
Ferré underscores the link between the transitory character of the translator and
prostitute and of Puerto Ricans in their presumably temporary ―commonwealth‖
status by using terms such as ―cambio,‖ ―transformación‖ and ―transitar entre dos
extremos o polos‖ to portray the core of Puerto Rican character. At once
emblematic of traditional notions of fidelity and of license, of powerlessness and
power, what emerges perhaps most prominently in the above discussion of the
prostitute and the translator is enormous ambiguity of identity. In Maldito amor,
Ferré suggests that for Puerto Ricans this uncertainty is ultimately destructive, but

8

It is curious that Ferré emphasizes the polarity of Puerto Rican identity in her 1998 preface to
Maldito amor and not in Sweet Diamond Dust: ―País esquisinfrénico con complejo de Hamlet,
nuestra personalidad más profunda es el cambio, la capacidad para transformación, para el
valeroso transitar entre dos extremos o polos‖ (13). Later in the preface, she reiterates this
emphasis on Puerto Rico‘s transitory identity by arguing that the ―puerto‖ of Puerto Rico ―nos
define, nos constituye en un país de caracoles viajeros, de peregrinos que vamos por el mundo
con nuestra casa a cuestas‖ (14). I find this belated characterization of Maldito amor more in line
with the conciliatory portrait of both Gloria‘s prostitution and North American intervention in
Sweet Diamond Dust than with the more pejorative depiction of both cultural exchanges in the
Spanish text, which remains unedited in subsequent editions. While Ferré asserts in this later
preface that ―[e]n Maldito Amor intento contar esta transformación de Puerto Rico en Puerto; [. .
.] Y por ello en el texto hay tantas voces contrapuestas‖ (14), I contend that the contrapuntal
nature of the Spanish text is an eventual casualty of her celebration of the transformative,
democratic, and welcoming nature of Puerto Rico—as impacted by the strengthening of Gloria‘s
character and narrative in Sweet Diamond Dust.
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she envisions the positive possibilities of this fluidity through her emplotment of
herself as translator and of Gloria Camprubí as prostitute in Sweet Diamond Dust.
(71-72)
Through her reshaping of Gloria‘s character, Ferré ultimately embraces and works to her benefit
the positive or postcolonial possibilities of translating and/or rewriting. While her revisions may
lessen the impartiality of her novel and convey a more accommodating or assimilationist
agenda—i.e., she creates a less polyphonic text in order to advance a seemingly more palatable
political vision of transnationalism— they also speak to Ferré‘s commitment to celebrate rather
than lament the uncertainties that complicate formulations of nationality for Puerto Ricans. By
emphasizing the transformative and transgressive aspects of Gloria‘s character in Sweet
Diamond Dust, Ferré anticipates and underlines her own emergence as an empowered,
inconsistent, and unapologetic translator of her own fiction.
Ferré illustrates her investment in promoting a more conciliatory transnational agenda
through both her additions to and her subtractions from Sweet Diamond Dust as author and
translator. Specifically, Ferré is careful to strike from the English version virtually all the
statements in Doña Laura‘s and Gloria‘s narratives in Maldito amor that reflect a proindependence stance. Her meticulous attention toward eliminating the pro-independence
overtones of the Spanish version of her text points to her growing receptiveness toward a prostatehood stance, which attitude she more clearly articulates in the later dissensions between
House on the Lagoon and Casa en la laguna and, formally, in the controversial 1998 New York
Times Op-ed in which she made waves by reversing her long-held support of Puerto Rican
independence. The few years between the publication of Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond Dust,
approximately 1986 to 1988, appear to have been a formative period in which Ferré warmed to

98

the necessity, if not the desire, for an even more official and extensive relationship between
Puerto Rico and the United States. While the conflicting politics of Ferré‘s characters cannot be
touted as wholly reliable indicators of Ferré‘s own thoughts and opinions, the conspicuous
absence of her characters‘ pro-independence leanings of Maldito amor within Sweet Diamond
Dust suggests that Ferré deliberately revises her English text to reflect a more open attitude
toward statehood and, on a larger scale, a less combative stance toward past and present U.S.
cultural interventions within and without Puerto Rico.
In the first place, Ferré strikes from the English version of her text Gloria‘s insinuations
in Maldito amor that Laura is motivated to disinherit her living children and leave la Central
Justica to Gloria and Nicolasito on account of her lingering resentment toward her deceased
husband for betraying his commitment to Puerto Rican independence while a national Senator. In
Maldito amor, Gloria implies to Titina that Ubaldino‘s abandonment of his quest for
independence is the final straw contributing to Laura‘s disenchantment with her husband. Gloria
explains that Laura,
era independentista, y por eso su hijo preferido siempre fue Nicolás, mientras se
peleaba todo el tiempo con sus otros hijos. Al final terminó también odiando a
Don Ubaldino. Porque tu amado Niño, como tú dices, Titina, fue siempre
independentista, y hubiese quizá muerto un independentista feliz, si al llegar a
Senador la Central Justicia no se le hubiese vuelto de pronto un Potosí. (82)
As Gloria implies, the cause of independence had previously united Laura and her husband—and
had enabled her to overlook some of his moral failings and misadventures. Apparently, Laura is
able to pass over Ubaldino‘s sexual improprieties but not his eventual political impotence
relevant to fighting for Puerto Rican sovereignty. Gloria claims that Laura‘s resentment toward

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Ubaldino is rooted in the fact that while, in theory, he, ―defendía la independencia y bordaba, con
su pico de oro, las glorias de nuestra patria mística, esa patria tan sentidamente cantada por
nuestro gran Gautier,‖ in practice, he actually opposed several reforms that would have helped
the nation establish itself and would have alleviated some of the burdens on the nation‘s working
poor: ―se oponía violentamente a la ley de las quinientas cuerdas, al salario mínimo y a la
jornada de ocho horas de trabajo, medidas que hundían a Guamaní cada vez más en el hambre y
en la desesperación‖ (83). In Spanish, Ferré presents Laura‘s antipathy toward Ubaldino as
centered in his unforgivable transformation from a philandering idealist and anti-imperialist,
―obsesionado aún por sus gloriosos sueños patrios‖ to a lecherous political dandy who allied
himself with his northern neighbors in order to sustain his personal interests and corrupt lifestyle
(82). As Gloria reminds Titina, ―Don Ubaldino pasó, [. . .], en menos de diez años, de prócer
egregio y preclaro, a viejo lujurioso y decrépito‖ (83).
Granted, in Sweet Diamond Dust, Ferré also insinuates Laura‘s emotional and political
disenchantment with Ubaldino. However, she revises the motivation behind Laura‘s resentment.
In English, Gloria recounts to Titina that Laura felt betrayed by Ubaldino because of his general
hypocrisy while as politician—―once he became a senator he quickly forgot his patriotic ideals.
He became just another politician‖ (Sweet 83), ―un politicastro más‖ in the Spanish (Maldito 83).
Yet, in the English text, she never mentions his changed stance on independence, nor does she
reference his self-interested alliance with the northerners who were once his enemies. Rather,
Gloria implies that Laura‘s rancor stems, in part, from the fact that American industrialists did
more to improve life on the island than did Ubaldino in his tenure as Senator. She claims that:
every morning, as he shaved and did his twenty minutes of weightlifting, he‘d
practice a series of forgetting exercises, to weaken his memory as much as

100

possible, and opposed the advanced social legislation proposed by the northerners
at every opportunity. He thus fought fiercely against the northerners‘ efforts to
democratize the town, against the right to strike, the minimum wage, and the
eight-hour work day, striving to keep Guamaní‘s inhabitants in the same state of
abject poverty they had know for centuries. (Sweet 83, deviations from the
Spanish underlined)
Similar to Maldito amor, Gloria notes Ubaldino‘s opposition to populist reforms aimed at
curbing both poverty and abuse of the working class in Puerto Rico. But, significantly, in Sweet
Diamond Dust she attributes the promotion of these reforms to the North Americans, to whom
she refers to in Spanish as Ubaldino‘s ―antiguos enemigos‖ (Maldito 83). Gloria claims that
while Laura sympathized with her husband‘s rhetorical sorrow at the loss of the island‘s ―own
time,‖ previous ―history,‖ and long-time ―language‖ after the arrival of the U.S. capitalists in
1898, she also understood that these losses were concessions made on the account of ―progress,‖
―electricity, [. . .] modern sanitary facilities, [. . .] intelligently built roads and bridges—in short,
[. . .] survival‖ (Sweet 83). Moreover, Gloria suggests that Laura feels betrayed because, for all
his flowery rhetoric, Ubaldino ―never did anything about‖ his concerns for the nation and only
9

voiced a consciously moot opposition (83). Thus, in the Spanish version of her novel, Ferré
illustrates that Laura is generally disillusioned with her husband on account of his political
incapacity and all-around hypocrisy toward reform, while in the English version of her novel she
implies that Laura particularly resents Ubaldino‘s abandonment of the cause of political and
9

Ferré‘s portrayal of Ubaldino De la Valle bears a strong, deliberate resemblance to José de
Diego, a Puerto Rican patriot, poet, and famed independentista of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. He was a vocal opponent of the seemingly reasonable and humanitarian House
Bill 14, which sought to limit the weight that a dock-worker or bracero would carry on his
shoulders. Juan Flores argues that de Diego‘s ―poetic and philosophical eloquence was but a thin
veil camouflaging his very interested defense of the hacendado class‖ (114).
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cultural independence for Puerto Rico, which resentment she still harbors on her deathbed. As a
result, Ferré creates in Sweet Diamond Dust a much more conciliatory and less antagonistic
portrait of U.S. intervention in Puerto Rico since 1898. She literally redacts or rewrites excerpts
of her text that may seem hostile toward or resentful of a North American presence in Puerto
Rico for her English-only readership.
Ferré‘s conscientious interventions to this end are apparent throughout Sweet Diamond
Dust. She, for example, does not translate into English Don Hermenegildo‘s claims that he and
Ubaldino were united by their dreams of independence. He recounts in the Spanish text that ―Nos
hermanaba un mismo propósito y un mismo sueño: llegar a ver nuestra estrella, nuestro mítico
lucero del alba, brillar contra el cielo inmarcesible de la bandera de la patria. Hacía ya demasiado
tiempo nos decíamos, casi veinte años, que la isla pasaba, como pelota de oro problemática, de
político a político en la palestra de Washington‖ (Maldito 59). Moreover, Ferré adds to Laura‘s
narrative in Sweet Diamond Dust the somewhat sarcastic but still glowing characterizations of
the U.S. industrialists as: ―dynamos, men of unflagging action; [. . .] young and handsome,
engineers, architects, doctors, energetic entrepreneurs who believed they could transform the
world and bring us the blessing of progress‖ (Sweet 67). Only in the English text, Laura presents
them as ―brimming ideal[ists]‖ who ―built marvelous cities‖ and ―practically wiped out poverty‖
(67). Laura boasts that ―when the foreigners came: they established modern methods of reaping
and planting, the field hands were treated like human beings instead of like slaves; their children
could go to school; they were given adequate housing and shoes. In other words, the foreigners
were a blessing to the poor and to the middle class as well, albeit a scourge to the rich‖ (68). She
declares that she ―hold[s] the foreigners in high esteem‖ and that she ―couldn‘t have been more
pleased when three of [her] daughters married these civilized men‖ (69). Finally, as the disparate

102

titles to the English and Spanish versions of her novel suggest, with ―Sweet Diamond Dust‖
Ferré moves away from the implications of a vexed, doomed, or, even, damned relationship with
country as expressed in and by ―Maldito amor.‖ As Jaffe suggests, ―Whether recounting Puerto
Rican domination by Spain or by the United States, or the parallel domination of women by men,
the title Maldito amor refers equally to the doomed romances in the novella and to a frequently
misdirected and thereby accursed love of country‖ (75). While ―Sweet Diamond Dust‖ evokes
the nation‘s contentious past with sugar, the title is less suggestive of internal angst toward
country and more in line with the more positive perspective on the transformative events of
Puerto Rico‘s history in the twentieth century that Ferré provides through her numerous revisions
in the English text. Jaffe argues that the English title ―erases the image of doomed love‖ in light
of more optimistic vision of Puerto Rico‘s future (76). Through these pointed revisions of
Maldito amor and/or additions to Sweet Diamond Dust in translation, Ferré makes visible her
efforts to construct or reconstruct a narrative more friendly to a U.S. past and present within,
without, and with Puerto Rico.

10

This is not to say that Ferré‘s English text is shamelessly obsequious to North American
interests. In both texts, Ferré emphasizes the islanders‘ struggle to defend and preserve their
economic, social, and cultural interests amidst the imposition of both Spanish and U.S. cultural
legacies upon them. Also, as Jaffe describes, ―the Spanish and the English texts alike espouse the

10

Ferré also adds to Gloria‘s narrative the assertion that her deceased husband, Nicolás, blamed
the hacendados for the ―infested hole‖ that Guamaní had become: ―He knew the local hacienda
owners were to blame for this, long before the arrival of the northerners on the island; and his
father was a typical example of it‖ (Sweet 84). Moreover, Jaffe points out how, in the Spanish
text, Hermenegildo ―proudly proclaim[s] the rescue of the Puerto Rican plantation from the
predatory force of the North American mills‖ while in the English text, ―the sense of an
identifiably Northern threat is eliminated and the criollo mill is saved "from being blown away
by the wind‖ (52). Ferré collective modifications toward modifying Northern, ―Yankee‖ bias in
translation are fodder for another, larger project.
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conviction that the sugar mill and land should forever remain in Puerto Rican hands‖ (77). Jaffe
elaborates that several of Ferré‘s revisions are strategic in that her ―less dichotomous, ‗us‘ versus
‗them‘ representation of Puerto Rican reality may be seen more constructively as transcending
binarism in the passage toward a new understanding of what Puerto Rican identity means at the
close of the twentieth century‖ (77). Whether for personal or literary motivations, Ferré
purposefully alters the anti-imperialist and pro-independence substance of Maldito amor in favor
of a more accepting and/or less resistant stance toward previous and future U.S. involvement in
Puerto Rico in Sweet Diamond Dust.
This change of perspective is unquestionably relevant to Ferré‘s decision to publish a
version of her novel in English. Writing and/or rewriting into English appears to be the critical
means by which she convinces herself that her previous appeals for a sovereign and/or culturally
independent Puerto Rico are neither feasible nor desirable. In accord with Jaffe, I maintain that
Ferré ultimately shifts to accept and adopt a more hybrid or transitory existence for herself and
Puerto Rico in light of and in defense of carving out a voice for herself in English. As Ferré
argues in her preface to the 1996 edition of Sweet Diamond Dust,
Now that ten years have gone by since Sweet Diamond Dust was published, I
think I can better understand now what made me write it. I am fifty-eight years
old and, like a number of Puerto Ricans, have spent half my life in the United
States and half on the island. My three children live on the mainland because
that‘s where they can make a living, and if I ever have any grandchildren, they
will be born there. I travel to the States at least once every two or three months to
visit my sons and daughter. In this I am thoroughly and typically a Puerto Rican.
(vii)

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Ferré intimates that being ―thoroughly and typically‖ Puerto Rican consists of a life divided
between the island and the mainland, a life of travel and exchange that is born of both desire and
necessity. By implication, she suggests that deciding to write Sweet Diamond Dust stemmed
from her realization of her transient, dual reality and her desire to formulate that reality in the
English version of her text. Ferré‘s shift toward celebrating rather than resisting the transitory
and divided aspects of her identity signifies the extent to which translation or rewriting becomes
for her a process of self-examination and personal reinvention instead of a rote and tedious
exercise of linguistic transference. As Jaffe argues, ―in English she seems to become an
assimilationist, silencing both her native language and the non-technological vision of the world
that Spanish represents for her. To dismiss or reject Ferré‘s work in translation on this basis,
though, is to misunderstand the ‗verdadera morada‘ that Ferré discovers through the
transitoriness of her work, in the passage from Spanish to English‖ (74). While her substantive
revisions of her texts make for a vexing comparison of her works, the conversation in and
between Ferré‘s versions of her text affords a window into her internal deliberations on
translation, nation, and the limits of literature and language in communicating a fluid and volatile
sense of national identity.

Sovereignty, Agency, and Identity in House on the Lagoon and Casa en la laguna
Ferré expands on the intertextual conversation between Maldito amor and Sweet
Diamond Dust with her House on the Lagoon and the later Casa en la laguna, this time opening
the discussion with her English version of the text. In and between these, again, disparate
versions of her novel, Ferré re- or cross-examines the tensions of Spanish and English,
independence and statehood, feminism and patriarchy that prompt the counterpoint between
Maldito amor and Sweet Diamond Dust. While on the surface House on the Lagoon and Casa en

105

la laguna both purport to be ambitious, drawn-out sagas chronicling the scandals, sorrows, and
secrets of the Mendizabal family, both versions ultimately combine and compete to form a
complex, carefully layered composite text that engages the larger problems of language, identity,
and agency that surround all of Ferré‘s fiction. Ferré herself projects the inherently digressive
and transformative nature of her text(s) with Isabel‘s closing sentence in the introduction of the
novel she is writing: ―My original purpose was to interweave the woof of my memoires with the
warp of Quintín‘s recollections, but what I finally wrote was something very different‖ (House
6).

11

In either English or Spanish, ―what Ferré finally writes‖ is an intensely self-critical,

compound text comprised of a series of texts and conflicting narratives—a text that attempts both
a defense and a discussion of her choice to publish first in English and, at the same time, her
controversial decision to support statehood in Puerto Rico‘s 1998 plebiscite. Through this highly
filtered presentation of her authorial preoccupations, Ferré deftly approaches questions vital to
the production and consumption of her fiction, such as: What constitutes an ―original‖ text or
work of art? Who participates in the unfolding, creating, or reconstituting of the meaning and/or
content of a text? What are the political and literary ramifications of supporting statehood for
Puerto Rico? And, finally, is the decision to first publish in English and/or later translate into
Spanish a mark of surrender or emancipation for her as an author? In both the similarities and
dissensions between House on the Lagoon and Casa en la laguna, Ferré reiterates and, also,
methodically confronts and complicates implications of the kind of hybrid, post- and transnational vision for Puerto Rico that she begins to articulate and celebrate in her revisions of
Sweet Diamond Dust.

11

―Mi propósito original fue tejer, a los recuerdos de Quintín, las memorias de mi propia
familia, pero lo que escribí finalmente fue algo muy distinto‖ (Casa 18).
106

Ferré intimates a critical guide to reading both House on the Lagoon and Casa en la
laguna text in a loaded exchange between Isabel, the novels‘ primary narrator and protagonist,
and her husband Quintín, a secondary narrator and frequent antagonist to the claims that Isabel
puts forth in the manuscript she has secretly been writing. An anonymous, third-person narrator
recounts:
The last few days, Isabel had been almost cordial toward Quintín. She was affable
at dinnertime and one night she began to discuss with him Choderlos de Laclos‘s
Les Liasons dangereuses, which she had been reading. She found it fascinating.
The literary convention of the letters exchanged between Monsieur de Valmont
and Madame de Merteuil was particularly effective. The characters communicated
indirectly, through a delayed echo. ―Between the writing and the reading of a text,
things change, the world goes round, marriages and love affairs are made and
unmade. Wasn‘t all storytelling, in a sense, like that?‖ Isabel asked, as she took
sip of wine from her glass. ―Each chapter is like a letter to the reader; its meaning
isn‘t completed until it is read by someone.‖ (311)

12

The narrator‘s recounting of Isabel‘s contention that the characters communicate ―indirectly,
through a delayed echo‖ speaks to Ferré‘s own awareness that she ―indirectly‖ communicates
12

Durante los últimos días, Isabel había estado muy afable con Quintín. En el curso de la cena,
empezó a discutir con él la novela que estaba leyendo por aquellos días: Les Liasons
dangereuses, de Choderlos de Laclos. La encontraba sumamente interesante. La convención
literaria de las cartas intercambiadas entre monsieur Valmont y madame de Merteuil, sobre todo,
le pareció particularmente eficaz. Los personajes se comunicaban indirectamente por medio de
ellas, a través de un eco postergado.
—Entre la escritura y la lectura de un texto, el mundo de vueltas, la gente cambia, los
matrimonios se hacen y se deshacen. La persona que escribe la última oración de una página no
es la misma que escribió la primera. ¿No es ésa le naturaleza misma de la escritura?—le
preguntó Isabel a Quintín, mientras brindaban con sus copas de vino—. Cada pliego es una carta
dirigida al lector; su significado no estará completo hasta que alguien lo lea. (Casa 332)

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with her reader via the ―delayed‖ implications of her text and of her translation of it. Similar to
how Isabel slyly acknowledges to Quintín that she knows he has been reading her novel and,
also, leaving angry notes and/or suggested revisions in the margins of it, Ferré insinuates through
her slight nod to the Laclos novel that she is highly attuned to the reader of her text, and to role
that he/she plays in contributing to the meaning and shaping of the text(s) that she writes.

13

Of

course, in the case of Ferré, being attuned to the role of the reader is also inextricably linked to
her role as author and/or translator of her text. She signals first in English and then in Spanish
that she is aware of the world ―between the writing and the reading of [her] text‖ and intimates
that changes in the world around her text have prompted differences between the versions of her
novel—another audience, a different language, and a changed literary context all being possible
catalysts. In other words, Ferré subtly marks for the reader how she herself may have changed in
relation to her source text and her target text, or the text that she rewrites.
The Spanish rendition of the same passage is more explicit on this point. While in
English Isabel reflects, ―things change, the world goes round, marriages and love affairs are
made and unmade‖ (311), in Spanish she indicates, ―el mundo da vueltas, la gente cambia, los
matrimonios se hacen y se deshacen. La persona que escribe la última oración de una página no
es la misma que escribió la primera‖ (Casa 332). Ferré places greater emphasis on how a person
or individual becomes an agent of change in the course of the text at hand, and adds the
statement clarifying that an author his/herself transforms from one moment to the next. While in
the immediate context of the novel that Isabel discusses, Isabel refers literally to different
individuals changing her source text, her words also evidence Ferré‘s own awareness of how she
13

This novel is, coincidentally, the same text upon which Manuel Puig‘s somewhat
autobiographical protagonist, Mr. Ramírez, decodes messages while a political prisoner in
Argentina. Like Puig, Ferré emphasizes the highly filtered presentation of meaning in and
between her texts by alluding to the unfolding of the intrigue in the complicated French novel.
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herself is a changed person in regard to the text she writes and/or the one that she rewrites. In her
non-literal translation of Isabel‘s words, Ferré implicitly acknowledges that even if she were to
create a more scrupulously faithful and/or literal translation of her English text into Spanish it
would resonate differently with a new readership and it would not, necessarily, be true and
faithful to the author that she has become since writing the first version of her text. Through the
narrator‘s take on Isabel‘s fascination with the communicative intrigue of the French novel she is
reading, Ferré signals for the reader her own enthusiasm for her own unashamedly transgressive
approach to translating her novel and communicating with her reader.
Thus, in and between the English and Spanish versions of her text Ferré promotes her
brand of self-translation as a means of engaging and enhancing her source text, as a way of
constructively reexamining and recreating her text in relation to the perceived possibilities and/or
constraints of another language or a new audience; she rejects the notion of translation as mere
imitation and creates another, contingent ―original.‖ On a theoretical level, Ferré emphasizes,
similar to Borges in his ―Pierre Menard,‖ that even an identical rendering of her first text would
make for a profoundly different text—as it would be met in a different time, by a different
readership, and in a different literary context. Her characterization of Milan Pavel, the immigrant
architect who devotedly and innocently recreates identical yet authentic reproductions of the
masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Puerto Rican bourgeosie, speaks to this perspective
on translation. Isabel writes that when accused of plagiarism, ―Pavel was stunned; he couldn‘t
understand how anyone could say such a thing. His church would have been a faithful recreation,
stone by stone, of Wright‘s masterpiece, not a mere copy‖ (House 41). The Spanish translation
makes Pavel‘s honorable intentions even more apparent, ―Pavel lo miró sorprendido; no podía
comprender cómo podía hacer una denucia semejante. Su iglesia era una recreación fiel, piedra

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por piedra, de la obra del maestro, y no una vil copia. Era su manera de rendirle el homenaje
máximo‖ (Casa 55, deviation from the English underlined). With her portrait of Pavel, Ferré
parodies the very possibility of a ―mere copy‖ or a ―una vil copia‖; she insinuates that a Puerto
Rican recreation of a Wright building would, in any event, be an ―original‖ work of art, given the
inevitable intrusions of a new setting, space, time, and history.
Quintín‘s undiminished enthusiasm toward Pavel‘s slavish imitation of Wright‘s work
reflects Ferré‘s own playful intimation that her reproductions of her own text via translation or
rewriting are recreations ―faithful‖ to herself and her evolving artistry, despite and because of
their apparent differences. Isabel relates that when Quintín sets out to restore Pavel‘s original
version of ―the house on the lagoon,‖ which his father Buenaventura razed and rebuilt to reflect a
more austere, medieval Spanish sensibility, he is thrilled to discover within Pavel‘s personal
copy of Wright‘s Wasmuth portfolio the exact plans for his former family home. In the Spanish
text, Isabel recalls his excitement upon discovering that one of the houses in Wright‘s/Pavel‘s
portfolio ―era exactamente igual a la casas de la laguna, tal y cómo él la recordaba en su niñez‖
(320).

14

Only in the Spanish, Ferré adds the provocative assertion that ―Ya para aquel entonces

en Puerto Rico se sabía que las casas de Pavel eran copias exactas de las de Frank Lloyd Wright,
pero a Quintín eso no le importaba. El dato hacía al personaje de Pavel aún más interesante‖
(319). The image of the house on the lagoon itself, a twice-recreated architectural imitation that
purports to be an original and is all the more ―interesting‖ for its likeness to another work of art,
speaks to the larger text that Ferré herself is revising and recreating through and in between the
English and Spanish versions of text.

14

The English version of the same statement is less explicit as to the identical nature of the plans
for the house: ―One of them was the plan of the house on the lagoon‖ (House 299).
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Ferré further emphasizes the, at times, narrow distinction between ―original‖ and
―imitation,‖ ―authentic‖ and ―counterfeit‖ in Isabel‘s recounting of the scandal involving her
former ballet instructor, André Kerenski. Isabel writes of how the Russian emigré instructor
recreates Swan Lake but with his own ―original‖ choreography.

15

He and the dancers in his

studio perform a production that both is and is not the original ballet. In the Kerenski story,
which is otherwise somewhat out of line with the rest of the novel, Ferré appears to find an outlet
for addressing the indignation of those who embrace her work as authentic from the guise of an
―autora puertrriqueña‖ but not from the perspective of a ―U.S. Latina author.‖

16

As Isabel

recounts, the audience for Kerenkis‘s ―Swan Lake‖ is completely enamored of the ballet
performance until, afterward, they learn that Kerenski himself has danced the second act, instead
of Tony Torres, the boy from the slums of Machuelo Abajo. Initially, they exclaim, ―God bless
our great Tony Torres [. . .]. Today he‘s brought great honor to Machuelo Abajo!‖ (House 177),
and/or ―—Que Dios bendiga a nuestro gran Tony Torres [. . .] porque hoy ha puesto en alto el
honor de Machuelo Abajo!‖ (Casa 191). In the metatext that surrounds both House on the
Lagoon and Casa en la laguna, Ferré is, at once, a kind of ―Tony Torres‖ and also an ―André
Kerenski‖—on the one hand, a national artist with the unlikely opportunity to perform for a
larger audience, on the other, a world artist who in her eagerness for wider acclaim steals the
stage from a beloved national author.

15

Ferré, through Isabel, emphasizes that the choreography is a Kerenski original ―Kerenski was
obsessed with the choreography, which he was doing himself. [. . .] We would interpret segments
of works in an original Kerenski version‖ (171)/ ―Kerenski estaba obsesionado con la
coreogradóa, que sería original para cada obra. [. . .] interpretaríamos segmentos de ellos, en una
versión original suya‖ (Casa 184).
16
Di Iorio Smith charts Ferré‘s transformation from an ―autora puertorriqueña‖ to a ―U.S. Latina
Writer‖ in Killing Spanish: Literary Essays on Ambivalent U.S. Latino/a Identity.
111

The Kerenski story reflects both Ferré‘s empathy and defensiveness toward the notion
that she is more ―authentic‖ as Rosario Ferré from Puerto Rico than as Rosario Ferré, a transamerican writer. In either text, Ferré depicts the anger of the crowd:
se pusieron furiosos [. . .] Se apiñaron al borde del escenario y empezaron a
quitarse los zapatos y a arrojárselos al profesor Kerenski, así como carteras,
sombreros: todo lo que encontraron a mano, gritándole que era un tramposo y un
embustero; que le había hecho a creer a todo el mundo que le iba a dar a Tony
Torres aquella noche la oportunidad de ser el bailarín estrella, cuando desde un
principio planeaba ocupar su lugar. (191)

17

And, only in the English text, Isabel caps her description of the rage of the crowd with the
poignant observation that—―Tony had never been given a chance to dance the second act‖
(House 178). The implication behind the crowd‘s reaction in either text is Ferré‘s implicit
acknowledgement that, for many of her readers, the ―who‖ behind the artistic representation is as
or more important than the representation itself. She portrays their feelings of betrayal as
justifiable and, even, understandable—though she evidences that Kerenski‘s deceit is born of
passion for the dance itself, his exasperation at having another perform a role that he could do
better himself, as well as of his passion for his co-ballerina, Estefanía Volmer, Isabel‘s redheaded friend who reminds Kerenski of his adored mother. Like Kerenski, Ferré may have
chosen to write her text first in English because of not wanting to have to outsource a task that
she could perform herself, or, conversely, she may have simply given into her passion for
17

―Tony had never been given a chance to dance the second act. His friends crowded together at
the foot of the stage and began to throw shoes at Professor Kerenski, handbags, umbrellas,
cigarette cases, whatever they could find in their handbags, yelling that he was a cheat and a liar,
that he had led everyone to believe that he was giving Tony Torres the star role when he had
planned to take his place from the start‖ (House 178, non-translated text underlined).

112

English as her other ―mother‖ tongue. As stretched as this analogy may seem, I maintain that
Ferré utilizes the Kerenski excerpts within her text to underline and undermine the tenuous
distinctions between English and Spanish, originality and imitation, authenticity and forgery that
permeate her fiction.
Further complicating the matter is Quintín‘s assertion in his revision of Isabel‘s
manuscript that Isabel herself pulls the curtain on the unmasked Kerenski and Estefanía after the
performance—that she deliberately exposes Kerenki‘s identity as the final dancer for the
lingering crowd and purposefully reveals for all the fact that he is passionately kissing Estefanía.
I argue that by crossing-over first into English and then back into Spanish, Ferré pulls the curtain
on the notion of herself as solely a national author and reveals herself, for better or for worse, as
a bilingual transnational writer. In the production and reproduction of her texts, she is, in the first
act, the marginalized national writer aspiring for larger acclaim and, in the second, the veteran
artist who trounces the conventions and expectations of Puerto Rican society by claiming a role
that is assumed to be another‘s. Through her purposefully insubordinate mode of translating,
Ferré emphasizes the murky, border territory of Puerto Rican identity. She reiterates in
translation her argument that ―To be Puerto Rican is to be a hybrid‖ (―Puerto Rico‖ A21) and her
claim that for her translating is ―a necessary reality‖ (―On Destiny‖ 163). She maintains that
translating is necessary because, ―As a Puerto Rican I have undergone exile as a way of life, and
also as a style of life‖ (163). Ferré‘s acceptance and bold assertion of the ―hybrid,‖ ―exilic,‖ and
translational aspects of her personal and national identity is an important and recurring sub-,
inter-, and/or meta-text in and between House on the Lagoon and Casa en la laguna.
This self-referential emphasis is evidenced in Ferré‘s attempts to out herself as the
translator of the text, her efforts to make the processes of self-translation more visible for the

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reader of both versions of her novel. She does this by frequently changing markers of number or
chronology in translation, by modifying her texts for her different readerships, and by compiling
multilingual intertexts, among other gestures. In the first event, Ferré almost compulsively
revises numerical or chronological identifiers in translation, suggesting that she either revels in
correcting or creating inaccuracies between the two versions of her text. The sheer number of
these revisions indicates deliberation on Ferré‘s part. Isabel, for example, recalls that her friend
Esmeralda is ―four years younger‖ than her in English (217), and ―cuatro años mayor‖ in Spanish
(232). Likewise, Isabel states that Quintín‘s great-grandfather Don Esteban was naturalized in
1885 in English and then in 1899 in the Spanish, and that he arrives in San Juan in 1899 in
English and then 1879 in Spanish (House 88, Casa 102). She also writes that Quintín‘s maternal
grandmother Madeline returned to Boston after 37 years in the English text (94) and after 31
years in Spanish text (108), and that Isabel‘s paternal grandmother had to give up her education
when she was ―nineteen‖ in House on the Lagoon (203) and ―dieciséis‖ in Casa en la laguna
(215). Moreover, in English Isabel relates that Quintín‘s mother Rebecca resumed her artistic
activities two weeks after [giving] birth (64), while in Spanish Isabel recounts that Rebecca
didn‘t observe even a week in bed, ―ni una semana de cama‖ (80), and in English Isabel recounts
that pre-plebiscite polls showed ―four percent‖ for independence in the English (357) and ―el
cinco por ciento‖ in the Spanish (380). I have cataloged at least twenty of such disparities
between the versions of Ferré‘s novel. The frequency of these corrections or adjustments points
to the extent to which Ferré is faithfully unfaithful or, at least, inconsistent toward her original or
source text. As she argues about translating her own work, ―It can be diabolic and obsessive: it is
one of the few instances when one can be dishonest and feel good about it, rather like having a
second chance at redressing one‘s fatal mistakes in life and living a different way‖ (―On

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Destiny‖ 162). By giving in to and/or creating opportunities to revisit or ―redress‖ certain
numerical or chronological markers in translation, Ferré illustrates her personal investment in
both reexamining her text and in marking her auto-reflexive role as translator for the reader.
Quintín‘s criticisms of Isabel‘s novel parallel, underline, and/or parody the self-critical
stance that Ferré adopts when translating her texts. The third-person narrator recounts Quintín‘s
insistence that, ―Isabel had made some inexcusable mistakes. Some of them were silly; for
example, pretending there were hot-dog stands in 1917, [. . .] Quintín laughed again. No one
knew for sure when hot dogs had arrived on the island, but he doubted it was before the Second
World War‖ (House 73).

18

Likewise, Quintín corrects Isabel‘s account of the siege of the

German submarines,
A more serious error was saying that Puerto Rico‘s siege by German submarines
had taken place during the Great War, when actually it had happened during the
Second World War. [. . .] But Isabel needed to invent the siege of Puerto Rico in
1918; the German blockade was important for her development of Buenaventura‘s
supposedly Fascist sympathies. She had consciously altered the facts of history to
serve her story. (74)

19

18

―Isabel había cometido unos errores históricos inexcusables. Algunos eran tontos; por
ejemplo, decir que en 1917 se vendían ‗perros calientes‘ en San Juan. [. . .] Quintín se rió de
nuevo. Nadie sabía, a ciencia cierta, cuándo habían llegado los hot dogs a Puerto Rico, pero
estaba seguro de que no había sido antes de la segunda guerra mundial‖ (Casa 89).
19
―Un error más serio era afirmar que los submarinos alemanes sitiaron la isla durante la
primera guerra mundial, cuando en verdad sucedió durante la segunda. [. . .] Pero Isabel
necesitaba inventarse el sitio de Puerto Rico en 1918 porque el bloqueo alemán le resultaba útil
para desarrollar la personalidad fascista de Buenaventura. Había alterado—conscientemente—
los hechos para hacer más interesante su historia‖ (Casa 89).

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Ferré reveals her familiarity with playing the role of historian, fact checker, and critic of her own
texts through Quintín‘s incensed criticisms of the novel or family history that Isabel is writing.
Per his commentary about the historical inaccuracies of her novel, the heavy-handed feminist
overtones of the text (House 108-09, Casa 122-23), or, elsewhere, his criticisms about the extent
to which Isabel identifies with her characters (House 72, Casa 88), Ferré pokes fun at some of
the most idiosyncratic, strident, and prevalent aspects of her writing. On a less playful level,
Quintín‘s words mark her investment in revisiting and reshaping her text as she reencounters it.
Quintín‘s inability to refrain from criticizing and, eventually, revising Isabel‘s novel—later in the
text he resorts to ―scribbl[ing] angry comments on the margins‖ and ―introduc[ing] his thoughts
in long, third-person monologues on the back of the manuscript‖ (House 380)

20

—mimics

Ferré‘s own unrestrained or, even, compulsive behavior toward her texts as she translates.
Ferré further evidences her lack of restraint through several other minor but striking
revisions of the English version of her text when translating. Frequently, she makes apparent
accommodations for her Spanish readership by either adding or taking away context, by
including linguistic flourishes and/or local color, and by editing certain assertions or
characterizations that could be found offensive. In addition to historian and critic, Ferré takes on
the role of ethnographer, cultural mediator, and diplomat as she self-translates. She, for example,
expands on her discussions of local food in the Spanish text (House 227, 247, and 307; Casa
242, 266, and 328), modifies her descriptions of local toys from one version of her novel to the
other (House 323, Casa 345), and showcases her ability to translate seemingly untranslatable
idioms or figures of speech from English into Spanish, and vice versa. She translates ―[He]
didn‘t have a cent to his name‖ (House 22) as ―había llegado con una mano por delante y otra
20

―añadir sus comentarios iracundos al margen de estas páginas‖ and ―estampar sus
pensamientos torturados en ellas‖ (Casa 402).
116

por detrás‖ (Casa 34), renders the notion of one‘s mate or ―other half‖ (House 309) as one‘s
―media naranja‖ (Casa 331), and translates the expression ―Vegigante a la bolla; Contigo, pan y
cebolla!‖ (House 141) as ―Marry me tomorrow, and we‘ll live on radishes with bread and onion‖
(141), among many other suggestive linguistic gestures. With these somewhat disjunctive
translations (especially those that she includes in text, alongside their Spanish or English
equivalent), Ferré makes visible for her readers the difficulty of translating concepts or idioms
that carry with them much cultural weight or specificity—and, again, points back to the fact she
herself is translating. She presents herself as the antidote to the suffering of Quintín‘s maternal
grandmother Madeline, whom Isabel remembers for having ―never learned to speak Spanish‖
and for having felt alienated by the inevitable ―bit of juicy gossip [. . .], risqué joke or expression
which could only be rendered in Spanish‖ (94). Isabel cites as an example the Spanish
expression: ―Eramos [sic] demasiados y parió la abuela‖ which she translates in text as ―[t]here
were already too many of us, and then Grandma got pregnant‖ (House 94). While Madeline
suffers loneliness, discomfort, and near invisibility for not being truly bilingual, Ferré revels in
the community, agility, and power of being proficient in both languages. She makes light of the
fact that she can negotiate between cultures and languages and, in the conversation between her
texts, presents herself as a consummate bilingual who dexterously overcomes and/or creatively
compensates for the cultural differences posed by writing in English and writing in Spanish.
Ferré‘s confidence is such that she edits or opts out of translating select statements and
insinuations that could offend her Spanish readership. She, for example, does not translate
Isabel‘s laden assertion that Arístides did not serve jail time for the Ponce incident because, ―He
was from too good of a family for the law to be applied literally‖ (132), nor her accusations of
corruption on the part of ―Puerto Rican legislators, whom Isabel recounts were ―bribed by the

117

tycoons of the garment industry‖ such that they ―worked around the National Labor Relations
Act‖ (221). Only in the English text, Isabel clearly asserts that because of the corrupt legislators,
―The strike was declared illegal, and the poor conditions and low salaries in the needle industry
stayed just as they were‖ (221). Likewise, Ferré amends Isabel‘s English recounting of Arístides‘
portrayal of the locals‘ harsh treatment toward him after his role in the Nationalist shooting, ―At
the water‘s edge there was nothing to hold you back; nothing to remind you that you had lost
everything and that people laughed at you wherever you went‖ (133, non-translated text
underlined), and she doesn‘t translate Isabel‘s self-assured claim that because she ―was
thoroughly bilingual‖ she ―never had any difficulty with my studies‖ (185). The Spanish text is
less self-congratulatory—Isabel relates, ―enseñaban inglés desde primer grado, de manera que
nunca tuve problemas con mis estudios‖ (198). Moreover, in English, Isabel recounts that when
Quintín‘s father, Buenaventura Mendizábal, arrived to San Juan in 1917, he heard ―someone
announc[e] through a loudspeaker that all citizens over twenty-one were expected to sign up as
volunteers in the U.S. Army‖ (19). In Spanish, Isabel recounts that Buenvaventura ―escuchó a
alguien anunciar por aquellos megáfonos que los que desearan alistarse como voluntarios en el
ejército norteamericano podrían hacerlo‖ (30). Certainly, the distinction between being
―expected to‖ and ―being able to‖ enlist in the U.S. army ―if desired‖ has colonial and/or
imperialist implications. In these examples and in several other telling modifications, Ferré takes
advantage of the leeway that accompanies the task of self-translation. The frequency with which
Ferré tweaks, takes out, or totally revises polemic excerpts of her English text in translation
indicates that she finds in translating welcome opportunities to revisit, realign, or destabilize
concerns of her first or source text.

118

Because of her transgressive approach to translating, Ferré is able to create a dialogue
around the controversies that surround her writing and/or rewriting—most importantly, the
looming question of sovereignty, statehood, or continued commonwealth status for Puerto Rico.
This debate fuels and/or colors most of the familial tensions that drive either version of her
novel. Ferré situates her characters on all ends of the political spectrum and, in this way, gives
voice to a range of perspectives on this divisive issue throughout and in between her texts. To
this end, some of the most curious dissensions between the two versions of Ferré‘s novel are the
slight revisions relative to Puerto Rico‘s national status. At one extreme, she creates the character
of Arístides, Quintín‘s maternal grandfather, who accepts the post of chief of police under the
stipulation that he ―hunt down‖ (House 127) or ―cazar‖ (Casa 142) Nationalist extremists and is
commissioned to open fire on an otherwise peaceful demonstration by Nationalist cadets. Only in
the English text, Isabel narrates that he accepts the police job to prove to the U.S. governor that
Puerto Ricans ―were loyal American citizens‖ (House 127). At the other extreme, she creates the
characters of Manuel and Cora, Isabel and Quentín‘s son and his girlfriend, who participate in a
later manifestation of the Nationalist faction that Arístides is tasked to eradicate. Their ―AK-47‖
group embraces violent action as a means of awakening indecisive voters for the upcoming
plebiscite. While in the English text, Coral declares that ―the plebiscite will cause a crisis on the
island. [. . ]We must stop being Hamlets‖ (357), in the Spanish her accusation is more explicit—
she faults luke-warm liberalism for keeping the country at a stalemate: ―—El liberalismo es una
mojigatería que no lleva a ninguna parte. Tenemos que dejar de ser Hamlets‖ (379). Through
these subtle revisions of and/or additions to these characters‘ statements about Puerto Rico‘s
national status, Ferré provides an internal discussion of the topic of Puerto Rico‘s most pointed
political question; she does not promote a stance on the issue so much as she creates a dialogue

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around it as she writes and then rewrites her novel. In either text, she quietly punctuates through
Cora‘s allusion to Hamlet her investment in both evaluating and reevaluating what she refers to
as Puerto Rico‘s ―perpetual dilemma‖ (―Blessing‖ 9). She restates her previous characterization
of Puerto Rico as a ―país esquisinfrénico con complejo de Hamlet‖ in her 1998 preface to
Maldito amor (13) and also her public declaration to the The San Juan Star that the Puerto Rican
―struggle for self-definition‖ causes ―us to feel like Hamlet, lost in the marshes of Elsinore‖ (9).
She tackles in writing and again in translating the questions of identity and nationality that
persist in shaping in her public and literary personae.
Ferré further signals her investment in these national questions by portraying several
characters who espouse more nuanced or, at least, less extreme positions on national status.
These characters represent some of the shades of gray informing the statehood and/or
independence debate as it unfolds in and in between Ferré‘s texts. Quintín‘s father,
Buenaventura, is said to be a closet-supporter of independence; Isabel surmises that as a ―proud
descendant of the Conquistadors‖ he found it ―difficult [. . .] to accept the fact that his adopted
country was only partly self-governed‖ (House 239).

21

Likewise, Quintín‘s mother Rebecca,

along with her artist friends, is a said ―salon type‖ independentista (97). In Spanish, Ferré renders
this as ―aunque sospecho que para la mayoría de ellos la política era más bien una pose‖ (Casa
111). Moreover, Isabel‘s grandmother Abby is an ardent independentista who is nonetheless
―tempted [. . .] to renounce her Independentista ideals‖ as she looks at the goods in the Sears
catalogue (House 183),

22

and Quintín‘s brother Ignacio is profoundly ambivalent as to either

statehood or independence. Isabel writes that, ―When you asked Ignacio if he believed in
21

―a un descendiente de los conquistadores‖; ―se le hacía dificil aceptar que su patria de
adopción no se gobernara a sí misma‖ (Casa 257).
22
―tentada a renunciar sus ideales independentistas‖ (Casa 196)
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independence for the island, he asked what you believed, and if you said you were for
independence, he said he was, too. But five minutes later a Statehooder asked him if he believed
in statehood, and he would say he did‖ (270).

23

Finally, in his later years, the same Arístides

who commandeered the firing squad against the Nationalist cadets becomes a barely lucid drifter
who mumbles his support for both statehood and independence. In the English text, Isabel flatly
recounts that ―he would praise statehood and independence in the same breath‖ (137). Through
these characters‘ diverse stances on Puerto Rico‘s national status, Ferré provides an ample crosssection of the varied perspectives that form the debate on the national question. She, again,
marks the extent to which she is invested in examining the murky questions of personal and
national identity and their repercussions for her as a Puerto Rican citizen and as bilingual author.
Through these discordant perspectives on the national question, Ferré provides context
for the profound discord between protagonists Quintín and Isabel on this issue—for the
corresponding dissension in the characters‘ marriage, and for her own somewhat parallel,
strained relationship with her Spanish readership. Quintín, an avowed supporter of statehood,
fumes that Isabel is writing a novel, in part, to give impetus to the independence movement. He
accuses her of writing ―a feminist treatise and Independentista manifesto‖ (386) or ―un alegato
independentista, un manifesto feminista‖ (Casa 408). However, Isabel, in turn, firmly rebuffs
Quintín‘s suppositions about her intentions. In the English text she declares to him, ―My novel is
about personal freedom, Quintín, not about political freedom [. . .]. It‘s about my independence
from you‖ (House 386). Likewise, in the Spanish text, she similarly proclaims, ―Mi novel no es

23

―Si uno le preguntaba cuál era condición política que le parecía más conveniente para la Isla,
contestaba devolviendo la pregunta. Si uno decía que la independencia, Ignacio contestaba que a
él también. Pero si cinco minutos más tarde un estadista le preguntaba si creía en la estadidad,
también aseguraba que sí‖ (Casa 289).
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sobre política [. . .]. Es sobre mi emancipación de ti‖ (Casa 408). In both versions of her novel,
Isabel distances herself from the notion that she writes in order to advance a political agenda.
Instead, she insists that her primary concern is achieving freedom from the constraints of her
overbearing husband, and she is decidedly apolitical and conciliatory as to the independence vs.
statehood debate. She recounts that,
I like to think of myself as apolitical, and when election time comes around, I
don‘t like to take a stand. Maybe my indecision is rooted in the Sears catalogue; it
goes back to the times I sat as a child in the living room of our house in Ponce
with the catalogue on my lap, wishing for independence and at the same time
dreaming about our island being part of the modern world. (House 184)

24

I maintain that Isabel‘s contention that she is motivated by personal and not political freedom is a
smokescreen behind which Ferré establishes her own independence from her ―Spanish-only‖
constituents and also sets the stage for her eventual shift toward advocating a hybrid or dual
reality for Puerto Ricans both on and off the island—a reality that is, at once, personal and
political. Isabel‘s ambivalences anticipate Ferré‘s controversial and less nuanced declarations in
her New York Times op-ed. In this piece, Ferré argues, first, ―When I travel to the States I feel as
Latina as Chita Rivera. But in Latin America, I feel more American than John Wayne. To be
Puerto Rican is to be a hybrid‖ and, later, ―We have become the other. As a Puerto Rican and an
American, I believe our future as a community is inseparable from our culture and language, but
I‘m also passionately committed to the modern world. That‘s why I‘m going to support

24

―Por eso soy apolítica; cuando llegan las elecciones, no voto. Quizá mi indecisión se remonta
a la época en que me sentaba de niña en la sala de la casa de Ponce con el catálogo de Sears
sobre las rodillas, anhelando la independencia y a la misma vez soñando con que nuestra isla
formara parte del mundo moderno‖ (Casa 197).

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statehood in the next plebiscite‖ (―Puerto Rico‖ A21). While Isabel is not a ready puppet for
Ferré herself, nor is Quintín a firm representation of a restrictive, patriarchal readership—I find
in Isabel‘s said political neutrality and in her efforts to break away from her controlling husband
the groundwork for the pro-statehood stance that Ferré eventually adopts, as well as for her
larger transformation or cross-over from a Spanish American author or ―autora puertorriqueña‖
to a U.S. Latina writer. Ironically, Ferré dissolves one marriage in order to explore another—the
union of the island and the mainland.
In effect, Isabel‘s endeavors to make herself independent or independizarse from Quintín
stand as another instance in which Ferré ―indirectly‖ communicates with her reader via the
―delayed‖ implications of her text (House 311). Beyond the aforementioned overtones of her
portrayal of the ballet instructor Andre Kerenski, the passionate artist who ultimately betrays
Tony Torres and Tony‘s hometown supporters, Ferré marks her independence from her Spanish
readership by both her exhaustive attention to different perspectives on the national question and
her patent defensiveness in, in between, and outside of her texts about writing in English.
Through Isabel‘s ambivalences, Ferré creates an opportunity to respond to both her anxieties and
her critics. She anticipates the reaction of peers like Ana Lydia Vega, who famously balked at
Ferré in ―Carta abierta a Pandora‖ in El Nuevo Dia, ―Serías la misma que hace unos días, bajo el
manoseado eslogan de ‗Puerto Rico USA‘, le entregara al New York Times una tan triste
apología de la asimilación? Serías la misma que, el pasado 19 de marzo, proclamándose ‗más
americana que John Wayne‘, le anunciara alegremente a nuestros conquistadores que por fin
habíamos llegado a ser como ellos?‖ (IB). Particularly in Isabel‘s tepid endorsements of Puerto
Rican independence, Ferré finds an outlet through which she counters the claims of assimilation

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by positing the value of both Spanish and English for the national culture and, even, the benefits
of statehood. As Isabel recounts,
The way I see it, our island is like a betrothed, always on the verge of marriage. If
one day Puerto Rico becomes a state, it will have to accept English—the language
of her future husband—as its official language, not just because it‘s the language
of modernity and progress but also because it‘s the language of authority. If the
island remains single, on the other hand, it will probably mean backwardness and
poverty. [. . .] There‘s no question in anyone‘s mind that independence would set
our island back at least a century, that it would mean sacrifice. But we can‘t help
being what we are, can we? (House 184)
Isabel employs the language of marriage to imply that an official relationship with the United
States would bring with it both the constraints and benefits of English as an official language and
that independence would bring underdevelopment or come at the cost of ―modernity‖ for Puerto
Rico. In her final question—about Puerto Ricans not being able to avoid who they are—she
seems to concede development as a necessary casualty of independence, but is seemingly pained
rather than glad at the prospect. Through Isabel‘s luke-warm support for independence, Ferré
floats opinions about the value of English and the hybrid nature of Puerto Rico‘s national
identity that she later makes waves with in her public discussions of her decision to write first in
English and in her ―coming out‖ New York Times op-ed in which she announces her support for
statehood.
Ferré‘s Spanish rendition of this passage is even more explicit as to the formative
potential of English for Puerto Rico and in the modern world:

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Como lo veo, nuestra isla es como una novia siempre a punto de casarse. Si algún
día Puerto Rico escoge ser un estado de la Unión, tendrá que aceptar el inglés, el
lenguaje de su futuro esposo, como su lengua oficial junto con el español, no sólo
por ser el lenguaje de la modernidad y del progreso, sino por ser el lenguaje del
poder en el mundo hoy. Si la Isla escoge la independencia y decide quedarse
soltera, por otra parte, tendrá que sacrificarse, y aceptar la pobreza y el atraso que
significará vivir sin los beneficios y la protección de Estados Unidos.
Independientes no seremos más libres, porque los pobres no son libres. [. . .] No
me cabe menor duda de que la independencia nos atrasaría más de un siglo, y que
significaría un enorme sacrificio. Pero ¿cómo dejar de ser lo que somos?
(Casa 198, deviations from the English underlined)
Only in the Spanish text, Isabel adds the important clarification that English, ―junto con el
español‖ would be the official language in the event of statehood. In the same vein, she
emphasizes in translation the island‘s agency to ―escoge[r]‖ either statehood or independence.
She also adds the unambiguous specification that ―pobreza‖ and ―atraso‖ would be the certain
results of choosing to ―vivir sin los beneficios y la protección de Estados Unidos‖ and the
dramatic assertion that ―Independientes no seremos más libres, porque los pobres no son libres‖.
Ferré appears anxious to refute in the Spanish version of her text the notion that Spanish would
lose official status should Puerto Rico become a state, as well as the idea that islanders would be
forced to choose or become anything. Moreover, she gives credence to the assertion that the
costs of independence would be enormous and, even, paralyzing for islanders. While translating
into Spanish, she endeavors to make the ―assimilationist‖ points of Isabel‘s arguments more
persuasive.

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Ferré‘s attentiveness to flashpoints relative to language, power, and the unequal
relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico recurs throughout and in between the versions of
her text. For instance, only in House on the Lagoon, Quintín emphasizes to the reader that Isabel
writes her manuscript in English—as a part of his argument that Puerto Rican sovereignty would
entail the loss of English on the island: ―Would Isabel herself give up English if the island
became independent? Would she have written her manuscript in English if she didn‘t think
English was important? If she had written her novel in Spanish and published in Puerto Rico,
why, only a handful of people would read it! But if she published in the United States, thousands
would read it‖ (150-51). Via an indignant Quintín, Ferré underlines for her English audience that
she herself has not ―sold out‖ the core components of her text in the name of greater access to it;
rather, by highlighting the appeal of a wider audience she offers an implicit defense of her
decision to write first in English. Quintín‘s words recall Ferré‘s own defensiveness in her public
discussion of readers who questioned whether money was the primary motivator of her switch to
writing House on the Lagoon first in English. She, for example, argues in The San Juan Star that,
―all writers want to sell their books and hope to be read as much as possible‖ (8). Yet, through
the conspicuous absence of Quintín‘s statements on Isabel‘s language of choice in the Spanish
version of her text, Ferré illustrates that she is hesitant to emphasize, even indirectly, the appeal
and strategic importance of English for readers who encounter her text in Spanish. Through the
dissonances between the English and Spanish versions of her text on this point, she makes visible
her tendency to tiptoe around the perceived sensitivities of her different audiences when writing
and, particularly, when translating or rewriting.
Similarly, only in the English text, Isabel reflects, ―With the difficulty Congress was
having retaining English as the official language in the United States, I thought, letting a

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Spanish-speaking territory become a state would be like letting a fox into the chicken coop. But I
didn‘t dare say anything to Quintín‖ (House 390-91). In the context of her conversation with
Quintín, who is angered by the chaos and upheavals that could occur should supporters of
statehood not obtain a majority in the upcoming plebiscite, Isabel implies that statehood could
result in even more unrest—which opinion she doesn‘t share with her husband for fear that he
will be enraged at her for speaking disparagingly of this outcome. However, in the context of
Ferré‘s other, public pronouncements on Puerto Rico‘s ―perpetual dilemma‖ (―Blessing‖ 9),
Isabel‘s words are another incidence of Ferré‘s double-speak in and in between her texts. As
Ferré claims in The San Juan Star,
When we discovered we could learn English without losing Spanish, and that it
gives us an edge in the world, we began to be less afraid of el otro. We thought
maybe we could teach him a thing or two, help our neighbors to the north become
better American citizens by making them resemble us. A second language was the
ace up our sleeves. Growing up ambidextrous had been an unexpected blessing,
after all. (9)
And, as she points out in The New York Times,
But conditions have changed. Latinos are the fastest growing minority in the
United States: by 2010 their numbers are expected to reach 39 million—more
than the population of most Latin American republics. Bilingualism and
multiculturalism are vital aspects of American society. [. . .] The reality is we can
no longer ―be disappeared.‖ (A21)
Isabel‘s prediction of the melee that would ensue in the event of statehood prefigures Ferré‘s
own more optimistic prognoses on how Puerto Ricans could effect or reciprocate change within

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the dominant, Anglophone culture in the U.S. Accordingly, by opting not to translate Isabel‘s
insinuations about the event of statehood Ferré avoids emphasizing for readers of her text in
Spanish the transformative role that Puerto Rico could take on in regards to the United States;
she, in this instance, edits out the implication that Puerto Rico could be a catalyst toward the
demise of monolingualism in the U.S. and, dually, the idea that statehood could create
circumstances beneficial to both the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Read in the context of Ferré‘s public
posturings on politics and language, Isabel‘s words are particularly suggestive—and Ferré‘s
decision not to translate them is equally evocative.
Determining ―why‖ Ferré translates such that in her English text she more clearly
establishes the foundation for her eventual support of Puerto Rican statehood than she does in
her Spanish text is a difficult and endless quandary. I do not aim to establish Ferré as ―twofaced‖ so much as I want to bring into focus the blurry distinction between what Ferré describes
as being ―ambidextrous‖ (―Blessing‖ 8) and what is, in practice, being contradictory. As she
relates to The San Juan Star concerning why she wrote House on the Lagoon first in English,
I wrote the novel in English and [later] in Spanish because I am ambidextrous.
When I was a little girl I wrote with my left hand, but when I turned seven Mother
changed me to the right. I couldn‘t be left-handed she told me. Left-handed
people are impaired: there were no left-handed desks at school . . . At seven I
became ‗right-handed‘, obligada; I had to assimilate my left self into my right
self. Today I write with both hands, be it with a pen or [. . .] a computer; and also
in both languages.
I think learning to speak a second-language in America has a lot to do with
learning to live with el otro, ―the other‖ that lurks inside us: our neighbor to the

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north if we come from Latin America, our neighbor to the south if we come from
North America. (8-9)
I ask if Ferré‘s conception of being ―ambidextrous‖ accounts for the points of dissension
between her texts and/or for the apparent accommodations she makes for her different
readerships. Do the conflicting demands of different audiences cause Ferré to make changes or
are these changes connected to the linguistic and sociological differences that Ferré herself
projects onto her writing? What is gained or lost by embracing the ―other that lurks inside‖? In
any event, Ferré‘s strong translations and/or willful rewritings make for an intensely filtered and
layered composite text, one that is made up of the contingent and, at times, perpendicular claims
of two ―twin‖ or ―sister‖ texts. Read together and, even, in continuation with the exalted vision
of translation and prostitution that she sets forth in her English translation of Maldito amor, Ferré
creates with House on the Lagoon and Casa en la laguna a challenging and engaging
conversation around the intersections between, language, agency, and identity.
I maintain that the inter- and meta-textual implications of Ferré‘s versions of her novels
are even more compelling than the individual storylines she creates. Through her heightened
sensitivity to language behaviors throughout and in between the versions of her text, Ferré both
promotes herself as a multilingual author and endeavors to insert her texts within the canon of
multilingual literature. She marks her texts as multilingual by a host of open and/or veiled
references to other multilingual intertexts, bilingualism, multilingualism, or language, generally.
For example, it is highly significant that the transgressive play which Ferré, via Isabel,
designates that Rebecca and her friends make covert plans to perform is Oscar Wilde‘s Salomé,
Wilde‘s controversial cross-over drama which he wrote first in French and published three years
later as an English translation. In English, Isabel relates that Rebecca and her artistic friends,

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―read it aloud and found it extraordinary, and one of them translated it into Spanish‖ (House 65).
In Spanish, Isabel recounts, ―Lo leyeron en voz alta y lo encontraron extraordinario. El desafío
que esa obra encarnaba fue tomado como bandera de batalla por sus amigos‖ (Casa 80). In the
English version of her text, Ferré emphasizes how Rebecca and her friends encounter the play
(whether in French or English) and find it worthy of translating into Spanish while, in the
Spanish version Ferré calls attention to how the challenge of performing such a text becomes a
rallying point or ―bandera de batalla‖ for Rebecca and her companions—there is no mention of
the language in which they encounter the play or of whether or not it is translated. In House on
the Lagoon, Ferré prefaces her own translation into Spanish by referencing the translation of
Salomé into Spanish and, in Casa en la laguna, she subtly refers back to her ―original‖ English
text by marking Wilde‘s cross-over drama as a ―bandera de batalla‖ (Casa 80). Rebecca‘s
willingness to take on the role of Salomé and to dance the transgressive Dance of the Seven
Veils recalls how Ferré herself takes upon herself the risky act of writing first in English,
interpreting a role for which she is bound to suffer repercussions. By alluding to Wilde‘s
multilingual drama, Ferré underscores her own controversial gesture of writing first in English
and marks House on the Lagoon as a personal rallying point.
Ferré adds to the discussion of language and languaging in and around her texts with
several other multilingual and/or intertextual gestures. She references authors such as Homer,
Shakespeare, Balzac, George Sand, Francisco de Quevedo, Karl Marx, and Edgar Allan Poe, she
depicts Isabel reading Choderlos de Laclos, presumably in the French original (House 311, Casa
332), and, only in the English text, cites Ivan Turgenev (House 72)—who, coincidentally,
famously remarked that ―a writer who did not write only in his mother tongue was a thief and a
pig‖ (qtd. in Pérez Firmat 1). She also speaks of Buenaventura‘s beloved Dobermans, Fausto and

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Mefistófeles; incorporates quotes from Letizia the mother of Napoleon, references artists Marc
Chagall, Antoni Gaudí, and Carlo Crivelli, among others; and writes of Russian, Czech, Italian,
Corsican, and U.S. immigrants to Puerto Rico. Via Quintín, she alludes to Suetonius‘ The
Scandalous Lives of the Caesars and Plutarch‘s Lives of the Noble Romans. In the English text,
Quintín chances upon Isabel‘s hidden manuscript while retrieving a Latin dictionary to look up a
word in the latter text by Plutarch (House 70). Yet, in Spanish, he retrieves a ―diccionario griegoespañol‖ as a part the same action (Casa 86). It is difficult to know whether Ferré is merely
covering in translation for having mistakenly assumed that the text Quintín reads was written in
Latin or if she has him read the text in Latin in the English text in order to subtly emphasize that
Quintín, a native speaker of Spanish and English, is reading a Latin translation. No matter her
motivation, it is likely that all these multilingual and international literary intertexts are pointed
and not casual.
Of particular interest is Ferré‘s discussion of Bernabé, grandfather of Petra who is the
long-time servant to the Mendizabalfamily. Bernabé plans a rebellion in his native Bantu and
fears the punishment of having his tongue cut out more than that of death (House 62, Casa 78).
While introducing his character, Isabel relates that for Bernabé, ―One‘s tongue was so deeply
ingrained, more so than even one‘s religion or tribal pride; it was like a root that went deep into
one‘s body and no one knew exactly where it ended. It was attached to one‘s throat, to one‘s
neck, to one‘s stomach, even to one‘s heart‖ (House 60).

25

Ferré emphasizes with Bernabé‘s

character the importance of one‘s native tongue, of one‘s language loyalty, particularly in the
face of repression—a gesture that she undermines or, at least, complicates by writing and

25

―La lengua de una persona era algo más profundo que la religión o el orgullo tribal. Era una
raíz que penetraba muy adentro del cuerpo, y nadie sabía en realidad dónde terminaba. Estaba
conectada a la garganta, al cuello, al estómago, quién sabe si al mismo corazón‖ (Casa 75).
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authorizing versions of her text in both English and Spanish. Like Bernabé, she revels in the
power of her tongue and/or language, but she presents her tongue as inherently double or
bifurcated, even organizing her own ―secret‖ inter-textual and/or multilingual rebellion against
the traditional parameters of literature and literary translation.
I contend that the very visible multilingual signature that Ferré sprawls across and in
between House on the Lagoon and Casa en la laguna and, also, Maldito amor and Sweet
Diamond Dust is key to understanding these texts and Ferré‘s eventual transformation from a
Puerto Rican author to a transnational Latina writer. Through all of these texts, she emerges as an
ardent champion of bilingualism, a tried advocate for a visible translation practice, and as a
consummate artist both willing to make substantive revisions of her texts from one version to the
next and not unwilling to make accommodations for competing audiences. Considering either set
of her texts, Ferré is, arguably, most adept at examining the ambivalences of language, nation,
and identity that inform her fiction in the space in between her versions of her texts. In the
dissensions between her texts, Ferré extends, colors, and complicates the conversation around
questions central to her public and literary selves. What determines authorship? What constitutes
an original text? What should be the role of the translator? To what extent does writing in one or
another language inform or predispose the possibilities of a literary text? How to account for
apparent historical or ideological imbalances between equally authoritative texts, and how to
formulate a poetics of hybridity? Moreover, what are the advantages and responsibilities of being
a ―bilingual translator,‖ and what are the political ramifications of championing bilingualism?
Only in House on the Lagoon, Isabel recalls how Ernesto Ustariz, a liberal lawyer who marries
the partially black woman whom Quintín‘s brother Ignacio is forbidden from courting, lauds his
daughters‘ bilingualism while insisting they retain the Spanish language by speaking only

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Spanish at home (338). Isabel recounts how Ernesto would tell his daughters, ―For every
language you speak, you‘re worth another person, [. . .]. Each language gives you another set of
tools with which to solve life‘s problems‖ (338). Ernesto‘s words to his daughters reverberate
strongly with the individual and composite portraits of herself that Ferré creates while writing
and rewriting her texts. While determining precisely why and for whom Ferré reinvents herself
across and in between the different versions of her texts will remain elusive, reading her texts in
continuation with each other brings into focus the hesitations, unknowns, and uncertainties that
persist in even her boldest assertions of hybridity or multiculturalism. Ferré tools herself with
each and/or the sum of her languages to examine and reexamine the linguistic, social, and
political polemics that combine and collide in her life and literature.

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Chapter 3
Self-translation and Accommodation: Multilingual Strategies in Gloria Anzaldúa‘s
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas‘ Puppet
The linguistic and social ambivalences of English and Spanish are, perhaps, most
pronounced in the multilingual acrobatics of individual Chicano and/or U.S. Latino authors.
These authors forcefully challenge the perception of Standard American English and/or Standard
American Spanish as pure or self-contained through various strategies of wordplay in their texts,
e.g., code-switching, calquing (writing in a language in a way that recalls another language), or
providing both literal and non-literal translations. By recurring to these and other transgressive
linguistic stratagems they visibly resist both the notion of a monolingual literary text and the
representation, fictional or otherwise, of a static linguistic community.
By titling her English novel ―So Far from God‖ Chicana author Ana Castillo cleverly
recalls Porfirio Diaz‘s famed characterization of ―pobre México‖ as ―tan lejos de Dios tan cerca
de los Estados Unidos‖ and, in the same stroke, emphasizes the strained and porous relations
between Mexico and the U.S. Likewise, by titling his book of poetry AmeRícan, Tato Laviera
signals the confluence and/or conflict of a dual national identity with only a capital letter and an
accent mark. Similarly, by self-identifying as a ―post-Porteño neo-Latino Canadian‖ (75),
Argentine-Canadian author and artist Guillermo Verdecchia makes light of the inadequate
descriptors to account for him and his nationality. Roberto Fernández‘s memorable Abuela
confuses ―cojon‖ with ―go home‖ (148), Luis Valdez‘s nimble Pachuco seamlessly incorporates
English, Spanish, and Spanglish into his narration, e.g., ―¡Órale pues!/ Don‘t take the pinche play
so seriously, Jesús!/ Es puro vacilón!/ Watcha.‖ (78), and Ana Menéndez‘s domino-playing
Máximo creates both humor and heartache in the Spanish-and-English jokes he tells to his exiled

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and immigrant friends—e.g., his tale of a mutt who roughly translates for an ―elegant‖ poodle the
pick-up line, ―O Madre de Dios, si cocinas como caminas…‖ (28). In English, the mutt stumbles
with ―Mamita, you are one hot doggie, yes? I would like to take you to the movies and fancy
dinners‖ (28). These examples, among many others, provide moments of fertile overlap and
cultural confluence which are especially significant given that the majority of Chicano and
1

Latino fiction is written overwhelmingly in English for a mainstream, non-Latino audience. As
Gustavo Pérez-Firmat grimly asserts, ―As the monolingual expression of a largely bilingual
population, Latino literature detaches culture from language, celebrating the former even as it
silences the latter‖ (139). By creating incidences of multilingual play in their texts, Chicano and
other U.S. Latino authors reaffirm, however momentarily, the voices and sounds of the sociallystigmatized variants of Spanglish—Tex-Mex, Caló, Chicano, Nuyorican, Dominican, Cuban
Spanish, etc.—that surface in their texts. They challenge the very presumption of
monolingualism by illustrating the porous borders of Standard English and/or Standard Spanish
and stretch the bounds of North American literatures in either English or Spanish by representing
minority voices within the rapidly emerging but still marginalized canon of Chicano and Latino
literatures.
Of course, certain authors are better able than others to choose to write in English,
Spanish, and/or a combination of both. As Pérez Firmat recounts, ―For every writer like Gloria
Anzaldúa or Roberto Fernández who endeavor to reproduce the actual speech, the idioma, of a
particular group of Latinos, there are several like Cristina Garcia [sic] and Julia Alvarez [sic],
who translate it into something like George Santayana‘s Received Standard English‖ (139).
1

Notable examples of ostensibly ―bi-lingual,‖ Spanish-and-English texts include ―Pollito
Chicken‖ by Puerto Rican author Ana Lydia Vega; the mind-bending Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina
Braschi, also Puerto Rican; and the recent collections of poetry by Ferré and Dorfman, her
Language Duel/ Duelo del Lenguaje and his In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land.
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While the bilingual, biscriptive, and Cuban-born Pérez-Firmat is quick to concede that for many
Latino and Chicano authors English is their native tongue and Spanish informs their literature
primarily as language of heritage, he is decidedly unenthused by the extent to which these same
authors, generally, strive to accommodate a non-Latino audience by acting as literary tour guides
or hasty ethnographers. Following Ernst Rudin‘s scheme for classifying the categories of
Spanish that are used in Chicano literature—into terms of address, high impact terms,
ethnographic terms, culinary terms, and terms for groups of people (Rudin 152)—Pérez Firmat
remarks,
If someone were to attempt to learn Spanish from Latino literature, he‘d be able to
do little else but cuss, pray, make love, and order lunch. Dictated less by the needs
of the story than by the desire to give non-Hispanic readers a taste of the foreign
flavors they came for, Latino literature‘s Hispanicisms turn many of these works
into formula fiction, novels and memoirs written for rather than written by. (142)
His criticisms prompt further, related questions: will the more balanced and contextually-driven
use of codes from both languages make for less formulaic literature?; is it overly optimistic to
assume that bilingual authors can sustainably produce and publish texts that are overtly
multilingual?; and, finally, assuming a bilingual author‘s capacity to write in either and/or a
combination of English and Spanish, should he or she feel obligated to write in a way that
accounts for the social and linguistic marginalization of Spanish and Spanish-speaking peoples in
the U.S.? Less than begging an answer, these questions underscore the binds into which bilingual
Chicano and Latino authors find themselves as they approach the roles of translator,
spokesperson, and cultural mediator in their, often, autobiographical narratives.

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The delicate negotiations of Chicano and/or U.S. Latino writing are ever present in the
signature texts of Chicana authors Gloria Anzaldúa and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas. In the mid1980s, both publish semi-autobiographical, mixed-genre, and inherently multilingual texts that
are well received critically and form the vanguard of Chicana literature. In these texts, both
authors project the possibility of an openly bilingual literary praxis and come to terms with the
mantle of authorial and social responsibility that each presents as inseparable to their formally
transgressive and activist-oriented works. A major difference between their texts is that
Anzaldúa‘s Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is written primarily in English
and is now frequently studied and taught in U.S. universities while Cota-Cárdenas‘ Puppet
(1985) is written primarily in Spanish and remains relatively undiscovered.
I compare Anzaldúa‘s and Cota-Cárdenas‘ respective multilingual strategies to determine
whether the formal or linguistic components of their texts support or undermine the social and
political agendas trumpeted in their literature. In their visible struggles to create voices
appropriate to their narratives, both authors foreground the power and influence of language and
highlight the extent to which a national, standard, written language does not account for the
linguistic variability of its citizens and/or speakers. By alternatively code-switching, offering
literal or contextual translations of loan words, providing either redundant or reworked English
and Spanish versions of a story or an idea, or by simply refusing to translate, both Anzaldúa and
Cota-Cárdenas challenge the notion of an ―invisible‖ translator (Venuti ―The Translator‘s‖ 1) by
forcing their readers to encounter and synthesize relational aspects of the variants of English,
Spanish, and Spanglish that form the meta-language of their texts. However, I maintain that the
sum concessions that each author does or does not make as an intra-textual guide and translator
reveal a significant distinction between the two writers as to how they ultimately approach the

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immense social and cultural responsibility that each insinuates is an essential part of being a
Chicana author and translator. While Anzaldúa presents herself as a willing and confident voice
for ―the New Mestiza,‖ Cota-Cárdenas‘ narrative self is initially tentative and uncertain about her
capacity or her authority to speak or write on behalf of the migrant laborers who seek her help in
securing justice for their mutual friend, ―Puppet.‖ Yet, more often than not, Anzaldúa undercuts
her platform of renewed cultural change and altered social consciousness by translating for or
playing to an Anglophone audience, while Cota-Cárdenas strengthens the at times tentative calls
for action in her text by generally refusing to accommodate either the reader of only English or
Spanish. The decision of whether or not to translate looms in both of these groundbreaking texts.
I examine the apparent motivations and social implications behind Anzaldúa‘s and CotaCárdenas‘ language choices and explore how the linguistic and/or translational aspects of their
texts support, complicate, and/or contradict the claims that each sets forth in their literature.

Theory and Translation in Anzaldúa‘s Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza
I admit that the whole of my argument concerning how Anzaldúa‘s and Cota-Cárdenas‘
acts of translation relate to the central arguments of their texts builds on the false opposition
between, on the one hand, the social or theoretical discourse of a text and, on the other, the
formal praxis of the author—in that the two usually overlap or collapse into one another. As
Alfred Arteaga argues in his comprehensive study of Chicano poetics, ―the study of literary style

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2

is inextricably bound up with that of discursive practice‖ (70-71). I emphasize that one cannot
fully distinguish between the formal and discursive nor the linguistic and social markers of a
text—as the signs of a literary text, like the signs of language, are present in a relational web
rather than as stand-alone factors in an equation. However, I maintain that by attempting to
separate questions of form and content in the literature of both Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas, I
illustrate the interdependency of language and discourse in their texts and highlight both the
possibilities and problems of their inherently multilingual messaging.
In Borderlands/La frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa is openly unapologetic about the
multilingual gestures within her text. She reiterates, on both a formal and a discursive level,
linguistic difference as a primary characteristic of the border community from which she narrates
and touts her multilingualism as an important asset in theorizing a larger border culture or
consciousness. While the physical border that Anzaldúa grapples with is the border between the
U.S. and Mexico, she emphasizes that she is as concerned with the kinds of intangible borders
that divide and define human society. In the preface to her semi-autobiographical memoir she
asserts, ―The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are
not particular to the [U.S.] Southwest‖ (np). Likewise, she insinuates the larger ramifications of
2

Arteaga sees interlingualism as a defining characteristic of Chicano literature, in particular
Chicano poetry. He argues, ―the speech [of the Chicano subject and/or text] is interlingual in that
it not only acknowledges a confluence of difference but emphasizes the factor of hybridity. It
readily permits a fluidity in conceiving race and homeland by treating these concepts as
categories of concepts that are composed of multiple and conflicting texts‖ (17). Accordingly,
more than other inter- or multilingual texts which make ―polyglot poetics‖ (69) a point of
aesthetic play or tension, interlingual Chicano texts better interrogate categorical totalizations,
given that the linguistic structuring of these texts is already a politicized act which reflects on
and responds to the conflictive realities of the space of the border. As Arteaga elaborates: ―The
border as discursive and existential fact does something to the interpretation of Chicano writing.
It removes the discussion of the styles of linguistic interplay from the realm of the aesthetic alone
because the border is a space where English and Spanish compete for presence and authority. It
is not the site of mere either/or linguistic choice but one of quotidian linguistic conflict where the
utterance is born at home in English and in Spanish and in caló‖ (70).
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the linguistic concerns of her text when makes the controversial declaration, ―So, if you want to
really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I
am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself‖ (59). She
posits both her linguistic and social marginalization as platforms upon which she builds her
authority as a writer and thinker. In statements such as ―Colored homosexuals have more
knowledge of other cultures‖ (85), ―En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the
mestiza‖ (80), ―In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures‖ (81), and ―I, for
one, choose to use some of my energy to serve as mediator‖ (85), her narrative self confidently
claims the helm of enunciation.
Anzaldúa goes so far as to mandate a future in which she as an author will not have to
translate her text—presumably because the minority literature of the ―new mestiza‖ will be
recognized as legitimate or mainstream. She first voices this imperative in the preface to her text,
in the form of an invitation to ―you,‖ presumably the hegemonic, monolingual Anglo-American
reader. She writes, ―Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you—from
the new mestizas‖ (np). Similarly, in the same passage in which she links ethnic and linguistic
identity, she declares, ―Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having
always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak
Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them
accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate‖ (59). She bases her ideal of a more inclusive
and pluralistic community on the requisite transformation of the imaginaries of the AngloAmerican reader. As Johnson and Michaelsen argue in Border Theory, she presents Spanish
American writing ―as a kind of final destination for all world writing‖ (12). By explicitly
refusing to translate or make accommodations for her more white-identified reader, Anzaldúa

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proposes a ―new consciousness‖ (78) remarkably like that consciousness which is already her
own. Instead of merely emphasizing the difference and the validity of her own point of view, she
privileges her own stance of enunciation.
Yet, as I indicated earlier, the formal aspects of Anzaldúa‘s text are more ambivalent and
less uncompromising. Rather than negating the act of translation in her novel, Anzaldúa, like
many other Chicano authors, actually foregrounds translation by taking great pains to define,
explain, or contextualize those non-English aspects of her text for her readers. As Rudin argues,
most Chicano authors essentially function in the role of translators in that the implied authors
and the narrators of their texts frequently mediate between Anglo and Mexican American
contexts by translating linguistic and cultural differences for their readers (60). In an interview
with Andrea Lunsford, Anzaldúa acknowledges the mediative role of her narrative self within
her text—the balancing act into which she is caught as she tries to play to her different
audiences. She relates:
I have to weigh things. [. . .] If I write in this style and I code-switch too much
and I go into Spanglish too much and I do an associative kind of logical
progression in a composition, am I going to lose those people that I want to affect,
to change? Am I going to lose the respect of my peers—who are other writers and
other artists and academicians—when I change too much, when I change not only
the style, but also the rhetoric, the way this is done? (41)
She concedes her struggle with what Pérez Firmat describes as ―writing for‖ instead of writing
by‖ (142). The contours of this struggle recur in the linguistic and translational aspects of
Borderlands/La Frontera, which suggest that Anzaldúa‘s primary audience, the pointed ―you‖ of
her preface, consists of those readers who speak only English as first-language.

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On a purely statistical level, her text is overwhelmingly in English. The author of the
summary of the text on the desk-jacket for the first, Aunt Lute edition promises that English
readers will understand the Spanish phrases ―in context.‖ Were the text to be translated, it is
likely that the English portions of the text would be translated and the Spanish portions would
remain in order to exemplify the local or vernacular aspects of the text. Moreover, almost every
multilingual gesture in the novel is accounted for by some kind of discursive explanation or other
3

strategy of translation. As Rudin argues, Chicano authors who incorporate Spanish into their
primarily English texts alternate between methods of translation: strategies of literal translation
(double naming and the pairing of words through and/or statements); of non-literal translation
(paraphrasing, explanation, or summary); of translation by contextualization (the explaining of a
word through an action/reaction scheme, by association, antonymy, synecdoche or metonymy);
or non-translation, the least common of strategies (124-51). Anzaldúa makes recourse to all of
the above strategies, usually with the end result of catering to the reader of English and not
Spanish. Her translations, literal or otherwise, evidence the extent to which she as an author and
as a discursive subject is willing to meet her Anglo other halfway, if not further. The criticisms
and lack of inclusivity toward an Anglo American perspective that surface within her border
theorizations—e.g., ―Gringo accept the doppelganger in your psyche‖ (86)—are frequently
mitigated by the eagerness with which Anzaldúa reaches out to her Anglo American reader
through the formal and/or translational aspects of her text.

3

The second half of the book, Un Agitado Viento/ Ehécatl, The Wind, includes several
untranslated poems, entirely in Spanish. The translational poetics of her poems are less
conciliatory than in Borderlands/La Frontera. I consider these poems a separate text, largely
because of how the book as a whole is formatted (Borderlands has its own section of endnotes).
Also, I am persuaded by Jane Hedley‘s argument that since Anzaldúa speaks of ―this book I‘m
almost finished writing‖ (66) in the sixth chapter of Borderlands it is possible she only added the
second half at the publisher‘s request, to make the book more substantial (51).
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Anzaldúa characterizes her writing as shifting, emerging, and ―threatening to spill over
the boundaries‖ (66). She also describes it as ―a hybridization of metaphor, different species of
ideas [. . .] full of variations and contradictions‖ (66). As concerns code-switching or the
interplay between Spanish and English in her text, her appraisal of her craft seems accurate. For
the most part, English, Spanish, and Spanglish flow seamlessly throughout her text. While
―Standard English‖ is the language that predominates in Borderlands/La Frontera—Anzaldúa
claims she speaks it along with ―Working class and slang English,‖ ―Standard Spanish,‖
―Standard Mexican Spanish,‖ ―North Mexican Spanish dialect,‖ ―Chicano Spanish,‖ ―Tex-Mex,‖
and ―Pachuco‖ or ―caló‖ (55)—its boundaries are often disrespected by Anzaldúa. The linguistic
varieties and national voices depicted in her text are, per the norm, non-standard, unofficial
and/or undocumented. Anzaldúa‘s willingness to legitimize or even ―legalize‖ these voices is
from the outset productive of a ―new‖ paradigm of literary practice.

4

Her transgressive methods are readily apparent in the first chapter of her text, ―The
Homeland, Aztlán/ El otro México.‖ As the somewhat disparate chapter title suggests, Anzaldúa
revisits the region of the U.S. Southwest borderlands—the original, mythical Chicano
homeland—and emphasizes both the singularities and contingencies of the region vis-à-vis the
U.S. and Mexico. She paints the borderlands as a ―vague and undetermined place‖ (3), a place of
―[a]mbivalence and unrest‖ (4), ―una herida abierta‖ and ―a no-man‘s‖ land (12), and portrays
herself as uniquely able to bridge worlds ―gabacho‖ and ―mojado‖ (3). She, for instance,
declares in the Spanish-language conclusion to and/or reprise of the mostly English poem that
opens her chapter, ―Yo soy un puente tendido/ del mundo gabacho al del mojado,/ lo pasado me
4

Admittedly, the politically-charged rhetoric of the current debate about immigration in the
U.S., e.g., ―illegal‖ vs. ―undocumented,‖ somewhat post-dates Anzaldúa‘s text. Still, I think it is
productive to show how both non-standard languages and ―undocumented‖ peoples are similarly
problematic within traditional literary or national discourses.
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estirá pa‟ „trás/ y lo presente pa‟ „delante./ Que la Virgen de Guadalupe me cuide/ Ay ay ay, soy
mexicana de este lado‖ (3). She grounds her narrative authority in her capacity to both straddle
and move beyond the social and linguistic boundaries that divide cultures and peoples north and
south of the border. Especially through her attention to the speech in and around her familial
home in South Texas, she uses her pulpit to give voice to the hybrid or extra-national language of
her homeland—as when her strongly autobiographical narrator recreates the voice of her mother:
―Drought hit South Texas,‖ my mother tells me. ―La tierra se puso bien seca y los
animales comenzaron a morrirse de se‟. Mi papá se murío de un heart attack
dejando a mamá pregnant y con ocho huercos, with eight kids and one on the
way. Yo fuí la mayor, tenía diez años. The next year the drought continued y el
ganado got hoof and mouth. Se calleron in droves en las pastas y el brushland,
pansas blancas ballooning to the skies. El siguiente año still no rain. Mi pobre
madre viuda perdió two-thirds of her ganado. A smart gabacho lawyer took the
land away mamá hadn‘t paid taxes. No hablaba inglés, she didn‘t know how to
ask for time to raise the money.‖ (8)
In this somewhat extreme example, Anazaldúa incorporates both English and Spanish voices into
her narrative. She favors a truly bilingual approach in this passage even though the substance of
the recollection can be understood in context for readers of either language. By pairing Spanish
articles with English nouns, e.g., un heart attack and el brushland, she points to the literal
amalgamation of said linguistic difference, the convergence and/or the dissolution of Standard
American English and Standard Mexican Spanish. Admittedly, the mere interchange between
English and Spanish does not make the text suddenly plural or dissolute as the etymologies of
any of the individual English or Spanish words would indicate that they are also already multiple

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and mixed. However, through her fluid interweaving of the two languages, Anzaldúa‘s makes
her text more one and plural; she indicates the legitimacy of Chicano Spanish as a stand-alone
language and emphasizes the permeability of the perceived linguistic constraints of both English
and Spanish.
Through the multilingual gestures of her text she champions a hybrid poetics dually
vilified and celebrated by authors and critics within the circles of Latin American and U.S.
5

Latino/a literatures. By refusing to ―tame [her] wild tongue‖ (53), she allies herself and her text
with those who promote the multilingual and postcolonial possibilities of Chicano writing. As
Arteaga suggests,
[I]nasmuch as Chicano discourse is specifically multilingual and multivoiced, it
further undermines the tendency toward single language and single-voiced
monologues, that is it undermines Anglo-American monologism. It undercuts
claims of prevalence, centrality, and superiority, and confirms the condition of
heteroglossia. It draws the monolingual into dialogue. In short, it dialogizes the
authoritative discourse. (73)
Similarly, Emily Hicks projects that ―by choosing a strategy of translation rather than
representation, border writers ultimately undermine the distinction between original and alien
culture‖ (xxiii). In the same vein, Frances Aparicio argues that by displacing the monolingual
American reader and by producing texts that require cross-cultural competency, bilingual U.S.
Latino and Latina writers call for a reshaping or reenvisioning of the ideals and embodiments of
cultural literacy (800). In declarations such as, ―we are suffering from [. . .] an absolute despot

5

Famous detractors of ―Spanglish‖ include Mexican authors Octavio Paz and Carlos Monsiváis,
while noted proponents of a multilingual praxis, in addition to those already discussed in this
project, include Ilán Stavans, Doris Sommer, and Debra Castillo.
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duality that says we are able to be only one or the other‖ (19) or ―As a mestiza I have no country
[. . .] I am participating in the creation of yet another culture‖ (81), Anzaldúa squarely aligns
herself with the most optimistic prognoses of Chicano poetics.
Yet, what literary or translational strategies qualify as ―Chicano,‖ ―border,‖ hybrid, bi-,
inter-, trans- and/or multi-lingual, and how and when do these multilingual gestures actually
work to displace the monolingual reader and/or favor a multilingual praxis? As Rudin argues,
code-switching and the other translational and even non-translational strategies of Chicano texts
may, in the end, work to favor the monolingual, Anglo reader. Using Rudolfo Anaya‘s Bless Me
Última as an example, Rudin claims, ―Paradoxical as it may sounds, the bilingual reader loses
from knowing Spanish, while the monolingual reader wins from not knowing it‖ (225). He
explains that many of the Spanish language entries in Anaya‘s novel are ―contextually
‗cushioned‘‖ and indicates that for the bilingual reader several of his translations seem
―unmotivated,‖ slow, and redundant (225). Anzaldúa implicates herself in this kind of
redundancy by compensating for the non-English aspects of her text through strategies of literal
or contextual translation. Hedley underlines this penchant toward repetition in more glowing
terms, when she argues that Anzaldúa‘s text ―assumes coherence from a reader‘s perspective not
through narrative chronology and not by sustaining a discursive argument, but through repetition
and recapitulation, the structural hallmarks of Anzaldúa‘s mythographic approach‖ (46).
Whatever the motivation, is it possible that in trying to displace the monolingual reader of her
text Anzaldúa may have achieved precisely the opposite effect.
Her care to accommodate her English reader is manifest in the following episode in her
text, in which Anzaldúa describes her encounter with her ―tono,‖ what she defines as her ―animal
counterpart‖ (26):

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Once we were chopping cotton in the fields of Jesus Maria Ranch. All around us
the woods. Quelite towered above me, choking the stubby cotton that had outlived
the deer‘s teeth.
I swung el azadón hard. El quelite barely shook, showered nettles on my arms and
face. When I heard the rattle the world froze.
I barely felt its fangs. Boot got all the veneno. My mother came shrieking, swing
her hoe high, cutting the earth, the writhing body. (26)
Anzaldúa explains all of the italicized words in this passage in context. ―Quelite‖ is understood
to be a weed in that it is in a field, it ―chok[es]‖ the cotton, and it has ―nettles‖ just as ―el
azadón‖ is understood to be a tool like a hoe insomuch as it swung at a kind of weed and
Anzaldúa‘s narrative self has already stated for the reader that she was ―chopping cotton in the
fields.‖ Likewise, the English reader recognizes that ―veneno‖ is poison or venom (already a
close English cognate) because Anzaldúa prefaces the word with the mention of a ―rattle‖ and
―fangs‖ and follows the word with the image of her mother screaming and swinging her hoe at
―the writhing body.‖ The Spanish used in this passage doesn‘t create a voice for a marginalized
linguistic community so much as it creates an other-worldly or mythical presence in her text. As
a proper noun, ―El Quelite‖ is personified and becomes almost menacing, and both ―el azadón‖
and ―[el] veneno‖ seem more than their English counterparts. Her care for her English reader is
solicitous, if not gratuitous. She not only cushions in context the italicized words in this passage,
but she explicitly defines each word in a separate endnote, further undermining her stated efforts
to legitimize her ―bastard language‖ and transform her Anglo reader (preface). Spanish, in this
instance, becomes a means of enhancing rather than diminishing the monolingual English
reader‘s experience with the text.

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I do not discount Anzaldúa‘s more aggressive attempts to upend the reading experience
of her monolingual reader. As she herself explains regarding her expectations of the codeswitching in her text, ―Code-switching jerks readers out of their world and makes each think,
‗Oh, this is my world, this is another world, this is her world where she does this, where it‘s
possible to say words in Spanish.‘ It‘s like taking the counterclockwise and injecting into the
clockwise‖ (Lunsford 59). Accordingly, she includes several, multi-paragraph Spanish entries in
her text that are unabashedly inaccessible to the monolingual English reader. Still, the content of
these lengthier Spanish segments is usually summarized or reworked into the text (what Rudin
describes as strategies of non-literal translation) and the monolingual English reader is often able
to grasp the crux of the foreign passages through familiar cognates. Moreover, as Rudin argues,
even the disorientation of the monolingual reader in the event of non-translation can create
suspense and intrigue within the text. He explains that ―For a reader that does not know Spanish,
the passage builds up and releases various tensions, while the bilingual reader is left with an
impression of needless redundancy and excessive repetition‖ (226). Likewise, the gross effect of
even Anzaldúa‘s most alienating gestures toward her Anglo reader is suspect. In some instances,
she obligates her Anglo reader to reflect on what he/she cannot understand and calls attention to
the manifold ambiguities and unknowns that characterize so-called cross- or multicultural
communication. Still, in more instances, she clearly plays to her monolingual reader by
heightening the suspense of her narrative and mires the bilingual reader in a more sluggish and
repetitive text.
Anzaldúa, for example, offers divergent Spanish and English versions of her account of
the legend of the appearance of la Virgen de Guadalupe to Juan Diego. While in Spanish she
adopts a poetic and sentimental approach to the encounter, her English retelling of the event is

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more ethnographic and didactic. The Spanish version is an approximately twenty-line poem that
relates in folk-tale fashion the story of ―[el] pobre indio‖ Juan Diego (28):
El nueve de diciembre del año 1531/ a las cuatro de la madrugada/ un pobreindio
que se llamaba Juan Diego/ iba cruzando el cerro de Tepeyác/ cuando oyó un
canto de pájaro./ Alzó al cabeza vío que en la cima del cerro/ estaba cubierta con
una brillante nube blanca./ Parada en frente del sol/ sobre una luna creciente/
sostenida por un ángel/ estaba una azteca/ vestida en ropa de india./ Nuestra
Señora María de Coatlalopeuh/ se le apareció./ “Juan Diegito [sic], El-quehabla-como-águila,”/ la Virgen le dijo en el lenguaje azteca./ “Para hacer mi
altar este cerro eligo./ Dile a tu gente que yo soy la madre de Dios,/ a los indios
yo les ayudaré.”/ Estó se lo contó a Juan Zumarraga/ pero el obispo no le creyo./
Juan Diego volvió, lleño su tilma/ con rosas de castilla/ creciendo
milagrosamente en la nieve,/ Se las llevó al obispo,/ y cuando abrío su tilma/ el
retrato de la Virgen/ ahí estaba pintado. (28)
As if recounting a story long familiar to her, Anzaldúa reimagines the physical attributes of the
two characters and recreates the Virgin‘s words to Juan Diego. She speaks to him tenderly,
referring to him with the affectionate ―Diegito‖ and using the familiar ―tu.‖ The tone of this
excerpt is a stark departure from Anzaldúa‘s less proverbial and more informational English
version of the event, which immediately follows. Anzaldúa writes:
Guadalupe appeared on December 9, 1531, on the spot where the Aztec goddess,
Tonantsi (―Our Lady Mother‖), had been worshipped by the Nahuas and where a
temple to her had stood. Speaking Nahua, she told Juan Diego, a poor Indian
crossing Tepeyac Hill, whose Indian name was Cuautlaohuac and who belonged

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to the mazehual class, the humblest with the Chichimeca tribe, that her name was
María Coatlalopeuh. Coatl is the Nahautl word for serpent. Lopeuh means ‗the
one who has dominion over serpents,‘ I interpret this as ‗the one who is one with
the beasts.‘ Some spell her name, Coatlaxopeuh (pronounced ―Cuatlashupe‖ in
Nahuatl) and say the ―xopeuh‖ means ―crushed or stepped on with disdain.‖ Some
say it means, ―she who crushed the serpent,‖ with the serpent as the symbol of the
indigenous religion, meaning that her religion was to take the place of the Aztec
religion. Because Coatlalopeuh was homophonous to the Spanish Guadalupe, the
Spanish identified her with the dark Virgin, Guadalupe, patroness of West Central
Spain. From that meeting, Juan Diego walked away with the image of la Virgen
painted on his cloak. Soon after, Mexico ceased to belong to Spain, and la Virgen
de Guadalupe began to eclipse all the other male and female religious figures in
Mexico, Central America and parts of the U.S. Southwest. ―Desde entonces para
el mexicano ser Guadalupano es algo esencial/ Since then for the Mexican, to be
a Guadalupano is something essential.‖ (28-29)
She restates all of the essential details of the story as first told in Spanish—the date, the place,
the persons involved, and the outcome—and adds to her English rendition of the story a lengthy
digression as to the cultural and spiritual significance of the encounter. Seemingly, Anzaldúa
compensates for the unknowns in her previous Spanish version of the event by doing more
explaining or ethnographic contextualizing in English. The many ethnographic asides in the
English paraphrasing of the legend are dizzying—she expands on Juan Diego‘s Indian ancestry,
tells how to pronounce Coatlaxopeuh in Nahautl, alleges a linguistic and cultural link between
the Aztec and Spanish cults of la Virgen, and, ultimately, builds a rationale for her subsequent

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declaration, first in Spanish and then in English, of the significance of being ―Guadalupano.‖
Aside from having access to a more intimate, folkloric version of the same story the bilingual
reader has very little, if any, advantage over the Anglo reader in apprehending or experiencing
the text. The preceding twenty lines of Spanish do not displace the monolingual reader so much
as they illustrate the extent to which Anzaldúa as writer and as translator calculates what aspects
of a story she should reiterate, leave out, or expand upon in her English narration in order to
accommodate or provide context for the reader of only English.
The normative use of Spanish in the text suggests that Anzaldúa‘s primary reader is
monolingual; Spanish is the ―other‖ language marked by italics and accounted for by
parentheses, footnotes, repetition, context, and other strategies of translation. Anzaldúa‘s
characteristic prose consists of redundant statements such as ―Soy nopal de castilla like the
spineless and therefore defenseless cactus that Mamagrande Ramona grew in the back of her
shed‖ (45), ―Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huérfanos—we speak an orphan
tongue‖ (58), and/or ―Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying
tales are all signs of being mal criada‖ (54).‖ Typically, she incorporates aspects of local speech
into her narrative while keeping her English reader informed of any perceived gaps in content.
For instance, in the lengthy Spanish passage in which she expands on the shame that she felt at
being different or abnormal within her culture and family, Anzaldúa keeps the attention of the
English reader with the refrain of ―Esa Gloria‖ (44) that recurs throughout the passage. This
refrain, paired with the fact that Anzaldúa sandwiches the Spanish excerpt in between English
portions of text that reiterate the circumstances under which her narrative self comes to terms
with her alterity (43-44), signals to the English reader that the passage relates to the author‘s
period of self-repudiation and discovery. Anzaldúa nurses her English-only reader through most

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of the inaccessible portions of her the text, softening via translation her more aggressive gestures
toward her Anglo-American audience, e.g., ―We need you to accept the fact that Chicanos are
different, to acknowledge your rejection and negation of us‖ (85) and ―the dominant white
culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance‖ (86).
However, while Anzaldúa keeps her monolingual reader informed as to any major
breaches in content, the English-only reader does on occasion miss out on the poetry and the
vernacular of her writing in Spanish. This is the case when Anzaldúa recounts, first in English
and then in Spanish, the expectation within Chicano culture that women become wives and
mothers. In English she states rather plainly, ―Educated or not, the onus is still on woman to be a
wife/mother—only the nun can escape motherhood. Women are made to feel total failures if they
don‘t marry and have children‖ (17). In Spanish, she follows with a more pointed and lively
exchange that punctuates the aberrance of her lesbian identity within her local community, ―¿Y
cuándo te casas, Gloria? Se te va a pasar el tren.” Y yo les digo, “Pos si me caso, no va a ser
con un hombre.” Se quedan calladitas. Sí, soy hija de la Chingada. I‟ve always been her
daughter. No „tes chingando‖ (17). Though it is possible that the monolingual reader could intuit
a portion of the dialogue given the timing of the question to the narrator and a basic
understanding of Spanish, in this instance the bilingual reader has exclusive access a more
intimate and vivid sound bite of the voices informing Anzaldúa‘s depiction of the tensions
surrounding her sexual identity. Likewise, only in Spanish does Anzaldúa include the resolute
declaration, ―Ya verás tan bajo que me he caído. Aquí no más encerrada en mi cuarto,
sangrándome la cara con las uñas. Esa Gloria que rechaza entregarse a su destino. Quiero
contenerme, no puedo y desbordo. Vas ha [sic] ver lo alto que voy a subir, aquí vengo‖ (44) or
the strong accusation that ―El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua‖ (54). While the

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untranslated excerpts of Anzaldúa‘s text typically do not convey essential content that is not
expressed elsewhere, they often provide color, emotion, or lyricism not reproduced by her
various strategies of translation.
If on the one hand, Anzaldúa mitigates her strong criticisms of a presumably white,
hegemonic North-American culture by her persistent catering to the Anglo-reader via translation,
on the other she challenges the dominant expectations of literary practice and interpretation by
attempting to normalize a multilingual or, at least, multi-voiced text. The unresolved tensions in
her approach to both writing and translating are instructive in that they point to the fine line
between making a caricature of a local language and community and providing a reality-based
portrait of a group of people for Chicano/a and/or Latino/a writers. Chicana author Ana Castillo
reveals her cynicism toward the first approach in Chicano literature when she writes:
On the one hand, we may choose to adopt standard English and white writing
standards, using material from our cultural heritage as a ‗motif.‘ This, in my
opinion, would reduce our poetry to Oaxacan paper cuts strung from beam to
beam; white standards the firm structure, with Hispanic flourishes lending the
local color that sanctions the celebrated fallacy of the melting pot. (Massacre 167)
Castillo resents the way in which Spanish words are used to ―decorate‖ the otherwise
monolingual text; she insinuates that instead of promoting multiculturalism such a practice can
encourage the trivialization if not the subordination of the Hispanic culture. Similarly, Pérez
Firmat posits that:
Like other ethnic writing, Latino literature is bound to a pedagogical imperative
that requires it not only to distract, entertain, elevate, but also teach; it must be útil
as well as dulce (de guayaba). And what does Latino literature teach? For the

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most part, what its readers already know, or think they know about Latinos,
Latinas, and Latin Americans: that they are slightly wacky, somewhat mysterious,
very sensuous, and definitely spiritual. (140)
Thus, for the Chicano and/or U.S. Latino author the task of translating is increasingly onerous
and thorny insomuch as he/she feels obligated to string along the monolingual reader and, at the
same time, break down social and cultural barriers in a way that does not perpetuate current
power structures. This dilemma is apparent in Anzaldúa‘s text insomuch as she offers herself as a
―mediator‖ between ―men and women of color‖ and ―white society‖ (85), and she also celebrates
not having to ―rendir cuentas a nadie‖ (21) because, in her words, ―unlike Chicanas and other
women of color who grew up white or who have only recently returned to their native cultural
roots, I was totally immersed in mine‖ (21).
I do not want to argue that the literary value of a Chicano text stems from how much or
how appropriately Spanish is used in a text—nor do I want to create an argument about the
authenticity of the author—so much as I hope to emphasize that skepticism toward the penchant
for code-switching and translation in the multilingual text is productive when the author takes
upon him or herself the role of community spokesperson or representative; In trying to both write
and/or translate for an Anglo audience and speak on behalf of a marginalized community,
Chicano and/or Latino authors enter a minefield of essentialisms and unsubstantiated
generalizations.
The problem of Nahuatl in her text, or as Anzaldúa refers to it, the ―sprinkling of
Nahuatl‖ (preface np) further illustrates the slippery slope upon which Chicano authors position
themselves when they recur to language as adornment—when they cherry-pick individual words
of language in order to support larger claims about a culture or group of people. There is hardly

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anything fluent or convergent about Anzaldúa‘s recourse to this indigenous language. Most of
the Nahuatl words in the text are mythological names that are seemingly untranslatable for their
character as sacred designations and invocations. The problem with this word-level borrowing is
that it has the effect of infantilizing or fetishing the language by isolating it from its larger
linguistic context. As it stands, Anzaldúa‘s text not only characterizes Nahuatl as mythological
and magical but as pre-linguistic and premodern. By ―sprinkling‖ her text with bits of Nahuatl—
by invoking the likes of Coatlalopeuh, Huitzilopochtil, and the mythic homeland of Aztlán—she
aims to create a mythological foundation for her text, and as a result, a privileged stance of
enunciation for herself as subject and speaker. More than her use of Spanish and Spanglish in the
text, her borrowing of Nahautl words seems motivated or, at least, limited by essentialist notions
of the larger Aztec and Nahua cultures.
Yet, is there a correct, responsible way to write a multilingual text? Could or should
6

strategies of code-switching or word-level borrowing be standardized? For whom, if anyone,
should Chicano or U.S. Latino authors write? Moreover, are Anzaldúa‘s fears that she will ―lose
the people‖ (Lundsford 41) that she wants to affect or change on account of the trans- or
multilingual gestures of her text founded? Ernst Rudin implicitly counters her concern when he
asks, ―Why should we require intelligibility from the authors of ―New Literatures‖ if we
celebrate at the same time the cryptic texts of consecrated and canonized writers? [. . .] And why
should the use of foreign language entries be regarded as an asset in The Waste Land and in the
Cantos but as a drawback in multicultural texts?‖ (223-24). The question that looms over
6

In ―Revolution Through Poetic Language: Bilingualism in Latina Poetry from la frontera,‖
Jeraldine Kraver is critical of the efforts of Chicano writer Gary Keller, along with sociolinguist
Guadalupe Valdés Fallis, to ―codify the process of code-switching, imposing on the practice a set
of acceptable situational parameters or qualitative standards.‖ She claims that the standardization
of the practice would work against the ―instinctual types of urges that motivate [Latino/a]
writers‖ and cites as an example the writing of Chicana author Cherríe Moraga (194).
155

Anzaldúa‘s Borderlands/La Frontera is whether her efforts to make her writing ―intelligible‖ for
her Anglo reader undermine the transformative aspirations of her text? Her visible translational
wranglings attest to the extent to which her ostensibly multilingual text is in the end quite
univocal. While her multilingual poetics are, at times, productive of a ―third place,‖ she
frequently infringes upon the linguistic sovereignty of this new space through her reluctance to
truly abandon the borders established for and by the Anglo reader. Certainly, the dissonances
between Anzaldúa‘s uncompromising theorizations of the border and her conciliatory strategies
of translation should not lead the reader to discount the larger possibilities of her text. As Rudin
asserts, ―novels do not stand or fall by their use of bilingual techniques‖ (230). However, I hope
to emphasize in contrast to or, perhaps, along with Anzaldúa that she hampers the creation of
―new‖ or ―third‖ place by her hesitance to displace or wholly upend the literary expectations of
the monolingual reader.

Theory and Non-Translation in Cota-Cárdenas‘ Puppet
While Anzaldúa‘s narrative self touts her inherent mestiza ambivalence and her ―total
immersion‖ in her ―native cultural roots‖ (21) as grounds for the authority of her narration,
Margarita Cota-Cárdenas‘ semi-autobiographical protagonist worries that she is disconnected
from the larger Chicano movement and culture and fears that she is inadequate to represent her
migrant worker friends in their quest to make public the unjust murder of their friend ―Puppet‖—
whose story both the author and the protagonist attempt to narrate. As Desireé Martín argues,
Cota-Cárdenas‘ ―Petra ‗Pat‘ Leyva is relentlessly plagued by what she perceives to be her
inability to embody an authentic Chicana self‖ (91). However, as Martín also insinuates, through
Petra‘s insistence on her placelesseness within Chicano society Cota-Cárdenas, at the same time,

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establishes herself as a cultural mediator, Chicana spokesperson, and community activist.
Because she does not fully identify with any of the groups depicted in her text—her Chicano
activist friends, her academic friends, her Mexican friends, the migrant construction workers for
the contracting company where Pat is an administrative assistant, and the farm laborers that her
family housed in her childhood—she also somewhat identifies with all of them.
Anzaldúa implicates herself in this nowhere-but-everywhere positioning when she writes,
―A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy‖ (85). Like Anzaldúa, CotaCárdenas builds a case for the exceptionalism and versatility of her narrator/protagonist. Yet,
more than Anzaldúa, Cota-Cárdenas quietly and steadily bolsters the authoritative claims of her
narration by the bold linguistic or formal strategies of her text. I concur with Martín in arguing
that in its ―radical interrogation of language and translation‖ the first edition of Puppet ―deviates
from the now dominant mode of hybrid identities and liminal, transnational spaces‖ as in
Borderlands/La Frontera and other more well-known Chicano texts (91-92). Instead of
foregrounding the act of translation in her text, Cota-Cárdenas actually negates the possibility of
translation by building her narrative around a chorus of competing and unfiltered transnational
voices in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. These voices combine and collide such that they
indicate the permeability of national languages and challenge the traditional parameters of
literary practice and interpretation. Through her unflinching multilingualism in Puppet, CotaCárdenas founds a ―new‖ place of enunciation like that space envisioned, but never fully
realized, in Anzaldúa‘s Borderlands/La Frontera.
Comparing these two novels and their authors provides many productive points of
contrast, especially considering the circumstances surrounding their publication and reception.
While Borderlands/La Frontera has birthed a virtual industry of secondary criticism since its

157

publication in 1987, relatively little has been published about Cota-Cárdenas‘ 1985 Puppet or her
other works of prose and poetry. Withstanding the novel‘s status as an ―underground classic‖
(Rebolledo xv) and its resurgence in Chicano literary circles following the bilingual edition of
the novel by University of New Mexico Press in 2000, there are still only a handful of secondary
7

articles and/or book chapters relevant to Puppet and Cota-Cárdenas‘ other works. The vast
disproportion between the two authors‘ readerships highlights the difficulties Cota-Cárdenas
faced in trying to publish her predominantly Spanish novel in the U.S. literary market. As Martín
Rodríguez asserts, ―si publicar siendo mujer resulta ya difícil, unirle las dificultades de publicar
8

en español lo convierte en una tarea casi imposible‖ (68). Similarly, Tey Rebolledo posits,
―Because it was written in Spanish and published by a small press, Puppet had its distribution
problems from the start. With no wide distribution system for sending out books, readership
suffered‖ (xiv-xv). While Cota-Cárdenas published her text with the diminutive Relámpago
Press in Austin, Anzaldúa was able to link her novel with the growing cadre of texts surrounding
the women‘s movement in the U.S. by publishing with the burgeoning Aunt Lute Books/
7

The MLA International Bibliography, for instance, lists only two peer-reviewed articles of
literary criticism directly concerned with Puppet—as well as two interviews with the author, an
article of literary biography, and two dissertations that partially discuss the novel. These works
of criticism, in addition to a couple of articles about Cota-Cárdenas‘ poetry, a number of articles
of secondary criticism written by Cota-Cárdenas herself, and a few other secondary articles and
book chapters relevant to the novel from other sources, comprise the slight secondary
bibliography on Puppet and all of Cota-Cárdenas‘ other texts. A basic search for ―Anzaldúa‖ on
the database nets 240 results (MLA International Bibliography).
8
Martín Rodríguez argues that the neglect of Chicana writers by the early publishing houses
associated with the Chicano Movement, particularly Quinto Sol, compounded the other obstacles
to publishing encountered by these women writers, e.g., lack of educational and professional
opportunities outside of the home and a preference for poetry and shorter fiction. He explains,
―A partir de la institución de los premios anuales Quinto Sol, la novel chicana empieza a conocer
un auge inusitado en la década de 1970: vientiocho novelas publicadas en esa década recogen la
bibliografías más completas; de entre ellas sólo dos son escritas por chicanas y—el detalle es
interesante—ambas son publicadads por cuenta de sus autoras y no en editoriales establecidas‖
(67-68).
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Spinsters press out of San Francisco. According to their website, Aunt Lute remains a non-profit
press aimed at promoting works by and for ―lesbians and women of color‖—especially in its
early instances—―lesbians and women of color‖ who wrote in English. As Martín Rodríguez
explains, early North American feminist presses like Aunt Lute/Spinsters (he also mentions
Naiad and Kitchen Table) had a different intended public than publishing houses associated with
the Chicano movement (70). He argues, ―En ese sentido, el uso del inglés (aun cuando se
conserve una cierta dosis de español) es casi obligatorio, si se quiere llegar a ese público‖ (70).
Accordingly, Cota-Cárdenas hampered her prospects of a larger readership from the outset when
she chose to write her hybrid novel primarily in Spanish. From a marketing standpoint, she failed
to make the linguistic concessions necessary to create a text within the perceived formula for
publishing success.
The lack of a broader readership for her first novel also attests to the extent to which the
unconventional formal and linguistic strategies of the text are challenging and not easily
translatable for a mainstream U.S. audience. Puppet is formidable both for its non-linear, streamof-conscious narrative and the non-translated English, Spanish, and Spanglish voices that
compete in the text. Cota-Cárdenas herself concedes the potential difficulties of her text when
she says, ―Es muy posible que el estilo mosaico de pensamientos, comentarios o frases
autorreferenciales, etc., [. . .], se recibieran o vieran por los lectores como demasiado reto con
que lidiar. Mis libros no son ―safe‖ ni ―fáciles,‖ especialmente en el caso de Puppet‖ (Capdevila
Guitérrez 260). On account of its reeling, self-referential narrative and its linguistic acrobatics
the novel has more affinities with multilingual novels such as Vladimir Nabokov‘s Pale Fire,
Guillermo Cabrera Infante‘s Tres tristes tigres, and Giannina Braschi‘s Yo-Yo Boing! than with
the ostensibly monolingual, bildungsroman-type novels of near Chicano/a contemporaries such

159

as Sandra Cisneros‘ House on Mango Street or Estela Portillo Trambley‘s Trini. As Martín
indicates, ―the language, form, and style of the novel explode strict boundaries at every turn,
symbolically reflecting the transnational condition of Chicano/as in the United States‖ (92). In
Puppet, Cota-Cárdenas does not ―write for‖ so much as she draws the reader into the
unpredictable and likely unfamiliar world of her text as both a pawn and as a collaborator.
The challenges of her narrative and her language are the strongest selling points of her
novel. Unlike Anzaldúa, whose text is full of multilingual moments, the majority of which are
accounted for by some strategy of translation, Cota-Cárdenas offers a multilingual text that
negates the possibility of translation in the traditional sense, insomuch as translating the
individual voices of her text into a standard national language would take away from the overall
9

character or integrity of her larger narrative. Debra Castillo argues that truly ―interlingual‖
literary texts,
defy translation into either of their constituent parts in a particularly strong sense,
for to translate such performative utterances into either Spanish or English would
be to distort them into meaninglessness, to subject them to a kind of linguistic
assimilation and erasure. Such translations could speak to the reader only in a
very limited sense, since they would inextricably dislocate the doubleness of the
language into an unacceptable version of the monolinguism against which these
writers are defining their entire poetics. (12)
Likewise, in the first edition of Puppet, Cota-Cárdenas builds her narrative around the discordant
voices and shifting languages of her protagonists and obligates her reader to plot a course

9

I draw from Rudin‘s distinction between ―bilingualism in literature‖ and bilingual literature,‖
in which ―bi‖ is understood to ―indicate two elements of equal or at least comparable weight,
format, or scope‖ (10).
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through their double, multilingual world. The branding of the 2000 edition of the novel as
―bilingual‖ by University of New Mexico Press is an exaggeration, in that the strongest case for
its ―bilingualism‖ rests on the inclusion of the 1985 edition of the novel on the flipside of the
otherwise predominantly English translation of her novel.

10

Both Rebolledo‘s claims in her

introduction to the new edition that in it the reader is able to access a Chicano reality‖ because
―the English version has uniquely incorporated some Spanish so that reader finds the meaning
through an immediate translation or by context‖ (xv) and Martín‘s insistence that both versions
of Puppet are ―thoroughly multilingual‖ (93) are excessively optimistic. Rather, I argue that on a
formal or a linguistic level the English version of Puppet reads more like Anzaldúa‘s
Borderlands/La Frontera. Apart from occasional asides in Spanish that momentarily disorient
the Anglo reader, the prose is doctored to accommodate and hold the attention of the
monolingual reader, whereas the bi- or multilingual reader encounters a more filtered and
redundant text. At best, the inclusion of Cota-Cárdenas‘s first edition of her novel on the flipside of the English translation speaks to the distance between the successive versions.
I do not lament the wider access afforded by the ―bilingual‖ edition of Puppet so much as
I fear the possibility that the English translation will become the definitive edition of the novel. It
is telling that when Cota-Cárdenas published her second novel, Santuarios del corazón in 2005,
the ―bilingual‖ edition of the novel (i.e., an English translation with the predominantly Spanish
manuscript included afterward) was the first and only edition. The English translation of the new
novel, by Barbara Riess and Trino Sandoval in collaboration with Cota-Cárdenas, is the de facto

10

Cota-Cárdenas is said to have been an active collaborator in this edition. Still, it is ironic that
the ―bilingual‖ edition of her novel results, in part, from the excessive bilingualism of the first
edition of her novel.
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―first‖ or primary access point to her text. Cota-Cárdenas provides implicit context for this latter
decision when she speaks of her decision to authorize the 2000 edition of Puppet. She deadpans,
Mira, es el supermercado en inglés. Tengo que aceptar que vivo aquí, y que
mundialmente, si escribo o traduzco al inglés, más lectores tienen la oportunidad
de—vamos a decirlo claramente—comprar mis libros. Ahora, esas escritoras a
quienes les brota su creatividad en inglés, o mitad/mitad, pues tienen que hacerlo.
Ya planteé mi idea que la voz creativa natural, surge, nace gritando para llorar y
reír después, en el idioma de su alma más más íntima. (Capdevila Gutiérrez 261)
While she concedes the appeal of larger readership and a global literary market, she holds to the
idea that creative forces, not market incentives, should determine the voice or voices of a literary
text.
Earlier in the same interview, she claims that she is motivated by the discursive strategies
of authors such as John Dos Passos, Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, Nellie Campobello,
Rolando Hinojosa, and Tomás Rivera, among others—that these authors prompt her to ―jugar
con el discurso‖ and also ―dejar que hablaran mi(s) narradora(s) o hablantes, como les diera la
real gana‖ (260). In accord with her stated intentions, Puppet, in its first instance, is a profoundly
oral text. Whether in Spanish, English, or Spanglish her characters each have their own, not
readily translatable linguistic signature—as illustrated by lines of dialogue such as PuppetHamlet‘s distinctive ―Vivil o no vivil, ésa es la plegunta..‖ (47), the drug-trafficker Samuel
Longoray‘s hardened Spanglish banter such as, ―Ah come on, compa, no se raje, [. . .] Ve,
Cerote, my compa and me, we‘re like brothers, seguro, puros hermanos, and he‘s no Malinchi, I
tol‘ you‖ (76, Cota-Cárdenas‘ emphasis), or the sardonic narrator‘s characteristic jeering as in
statements like ―A ver, cómo va, cómo va? Ja, ja, ja, a ver qué qué de ‗braun ais‘... ja, ja...,‖ in

162

response to the image of ―BROWN EYES‖ in Petra‘s poem (30).

11

I maintain that the distinctive

timbre and linguistic agility of these characters is either muted or considerably labored in
translation and that the patent inadequacy of the ―bilingual‖ translation speaks to the pioneering
multilingual aesthetics of the novel in its first instance.
The many different characters and voices in Puppet underline the linguistic variability
and versatility of the individuals in U.S. Southwest community depicted in the novel. The main
protagonist, Petra Leyva—also referred to as Pat, Petrita, Patricia, Petru, among other names—
proves as variable as her name in her chameleon-like capacity to absorb and reproduce the voices
of the many individuals with whom she interacts as she is drawn into the questions surrounding
12

the death of her friend Puppet.

While on a discursive level she frequently doubts her role in

uncovering, creating, and promoting the true story of his murder, e.g.,― No sabía todavía
exactamente por qué Memo decidió confiar en mí, pero empezó a llamar por teléfono en esos
días para informarme de lo que se iba sabiendo‖ (13) or ―No quiero pensar todo esto que he
estado pasando y repasando como grabadora…no quiero y encuentro que al entrar a la mortuoria,
sigo componiendo frases, fragmentos de poemas, escenas en la cabeza‖ (45)—on a formal or
linguistic level she is hardly tentative. She is the figurative ―rock‖ upon which the other
characters record or engrave their voices.
She showcases her linguistic versatility as she weaves in and out of the mass of
personalities in the novel and then deciphers and reproduces their distinguishable linguistic
foibles; in doing so, she builds her case for her privileged stance of enunciation. She, for

11

Unless otherwise indicated, all bold or capital typeface lettering is Cota-Cárdenas‘ emphasis.

12

In a similar vein, Martín Rodríguez argues, ―Así como la idefinición del nombre de Petra,
también la fluidez de voces y discursos que hemos notado como caracteristica de la novela
apunta hacia una concepción antiesencialista de la identidad‖ (76).
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example, recounts Memo‘s clipped Spanish when he speaks of Puppet‘s death: ―—...Jue por
na‘a... Murió por na‘a el batito...Lo poco que nos ha podido ‗ijir el tío...‖ (109); the fluent and
youthful English of her Chicana daughter María who complains, ―then when I didn‘t even know
what a quinceañera was… Well, they all laughed in the kitchen and Estér told me to ask my hotshot mother, the Spanish teacher, what that was… Yeah, I was embarrassed‖ (8); the hesitant
Spanish of her Chicana student who tells her, ―This is Sally Aguirre, de su clase para los que
trabajan en los hospitales…I can‘t make it to class tonight [. . .] Something happened to a a [sic]
friend of mine, from the barrio‖ (37); the accented English of the farm laborers Wimpy and El
Güero who tease the young Petra for reading the comics by calling her ―Mees fanibuc‖ (25); and,
certainly, the easily identifiable Spanish of Puppet-Hamlet, whose words are marked by a speech
impediment that causes him to mix up the ―l‖ and the ―r‖ sounds. Petra imagines that he tells her,
―Pala qué m‘balacealon esos dos chotas,/ eso e lo q‘ quielo sabel, pala qué...yo/ qué les jice,
qué...? [. . .] me quedé con muchas/ pleguntas...no tuve tiempo de pleguntal na‘a...ARGO...‖ (4748). In these instances and several others, Petra lithely switches from one linguistic register to
another—providing a dizzying, synchronic portrait of a wide swath of Chicano society in the
U.S. Southwest. Cota-Cárdenas uses Petra to provide a forum for the fifty-plus, largely
disenfranchised voices conversant in her novel and, as a result, she lends visual and oral
emphasis to her desires to capture, reproduce, and even represent the marginalized voices of a
Chicano society.
Petra functions as a virtual tape-recorder in the novel, the sounding-board onto which the
other characters project their frustrations, fears of injustice, and personal histories. Even when
Petra resists this role, she reinforces it: ―No quiero pensar todo esto que he estado pasando y
repasando como grabadora… no quiero y encuentro que al entrar a la mortuoria, sigo

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componiendo frases, fragmentos de poemas, escenas en la cabeza‖ (45). Cota-Cárdenas‘ care to
emphasize Petra‘s inhibitions allows her to, at the same time, highlight Petra‘s roles as a
community spokesperson and a cultural mediator—roles which, in many respects, parallel the
social responsibilities taken on by Cota-Cárdenas herself. Both women are professors of Chicano
literature, divorced mothers, and second-generation Mexican-Americans, with the crucial ability
to speak and write in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, and with close ties to the university, local
Mexican migrant workers, and the Chicano activist community. The author signals her
autobiographical connection to her protagonist when she teases that while ―fictitious‖ her novel
―is based on an actual series of events‖ (iv) and when she recognizes her friend ―Memo‖ in the
acknowledgements and/or reconocimientos section of her novel—referencing Petra‘s long-time
friend and advocate who urges her to transform into words Puppet‘s story (v). Moreover, CotaCárdenas puts the whole of her authorial weight behind Petra‘s investigations in the novel when
she dedicates her novel to the ―powerless, who like Puppet, must struggle daily for their small
share of human dignity and respect‖ (vii). I don‘t aim to establish the two women as one and the
same so much as I emphasize that Cota-Cárdenas‘ efforts to bolster the credentials of Petra as a
recorder and interpreter of Chicano society also build a case for how she as an author is uniquely
able to bridge the manifold moments of frustrated speech and miscommunication depicted in her
novel and encountered in her own society. Petra‘s ―balazos… escritos‖ (30) reflect on how CotaCárdenas‘ stakes out her narrative authority through language usage.
Petra‘s role and, by implication, Cota Cárdenas‘ role as the author becomes even more
significant considering the many depictions of characters either paralyzed, traumatized, or
somehow hampered by problems of mis- or in-communication in the novel. In her dialogues with
the novel‘s large supporting cast, Petra provides raw and relatively unfiltered accounts of these

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individuals‘ struggles to communicate. When Memo fails to find the words to tell Pat/Petra on
the phone that Puppet was killed, Petra recalls that ―Aquí se le fue la voz. Le pregunté si podía
venir a contármelo en persona‖ (1). Similarly, when Memo recounts the death of his brother
Félix, Petra describes, ―Aquí Memo ya no puede hablar, yo volteo a examinar la pared porque no
necesito verlo para saber que llora. Puedo oír que traga, trata de decirme algo, se levanta de
repente y sale bruscamente hacia la camioneta‖ (3). Memo‘s inability to communicate is
compounded by his memories of his brother‘s last moments, which were marked by the horror of
not being able to speak. He tells Petra,
A lo último, me miraba con unos ojos grandes de espanto, la cara toda torcida, y
empezó a querer ‗ijirme algo...hacía muecas muy feas, abría la boca grande para
hablar y se le arqueaba la espalda porque se levantaba en parte de la cama
tratando de decirme algo, pero no le salía nada...no podía pronunciar nada...Y se
espantaba más y más con el horror de no poder. (9-10)
Petra‘s experiences with frustrated and incommunicative friends and acquaintances build to an
almost frenzied pitch in the novel. When Petra asks her female student, Estér, to respond to a
male student‘s denunciation of feminism and its effect on the Chicano movement, Estér does not
respond and, instead, breaks into tears. ―Qué crees tú, Estér...? El feminismo es bueno o
malo...etc...? Ah, no quieres decir...? Tienes...miedo...? Qué dices, Nestorcito? [. . .] Estér, por
qué lloras...qué te pasa...?‖ (88). Likewise, Petra recalls the panic that seized her as a young
child when she realized that she couldn‘t tell her recently deceased friend, Wimpy, that his
brother died in a car accident en-route to Wimpy‘s funeral. She recounts, ―Empecé a llorar,
sintiendo una confusión pesada, haciéndoseme un nudo la desesperación porque no le había
podido decir al Wimpy que era su hermano el que había muerto‖ (25-26). Further, Petra learns of

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the trauma of an undocumented Mexican woman when she delivered her first child in a hospital
where no one spoke Spanish—how, while in labor, the woman cried out, ―NO NO HABLAS
ESPAÑOL? [. . .] qué qué me hacen no me meta el dedo me duele todo todo me estoy muriendo
y vea que hay sangre‖—and how the woman‘s trauma persisted to the point that she nearly bled
to death at home for fear of returning to the hospital to deliver her second child (30). She gives
Petra a muted explanation of her actions, ―—Señora...lo siento, yo no puedo...hay cosas que una
no quiere...esos recuerdos, ya ni con mi marido los quiero compartir‖ (40). Finally, capping
many incidents of miscommunication in the novel, Petra imagines Puppet/Hamlet recriminating
“...Saben? me quedé con muchas pleguntas...no tuve tiempo de pleguntal na‘a...ARGO... (48),
and she allows the intermittent refrain, ―QUERIA DECIRNOS ALGO PERO NO PODIA‖ (15,
20, 76), to interrupt her narration—which excerpts reiterate the linguistic and emotional angst of
several of the socially marginalized characters in the novel.

13

In all of these examples, Cota

Cárdenas provides an incisive portrait of her characters‘ anxieties about being misunderstood or
unable to communicate.

13

Two other notable examples of frustrated or, in this case, repressed communication in the
novel are Petra‘s friend Medeiro‘s comments on the oppressive silence concerning the Tlatelolco
massacre in Mexico and Memo‘s recounting of the difficulties Puppet‘s friends have had in
getting to talk to Puppet‘s uncle, the only witness of Puppet‘s death. Medeiros says of Tlatelolco
―Me cuenta en la carta que no saben cuántos fueron, esa noche en Tlatelolco...no se sabe...no se
sabe... pero algunos están ya escribiendo cosas, cosas que nadie publicará, porque no se vio ni
por la televisión ni en los periódicos ni en la radio nadie nadie dijo nada... [. . .] Lo que se dijo
oficialmente, ni se aproxima a la verdad, dice Chema en su carta‖ (67). Likewise, Memo recalls
the bureaucratic conspiracy of silence surrounding Puppet‘s surviving uncle. He reveals to Petra
that Puppet‘s uncle is not allowed to talk: ―todavía está el tío del batito bajo police guard. Nadie
le ha podido hablar, para confirmar o refutar o saber si la versión de la chota, la versión que
Memo no cree por nada en absoluto...‖ (91), nor is he able and willing to talk: ―...Al tío no le
podemos jacer hablar casi na‘a, dice que no quiere recordarlo...‖ (107) and/or ―—...Jue por
na‘a... Murió por na‘a el batito...Lo poco que nos ha podido ‗ijir el tío...‖ (109). In these
instances, Cota-Cárdenas reaffirms the horrors of institutionalized silence in her novel.
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As a corollary, she emphasizes the need for a narrator and/or community spokesperson
able to assuage or compensate for the frustrations of the linguistically marginalized voices
depicted in the novel. Petra undergoes a gradual and very opportune transformation as she
internalizes the social and linguistic anxieties of those persons with whom she interacts; their
collective experiences motivate Petra to overcome her own trepidations and to use her words, her
linguistic agility, to combat social injustice. She voices her resolution most forcefully toward the
end of the novel, when she tells Memo, ―Pues no más con la fuerza de nuestros escritos y
nuestras palabras, podemos cambiar muchas cosas y hacer mucho más...[. . .] Soy la que fui hace
mucho tiempo. Como cuando éramos niños y todos sabíamos, instintivamente y con valentía...a
actuar...y decir...‖ (134). She resolves to be as bold and as unbridled in speaking out as when she
was a child and was less constrained by societal fears or pressures. Her arrival at this conclusion
is a welcome outcome to the other characters, who emphasize throughout the novel her
mediative value to them and seek her help as a translator. The incessant ringing of Petra‘s
telephone—the many calls of encouragement, calls for help, and calls of collaboration relevant to
Puppet‘s death—punctuates the demand for Petra‘s input by the other characters. As Memo tells
her about why he and his fellow laborers approached her about chronicling and publishing the
circumstance of Puppet‘s life and death, ―—Sabes, te teníamos miedo porque nos había dicho
Stan [. . .] que eras maestro de español y que trabajabas también en la universidad... / Pero como
te pudíanos hablar en español, se nos hizo que pos...‖ (3-4). Similarly, when her sister, la Beli,
asks Petra to help her in her struggling marriage, she pleads, ―Pat,...I...Pat...Help me, Pat...I...
You have an education, you‘ve lived so much…Manita, ayúdame…‖ (94). For these characters,
Petra is indispensable; they portray her as able to transcend local boundaries of language, class,

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and space through her linguistic agility and her resultant connections to both marginalized and
institutionalized groups within her hypothetical Southwest community.
The novel‘s sardonic and self-referential narrator, perhaps an extension of Petra herself,
reaffirms and makes light of this positioning when he/she jibes Petra, saying,
En aquel entonces tú eras muy popular, umjum, bueno porque siempre andabas
quedando bien, no hacías preguntas demasiado serias, te ajustabas al rol más o
menos. Menos, por ser divorciada con hijos y tú ya te acuerdas lo que respondían
tu padre tus tíos a ESO... Más, porque siendo una de las pocas mexican-american
educated women, le dabas por representar a tu gente...desde la primaria andabas
quedando muy bien, te elegían pa‘acá te elegían pa‘allá (como si juera una
samba? Jajaja) y tú con el smile ése andabas muy líder, a veces hasta cuando no
hacía falta, pues metías la cuchara... (99)
By having several of the voices in the novel build Petra‘s image as a ―líder,‖ representative,
translator, and mediator, Cota-Cárdenas achieves a concerted and self-effacing strategy of
asserting the cultural and translational authority of her central protagonist, and, by implication,
the authoritative claims of her own narrative.

14

By emphasizing the strengths of Petra‘s

character, her ability to move from one social and/or linguistic milieu to another, she underlines
14

Other incidences of characters indicating Petra‘s worth to them as a writer, mediator, and
representative include Loreto‘s insistence that Petra continue writing, ―Hazte valiente, mujer...Si
yo he visto a otra Petra.. pues en tus otras poesías... [. . .] Pero no dejes de escribir, Petra, uno no
se puede ya callar...‖ (31), Loreto‘s words of encouragement to Petra: ―—Oh, Petra, tú todavía ni
sabes lo que puedes hacer... Ni cuenta te das todavía...‖ (34), Memo‘s implicit pleading with her
that she‘ll become involved with Puppet‘s story, ―somebody‘s gotta do it, mija…‖ (13), and,
also, Petra‘s own imagining of Memo‘s desires that she‘ll continue pursuing the questions and
injustices surrounding Puppet‘s death: ―Se me queda mirando largo mi amigo, su cara sudada
color bronce a la luz de la ventana esta tarde. Sus ojos me interrogan, preguntas inauditás pero
inquietantemente presentes: Quién nos ayuda? Por qué tienen miedo? Quién nos representa,
habla por nojotros, me da la mano en todo esto que nos sigue pasando, nos sigue pasando, nos
sigue pasando?‖ (102).
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the productive ambivalence of a ―Chicana‖ identity, an identity which Anzaldúa champions as
the perspective of ―the new mestiza.‖
Yet, more than Anzaldúa, Cota-Cárdenas girds her narrative authority in the multilingual
acrobatics of her text. Through Petra‘s agile maneuverings and the peculiar speech habits of her
other characters, Cota-Cárdenas gives voice to several minority speakers within her Southwest
community and exposes the permeable confines of English and Spanish as national languages.
Petra, for example, normalizes switching back and forth from Spanish into English, and vice
versa, in her conversations with her many friends, relatives, and acquaintances. When speaking
to her friend Memo, her activist friends Venus or Chavela, and, to a lesser extent, her daughter
María, she recurs to a more splintered form of both languages—as when she tells Memo, ―—
There‘s all kinds of mexicanos, Memo... You know that about most of our kids… Pues los tuyos
también… tampoco hablan muy bien el español… Y hay otros, hasta maestros de español… y
los hijos… Yes, chicanos is better… It‘s okay, Memo, maybe sometime I can teach you to
read… (16), or when she tells María, ―Listen, María… I know how you feel… But your Dad
spoke English only, we were far from the family, and it was the easy way out… por lo menos,
quisiste aprender después, lo hiciste por tu cuenta, y lo hiciste bien‖ (8).

15

15

Yet, when speaking

Another, more extreme example, occurs as Petra works the reception desk as a part of her job
for Southwest City Estates. Petra answers:
―—….Aló, I mean, Good Afternoon, Southwest City Estates…No, Stan isn‘t here…Who…?
Oh, Paco Jiménez from the Mex-Am C of C…Ajá…sí, hablo esp…mande…? No, no creo
que no hayamos conocido [. . .] What can I do for you Mr...oh, Paco, all right… Boletos…?
[. . .] Sure…cómo no, hasta luego…Excuse me? Oh!...Petra, Patricia Leyva de...well, just Pat
Leyva is fine…Sure, no trouble…bye…‖ (98).
While, for the most part, Petra seems to effortlessly alternate between English and Spanish—in
this instance, she seems somewhat skittish. Her responses are cordial but, also, clipped and
confused. When she tells her caller that her name is, at once, ―Petra,‖ ―Patricia,‖ and ―Pat,‖ she
seems uncertain as to which self or persona she should present in the conversation. Though we
are privy to only one side of the conversation, Pat seems noticeably dizzied by the exchange.

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with her mother (a first-generation immigrant), her friend Medeiros (a former teacher in
Mexico), her activist friend Loreto, or other acquaintances that speak primarily Spanish Petra
maintains a more unbroken variety of ―Standard Mexican Spanish.‖ Likewise, when writing
Puppet‘s story in English or when talking to her reporter friend Sandy, her ex-husband Vittorio,
or her youngest daughter Marisa, she shows that she is equally adept at maintaining a fairly
consistent variety of ―Standard American English.‖

16

While Spanish predominates in the text,

the reader of either Spanish or English is forced to adapt as Petra adapts to her ever-changing
socio-linguistic circumstances. As a result, he/she internalizes the linguistic contortions that both
result from and shape Petra‘s Chicana identity.
Cota-Cárdenas insinuates the cumulative, psychological effects of Petra‘s constant
switching between Spanish and English most forcefully in the numerous internal battles or
dissensions between Petra and the novel‘s self-referential narrator. Throughout the novel, the two
(who are possibly one and the same) banter over Pat‘s choice of words, idiom, storyline, and/or
the overall narrative direction. The narrator, for example, interrupts Petra‘s recounting of how
she promised Memo that she would teach him to read in Spanish, saying, (Oh seguro, sometime
les va a enseñar a tus propios hijos…[. . . ])‖ (16), and he/she interrupts Petra‘s story about an
episode from her youth to say, ―Qué qué? Qué point? (5), and then mocks the turn of the
narrative saying, ―SI SIEMPRE FUISTE MUY DAYDREAMER PANIC BUTTON
ROMANTICACA‖ (6). Elsewhere in the text, he/she warns Petra to mind the bounds of her

16

Cota-Cárdenas inconsistently depicts how Petra adapts her speech according to her sociolinguistic context. For instance, while Petra implies in her conversation with her daughter María
and later in the text that she and her ex-husband Vittorio communicate primarily in English (8,
79), in other episodes of the text and/or imagined encounters with Vittorio she speaks to him
mostly in Spanish (41, 62, 71). Moreover, she initially talks to her newspaper friend, Sandy, in
Spanish (15), and then later speaks to him mostly in English (111-15). It is unclear whether these
slippages in Petra‘s linguistic wranglings and reimaginings are intentional or inadvertent.
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narrative, ―Cuidado, y te estás saliendo fuera de papel‖ (11); complains that she is being
excessively detailed, ―(Te vas fijando… hasta en los detalles más nimios… [. . .] Bueno, a una
niña se lo dejo pasar, pero a ti, viejonona…)‖ (18); accuses her of recurring to ―la raza‖ as a buzz
word, ―Sí, muy amante de ‗mi raza‘ aquí, y ‗mi raza‘ allá, como si fuera una samba, samba‖
(30); pokes fun at her for sounding too academic, ―(O que la profa! Siempre salió otra vez con
las suyas...)‖ (33); chides her for fantasizing about her ex-husband, ―Ja, ja, de veras les vas a
contar de Vittorio? [. . .] Bueno, adelante, burrita, but I don‘t think I want to stick around for
this...Chale...‖ (41); laments her lack of progress writing Puppet‘s lifestory, ―Oh, sí, muy fácil,
anímate...horas y horas de tratar de escribir una versión de la vida de Puppet [. . .] y todo lo que
logras son fragmentos, puro stuttering romantichucho...‖ (49); questions her choice of language
in writing Puppet‘s story, ―Ay, tú qué self-righteous... Mira, si insistes, por lo menos trata de esto
en castellano…‖ (17); and, also in reference to her writing Puppet‘s story in English, mocks her
use of ―whom‖ instead of ―who,‖ ―(Válgame el whom, qué smart eres tú)‖ (16). All of these selfreflexive interjections point back to the creation of the text and obligate the reader to more
actively consider the narrative and linguistic choices of both Petra as the primary narrator and
Cota-Cárdenas as author. As Francisco A. Lomelí argues concerning the novel‘s effect on the
reader when introducing the novel on the back cover of the first-edition, ―Como obra dinámica
reta al lector en cada frase. El lenguaje mismo lucha con el lector para absorberlo y bofetearlo,
recordándlo que tampoco se deje tratar como títere‖ (np). The narrator‘s attempts to destabilize
Petra‘s narrative and question her recounting of Puppet‘s life story make more transparent for the
reader the linguistic and cultural negotiations that Petra and Cota-Cárdenas undertake when
writing. Petra‘s agency, ambivalence, and uncertainty underscore the extent to which Puppet

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engages the reader in the creative possibilities and inevitably traitorous choices of an inherently
multilingual narration.
The weight and consequence of Petra‘s language decisions are further apparent in the
conflicting advice she receives from her friends about writing in either English or Spanish and in
her deliberations about whether or not she writes for an intended reader. Concerning her draft of
Puppet‘s life story, Memo tells her ―Qué bueno que los hiciste en inglés, Pat‖ (16), while her
community organizer friend Loreto reads what she has written about Puppet and tells her, ―Mira,
tú quieres a tu gente, Petra? Bueno, trabaja el cuento…o el relato…a lo mejor saldría mejor en
español‖ (23). Memo seems to think that in English her story will have more social reach, while
Loreto implies that for the sake of ―[su] gente‖ and/or ―el pueblo‖ (23) Petra should write in
Spanish. Her friends‘ contradictory views of which national language would be most apt for her
story compound Petra‘s own ambivalence as to which language she should choose or the
audience for whom she should write. She, for instance, appraises the text she has been writing as:
Total, una ensalada de sentimientos confusos, acusaciones... un lashing out, y en
inglés... Yo creía que lo escribía de una manera impersonal... no sé en qué lector
estaba pensando... era algo o alguien vagamente afuera/allá que comprendiera,
que sintiera, que viera... Empecé a escribir y re-escribir, pero no me salía bien la
cosa, siempre estaba yo allí juzgando, juzgando a no sé todavía quién... (15)
All at once, she questions the purpose of her narrative, seems somewhat bemused that what she
has written is in English, admits to not having a specific intended reader, reveals her
disappointment with the drafts that she has written and revised, and voices her disillusionment
about the judgmental role that she feels that she adopts as author. Between the conflicting
commentary of Petra‘s friends and Petra‘s own assorted trepidations, the reader of Puppet is

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privy to a host of concerns relevant to the creation of a literary and socially-minded text by a
multilingual author. By sowing dissension as to the affective potential of either English or
Spanish in a Chicano text and emphasizing Petra‘s confusion as to the appropriate purpose and
public of her text, Cota-Cárdenas co-opts her reader into weighing the stakes of messaging in one
or the other language and of writing for a specific cultural audience.
Ironically, Petra‘s creative reservations, particularly her anxieties about language,
illustrate Cota-Cárdenas‘ own deliberateness concerning the poetics of her hybrid, inter- or
multi-lingual novel. Puppet stands as a novel profoundly preoccupied with and shaped by
questions of language. In addition to Petra‘s singular ability to pivot from one linguistic context
to another, the playful and self-reflexive interjections of the novel‘s narrator, and the intratextual dissensions about language and audience, Cota-Cárdenas foregrounds issues of language
and multilingualism in her novel through several more overt gestures in English, Spanish, and
Spanglish. She, for example, mixes languages on a word level; emphasizes her characters‘
linguistic idiosyncrasies by reproducing their speech through grammatical errors, misspellings,
and phonemic re-castings of their words; and writes in one standard language such that she
recalls another. As Martín argues, ―By emphasizing apparent flaws such as repetition,
mispronunciation, misunderstanding, colloquialism, and language mixing, the linguistic games in
Puppet privilege flexible identities by revealing each person‘s capacity to shift between the poles
of inclusion and exclusion‖ (92). In Puppet, Cota-Cárdenas exploits language to show the
possibilities more than the deficiencies of multilingualism.
Besides showing her characters‘ frustrations about being unable to communicate, CotaCárdenas reveals a world where communication abounds with multilingual play, the result of
linguistic excess or surplus. For instance, Petra refers to her migraine headaches as ―hot-

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cakes‖—playing with the Spanish word ―jaqueca” which she claims “siempre me recordaba hotcakes‖ (45). In the same chapter, she conflates her complaints about her ―migrañas‖ (45) or
―jotquequis‖ (53) with her descriptions of the dread instilled by the threat of ―la migra‖ (53). Her
depiction of young children screaming ―ay viene la migraaaa…..ay mamaaaaá…!‖ (53) also
evokes the pain of her relentless headaches. Likewise, Puppet and his friends jokingly refer to
Puppet‘s girlfriend ―Inés‖ as ―Inerest‖—recalling Puppet‘s improvised answer to Inés‘s question
about what would be the English meaning of her name (7). ―Inerest‖ is a sign of the surplus of
meaning that Puppet creates through his mistaken or his willful non-translation.
This linguistic surplus is further evident in the creative speech of the novel‘s imposing
narrator who wantonly mixes Spanish and English for added effect or impact, such as when
he/she asks Petra ―Qué point?‖ (5), or when he/she refers to Petra‘s penchant for melodrama as
―Romanticaca‖ (6) or ―romantichucho‖ (49). By mixing Spanish and English and by showcasing
her characters‘ non-standard speech habits through misspellings or phonemic renderings of their
words, e.g., ―Pos l‘ije‖ instead of ―Pues, le dije‖ (3), ―lo‘jotros‖ instead of ―los otros‖ (45), or
―güeno‖ instead of ―bueno‖ (49), Cota-Cárdenas brings linguistically marginalized voices to the
forefront in her novel. Moreover, in Hamlet/Puppet‘s characteristic declarations, such as ―Vivil o
no vivil, esa es la plegunta‖ (47) or ―ARGO HUELE MAL EN SOUTHWEST CITY,‖ she
achieves a subtle means of recalling famous or idiomatic English phrases while writing in
Spanish (134). In these instances, as well as in every instance in which the characters speak of
the eponymous ―Puppet‖—whose English nickname is the preferred and inexplicable stand-in
for the Spanish term ―títere‖—Cota-Cárdenas emphasizes and normalizes the confluence of
Spanish and English in her novel. By instigating so much multilingual play in her novel, she
makes a compelling case for her own enunciative authority.

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Cota-Cárdenas‘ unrelenting multilingualism is, arguably, the biggest detractor and the
greatest strength of her novel. Unlike the more well-known texts of contemporaries such as
Gloria Anzaldúa or Rudolfo Anaya, texts that include an alarming number of concessions or
translations for the monolingual English reader, Cota-Cárdenas‘1985 edition of Puppet provides
a rigorous and unapologetic foray into the linguistically and nationally ambivalent world of the
U.S. Southwest. While the multilingual turns of the text make it more formidable and
inaccessible to the reader of only English or only Spanish, the novel is most forceful in
dismantling the illusion that Spanish and English are self-containing and impermeable. As
Martín argues, ―the novel‘s interrogation of language and translation reveals that the distinction
between English as the national language of the United States and Spanish as a ‗foreign‘
language is plainly untenable‖ (93). Petra‘s seamless pivoting from one language to the other;
the distinguishable linguistic signatures of many of the characters in the text; the non-labored
digressions in tone, tempo, and narration, the stand-alone presentation of Spanglish; and the
challenge posed to the reader are all mitigated in the ―bilingual‖ edition of the novel.
Certainly, the wider access and renewed attention toward to the first version of the novel
prompted by the 2000 edition are positive. However, I maintain that critical enthusiasm for the
―bilingual‖ translation of the novel should not outstep or neglect the singularity and political
import of what Cota-Cárdenas accomplishes in the first instance of her novel. Insomuch as
Puppet is dedicated to ―the powerless, who, like Puppet, must struggle daily for their small share
of human dignity and self respect‖ (vii), the first edition of the text, written mostly in Spanish
with many non-translated and untranslatable multilingual turns of the narrative, is a more

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persuasive renunciation of an ―English-only‖ culture and literary practice.

17

In her novel, Cota-

Cárdenas presents Spanish as ―una lengua tan viable como el inglés‖ (Martín-Rodríguez 71) in
the unequal linguistic playing field of U.S. and Chicano literatures and, through the countless
multilingual gestures of her text, she offers her characters‘ brands of English, Spanish, and
Spanglish as legitimate, standard, and representative voices in North American culture and
society. She reaffirms the social aims of her text with the aggressive formal and linguistic
gestures of her literary practice.
Because of its bold multilingual poetics Puppet is one of the most transformative and
undervalued texts in the vanguard of Chicano literature. In the novel, Cota-Cárdenas draws her
reader into virtually unchartered territory in the canon of North American literatures—the novel
quickly becomes a nationally and linguistically ambivalent space where questions of language
and translation freely intrude upon and shape an already reeling narrative. Unlike other
contemporary Chicano texts, Puppet is marked by Cota-Cárdenas‘ refusal to accommodate or
translate for the monolingual reader. She obligates the monolingual reader of Spanish or English
to follow and try to synthesize the unpredictable and border-trespassing voices of the narrative
and chooses not to translate or standardize the ―foreign,‖ mixed-language, or non-standard
speech for the reader. Instead of committing herself to the kinds of conciliatory strategies of
translation employed by most other Chicano and/or U.S. Latino authors, Cota-Cárdenas employs
multilingualism as a point of play and possibility and as a primary means of accounting for her
characters‘ abundant frustrations and moments of miscommunication.

17

Just as the dedication to the predominantly Spanish version of her novel is written in English,
the dedication to the English and/or ―bilingual‖ translation of the novel is written in Spanish,
―Dedicado a los que no tienen poder, que, como Puppet, luchan cada día por su pequeña porción
de dignidad humana y amor propio‖ (ix).
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Cota-Cárdenas offers her linguistic acrobatics as an implicit answer to the recurrent
question posed by the narrator and other characters in the novel, ―Qué hace uno para no
amargarse para siempre?‖ (13, 48, 51). Petra‘s final realization that change is contingent upon
―la fuerza de nuestros escritos y nuestras palabras‖ (134) speaks to Cota-Cárdenas‘ own
purposeful manipulation of language as a means of social resistance in the novel. In response to
an interviewer likening her work to Anzaldúa‘s, Cota-Cárdenas bristles,
Han aparecido varias [. . .] bibliografías ―chicanas‖ desde los setenta, y no figuro
en la mayoría de ellas. ¿A qué se debe? ¿Será porque no me adherí a ningún
grupo político (o dogmático) formal? ¿Cuáles han sido las fronteras verdaderas
para mí, personalmente y como escritora? ¿Me marginé, o me marginaron? ¿Por
qué?, por qué, es para ustedes responder. Pero no creas: soy demasiado ―fregona‖
para ser víctima. (Capdevila Gutiérrez 257)
She questions whether her work has been excluded from critical appraisal on account of its noteasily classifiable politics or formal poetics and asks if she has been either the cause or the
victim of marginalization. I maintain that Cota-Cárdenas achieves in Puppet and among
Chicano/a texts a felicitous and unusual marriage of form and content—in which she reinforces
the theoretical claims of her text with her unwavering multilingualism and illustrates both the
dependency and fragility of medium and message, language and nationality, and nationality and
identity. In her willingness to represent the socially and linguistically marginalized individuals of
Southwest City and in her unwillingness to translate for a monolingual reader, she challenges
literature and society to move beyond the traditional, debilitating representations of and for
individuals and communities who do not conform to the ―standard‖ means of messaging and
representation.

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To translate or not to translate—this is the question that looms over the textual production
of multilingual authors who choose to create a reality-based portrait of their nationally and
linguistically ambivalent societies. These authors have to decide if, for them, the prospect of
accessing the monolingual reader outweighs the possibility of transforming the reader by altering
his/her sociolinguistic expectations of the text. Their translational practices create questions for
the academy and for the larger public: What constitutes a truly multilingual text? Where can and
should multilingual texts be taught? Who are the speakers represented in these texts? What
languages do they speak? How do these text evidence that our concepts of language, nation, and
identity are inadequate? What is the relationship between a multilingual literary text and an
intended public, and is it possible to conceive of one without the other? Is the establishment of a
linguistically sovereign text, one occupying a ―third place,‖ feasible given the realities of the
literary marketplace? The respective language choices of Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas illustrate
both the costs and the opportunities occasioned by either translating and/or refusing to translate
the multilingual aspects of a text in the context of a borderlands society; through their formal and
linguistic decisions each either lessens or reinforces the theoretical claims of their works.

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Conclusion
This project stems, in part, from my insecurities about attaining ―fluency‖ in another language
and my hesitancies about approaching its accompaniment or assumed literary tradition. While
examining the texts and the translation strategies of multilingual U.S. and Hispanic authors, I
have had to reevaluate my own approach to comparing and writing about these authors‘ Spanish
and English versions of their texts and/or their individual translations within their literature. I
have wondered what is lost or gained when I read a text written primarily in one language and
then examine that same text primarily in another. I have questioned if I can assume a bilingual
Spanish-English reader or if I am sufficiently bilingual to judge the adequacy of or to commend
the audacity of another‘s translation, especially when the self-same author is the translator.
Finally, I have asked myself if I am truly committed to the Borgesian notion that strong and
domesticating translations are in theory and in practice more principled and literary than other
approaches to translating. These anxieties, while personal, reflect some of the larger questions
that inform language usage and fuel comparative and translation studies. Is there a standard for
determining bi- or multi-lingualism in literature and literary criticism? Is it possible, ethical, or
productive to link ethnic and linguistic identities? What are the implications of Anzaldúa‘s claim
that ―I am my language‖ (59) or Kellman‘s claim that ―if identity is shaped by language, then
monolingualism is a deficiency disorder‖ (viii)? How are we limited or enlarged by the language
or languages we speak or write? What can be done to cast greater light on the conditions under
which texts and translations are made and to further emphasize the extent to which translating
becomes a form of authorship? By writing about a number of intensely self-reflexive texts that
center on the often strained relation between language and identity I emphasize the manifold
transformations of language across space and time and hope to make more transparent the

180

assumptions that gird traditional approaches to literature, authorship, and communication,
generally.
Read in tandem, the texts and translations of Manuel Puig, Ariel Dorfman, Rosario Ferré,
Gloria Anzaldúa, and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas illustrate how questions about the possibilities
and limits of language and about translation, specifically, should be at the forefront of
conversations about identity and nationality in Latin American or Inter-American studies. Instead
of asking ―Who are we?‖ these authors ask ―Who are we perceived to be?‖, ―Who speaks for and
about us?‖, and ―Do I determine language or does language determine me?‖ As Gentzler argues,
The nation-states of the Americas are artificial ones at best, carved out of the New
World by colonizing powers until the postcolonial movements led the way to
revolution and independence across the hemisphere. Thus, deconstruction and
postcolonial theories, when applied to the Americas, help uncover theoretical
questions regarding definitions of nation, nation-state, and national language, as
well as ontological questions with regard to emerging concepts of identity. Such
inquiry transitions quite naturally to the translational, transcultural, and
transnational theories that follow. (xv)
Through their language choices in and in between their texts, Puig, Dorfman, Ferré, Anzaldúa,
and Cota-Cárdenas make more transparent some of the national and linguistic ambivalences that
undercut monolithic notions of nation, language, or self and fuel deconstructive and/or
postcolonial perspectives on literature and history. By strategies of deliberate or inadvertent
mistranslation, non-literal translation, contextual cushioning, or non-translation, these authors
manipulate words such that they foreground the negotiations of translation, approximate the

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aesthetics of exile, expose dynamics of the literary marketplace, and, as a result, engage
contradictions and instabilities inherent in linguistic and national identities.
The task of self-translating enables these writers to tweak, readjust, or totally revise
aspects of their texts and their literary personae. For authors such as Puig, Dorfman, or Ferré, the
frequently substantive differences between the two versions of their texts combine to create an
evocative ―third‖ space in literary and translational practice. Through the unlikely status of an
equally authoritative ―translation‖ these authors reiterate how perceptions of themselves and
their texts are always variable and contingent on the individual, historical, and linguistic
circumstances surrounding both the production and the reception of their text(s). As Kellman
argues about the multilingual author Fernando Pessoa, ―The ‗real‘ Pessoa, like the ‗real‘
Shakespeare, must be inferred from the sum total of his creations, a process complicated by the
poet‘s refusal to bind himself to one language or style‖ (34). Especially in the event of selftranslation, authorship and textuality become evolving and collaborative endeavors; Puig,
Dorfman, and Ferré emphasize the provisional character of their authorial and textual identities
through their Spanish and English or English and Spanish versions of their texts.
Authors like Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas make the ambivalences of national and
linguistic identities even more transparent by translating and/or refusing to translate on an intratextual rather than an inter-textual level. These Chicana authors present a narrative or literary self
that is overtly fractured, double, ―ambidextrous‖ (Ferré ―Blessing‖ 8), duplicitous, versatile,
and/or multiple. Both writers insinuate the possibility of a literary praxis that takes into account
the complexities of the marginalized communities and voices represented in their texts. To
different extents, Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas create inherently multilingual texts that both
foreground and obviate the negotiations of translation. Like the other authors discussed in this

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project, they underscore the emotional, political, and transformative ramifications of their
language choices. Through their varying translation strategies they visibly balance the desire to
accommodate a monolingual readership with the goal of freely portraying or representing
unofficial or peripheral voices within their texts.
In the overt or latent multilingual poetics of their writing, all of the authors examined in
this study actively introduce fertile slippages, instabilities, or ―frayages‖ (Spivak 398) between
and within their texts. As Spivak argues,
Language is not everything. It is only a vital clue to where the self loses its
boundaries. The ways in which rhetoric or figuration disrupt logic themselves
point at the possibility of random contingency, besides language, around
language. Such a dissemination cannot be under our control. Yet in translation,
where meaning hops into the spacy emptiness between two named historical
languages, we get perilously close to it. By juggling the disruptive rhetoricity that
breaks the surface in not necessarily connected ways, we feel the selvedges of the
language-textile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations. [. . .] The task of the
translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that
permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her
imagined or actual audience at bay. (398)
Self-translators, particularly, disrupt the boundaries of self, language, and nation by elevating
―translation‖ and asserting ownership of the dissonances between the versions of their texts
and/or the translingual gestures within their texts. They emphasize the permissibility of linguistic
and national identities and embrace and/or facilitate the fraying between the versions of their
texts. Through the negotiations of translation they actively approach the ―spacy emptiness‖

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between two national languages and emphasize the extent to which the decisions of writing and
translating result both because and in spite of linguistic, literary, and social hierarchies.
The dissension between their texts is all the more significant given the unequal status
between English and Spanish in the global literary marketplace. Waisman argues that ―[t]he
brilliance‖ of ―Pierre Menard‖:
resides in that, even as it manipulates the recontextualizations that amplify
meanings, the previous ones are not lost. […] The displacements lead to a
multiplication of layered meanings, which, even if they contradict each other,
remain present for the reader to appreciate. And it is precisely here where we find
the potential of writing as (mis)translation from the periphery. (108)
Likewise, by asserting some control of the processes of translation, Puig, Dorfman, Ferré,
Anzaldúa, and Cota-Cárdenas engage, for better or worse, the possibilities of rewriting or
―talking back‖ and resist both the neutralization of their texts into a kind of ―translatese‖ and the
categorization of their texts into inadequate national rubrics. Authorizing their words in English
and Spanish and/or English-and-Spanish allows them to highlight the ever simmering tensions
surrounding the usage of one, another, or both of these languages in the context of the border
regions of the U.S. and Spanish America. In their texts, these authors illustrate that while, for
them, Spanish and English may bear different emotional and political resonances, these two
languages, like all languages, are always combinative and never entirely separate.
Whether as actual political exiles or as ―domestic foreigners,‖ as willing ―traitors‖ or
―prostitutes‖ of their multilingual competencies, or as cultural mediators and/or community
spokespersons, these authors reveal their linguistic loyalties as more complicated than traditional
conceptions of language and ―languaging‖ in literature and society. Through their varied

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strategies of translation, they extend the perceived parameters of one or both of their languages
and advocate a fluid if not harmonious relationship with either and/or both of their assumed
languages. Their overt multilingualism contrasts divisive politics of ―English-only‖ on the one
hand and calls for more unyielding Hispanophone postures on the other. Each promotes an
official status for and/or dual representation of either or both of their languages. Their combined
texts are in line with the firestorm of criticism and popular resentment incited by the 2012
Republican presidential primary candidate Rick Santorum when in an interview with Puerto
Rico‘s El Vocero he was reported to have said that for Puerto Rico ―to be a state of the United
States, English has to be the principal language‖ (Trott). Following his comments in the Reuter‘s
report and a host of other similar statements in his interview with El Vocero, Santorum
summarily plummeted in the local primary, and his words prompted a response from Puerto
Rico‘s pro-statehood governor, Luis Fortuño. In an interview with Fox News, Fortuño stated,
―For more than a century, both English and Spanish have been official languages of Puerto Rico.
And as you know that is a right that is reserved to states … and we believe strongly that it should
remain that way,‖ and he added his personal opinion that most Puerto Rican parents want their
children to be bilingual and speak ―perfect English because it‘s the language of opportunity, but
at the same time we are proud of our heritage and we want to preserve Spanish as well‖
(America‘s Election HQ). Santorum‘s opponent, Mitt Romney, extended the governor‘s farreaching linguistic commentary when he told reporters, ―Spanish is the language of Puerto
Rico‘s heritage, English is the language of opportunity‖ (Freidman). In the complicated web of
dissensions and slippages between their texts, writers like Puig, Dorfman, Ferré, Anzaldúa, and
Cota-Cárdenas defy both the political imposition of a single language and limiting essentialist
notions about the inherent potential of either English or Spanish.

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While each author approached in this project explores the seeming character of one or the
other of their languages—Puig depicts Spanish as a language connected to Ramírez‘s traumas as
a political prisoner; Dorfman intimates Spanish as an inherently passive language in his
discussion of ―the impersonal se‖ (Heading 114-15 and Rumbo 158); Ferré claims that, for her,
English is a language of ―direction,‖ ―action,‖ ―technology,‖ and ―capitalism‖ (―On Destiny‖
160-61); and Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas both illustrate how their narrative selves must
constantly change linguistic registers to pivot between diverse social circumstances—the sum
differences between their texts and translation strategies suggest that, rather than an overriding
linguistic determinacy, indeterminacy and individual experience govern their language choices.
As Pérez Firmat argues, ―there is no model, no rule, no syntax, for the relation between Spanish
and English or (more generally) between a first and a second language; the same tongues tie
different speakers differently. Spanish is the language of the soul no more than English is that of
the wallet. Perceptions of difference emerge from personal history, not linguistic theory‖ (162).
Especially through the instabilities and ambivalences introduced between and within their texts,
the authors examined in this project approximate language as inherently contradictory,
inadequate, and, at the same time, permissive and full of possibility. Ultimately, these writers
stretch language to create openings for reinterpretation, reinvention, and uncertainty rather than
reinforcing linguistic and ethnic stereotypes.
The dissensions in and between their texts evidence translation as a form of authorship
and reiterate the extent to which the ―refractions‖ of a text inform and, often, shape the
perception of a text through time (Lefevere, ―Mother‖ 234). Particularly in their presumed lack
of sanctity toward their own texts, these authors represent translating or rewriting as a feat of

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―crucial intervention‖ (Venuti, The Translator‟s 1). As acclaimed Spanish-to-English translator
Edith Grossman argues,
But what never should be forgotten or overlooked is the obvious fact that what we
read in a translation is the translator‘s writing. The inspiration is the original
work, certainly, and thoughtful literary translators approach that work with great
deference and respect, but the execution of the book in another language is the
task of the translator, and that work should be judged and evaluated on its own
terms. (31-32)
Grossman‘s comments prompt the question of what constitutes ―deference and respect‖ toward
an original text, as well as the contention over whether a strong or a measured translation
practice is preferable in the global literary market. In their negotiations between and within their
texts, authors like Puig, Dorfman, Ferré, Anzaldúa, and Cota-Cárdenas intimate the inescapable
temporality occasioned by writing and, especially, rewriting, and they engage rather than restrict
the possibilities for contradiction and misprision surrounding perceptions of themselves and their
texts. As Gentzler maintains, ―Ironically, mistranslation can reveal more ‗truth‘ regarding the
source of the border culture, than a more traditional ‗accurate‘ translation‖ (145-46). Likewise,
the authors I discuss embolden the task of translating, and in doing so, expose the tenuous
constructs and/or mistruths and that bind language, nation, self, and community.
My project extends conversations around translation and the event of exile, translation
and authorial or textual reinvention, and translation and the feasibility of an openly multilingual
literary praxis in the texts of U.S. and Spanish American authors. In addition, this study invites a
host of other, related inquiries: Does ―the genuinely bilingual post-colonial‖ truly have an
―advantage‖ in the contemporary literary marketplace (Spivak 404)? What responsibility, if any,

187

does an author have to write in one or another of his/her languages? Are multilingual authors
connected by a shared capacity for tolerance, ambiguity, and/or self-reflexivity? Can we discern
an ―aesthetic of multilingualism‖? How can we distinguish between an inspired and an abusive
translation practice? Finally, to what extent do questions about translation collapse into questions
about language, generally? As Steiner claims, ―inside or between languages, human
communication equals translation. A study of translation is a study of language‖ (49). In this
project, I self-consciously examine the language decisions of U.S. and/or Spanish American
authors to illustrate how the event of self-translation occasions valuable opportunities to rethink
and reconfigure conceptualizations of language, nation, and self between and within literary
texts.

188

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