A couple of posts ago I wrote about what I might or could know about Mexicans and mentioned that Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz was supposed to offer clues to Mexicanidad. Since then I have read the whole Laberinto de la solituda of Octavio Paz. In Spanish yet. Why in Spanish? We were brought up with the notion that reading something in the original is better than in translation. This issue has some relevance to the discussion of foreigness, I think.
I discovered that (probably to the horror of my Spanish teachers) I could get through reading a fair amount of Spanish by reading English-language mystery stories and bestsellers in Spanish (junk, in other words, I guess.) The first one I attempted a number of years ago was a John Grisham novel – I can’t remember which one. Indeed it was eye opening (or ear-opening maybe). The first thing I noticed was how strange the cadence was. Grisham´s characters personify the US south. They don’t have Spanish accents or even a Spanish lilt – EVER. At that time, I was still pretty awkward in Spanish so I had to look up what seemed like every other word. Doing this led me to realize just how much of a book is in the translator’s hands. The translation for one word would seem apt to me, for another it wouldn’t. It is very hard for a translator to find a way to express the author´s culture rather than his own. Often the flow of the language seems generic, if I can call it that, or more like that on TV.
Also I realized that as a native English speaker, I was familiar with a wide variety of English without giving it much thought. Thus, the English of Dickens, of PD James, of Walter Mosely and George Pelikanos doesn’t phase me and more important, tells me something about place and character. I could pretty much tell a fair amount about the background of authors and characters and where they came from. I do have trouble with some UK English, I have to confess. For years I had a very hard time making any of these distinctions when I read Spanish. Spanish slang, which varies from place to place REALLY baffled me. I could start to tell a few things about writers in Spanish especially the fact that Spanish writers often use longer sentences and more words than current writers in English. And I actually got to where I could recognize that some writers just weren’t very good. I got to the point where I thought many Spanish language writers liked William Faulkner,maybe in part because HE liked long, convoluted sentences. I can now kind of tell styles apart: Gabriel Garcia Marquez vs. Carlos Fuentes, for instance. And I can get absorbed in the stories, too, and make somewhat intelligent comments.
But I persist in reading US bestsellers in Spanish translation. I read books I have not read in English. And I think the virtue in doing this lies in reading non-literary Spanish; reading conversational Spanish. I think this kind of reading is good for everyday Spanish.
At this point, I can kind of overlook the weird Spanishness of translations of PD James, for instance. I’m not sure how that came to be or whether it has to do with the work itself. NowI’m reading Aeropuerto by Arthur Hailey in Spanish. If that isn’t a potboiler I don’t know what is. It’s okay and easy which means I can read a LOT of Spanish at once. At this point, the Spanish doesn’t make the characters sound misplaced in Chicago. I suspect partly it’s because Hailey’s English is pretty generic and can be translated into pretty generic Spanish, but this isn’t the whole reason. I think one’s brain does some shifting from one language to another in terms of shades of accent and tone and so forth as one gains experience. Reading Spanish works in the original language as a native English speaker raises for me the question of whether indeed it is always better to read something in the original. Andrea Camilleri, an Italian author is reportedly so happy with the work of the man who translates him into English that he gives him prominence on his title pages. Camilleri is an interesting person to think about translation with. His series of detective stories set in the not-so-imaginary town of Vigata in Sicily feature not just Italian in the original, but local dialects. Apparently Camilleri works with these dialects so that even Italians who don’t speak them can get the flavor and still understand what the characters say. Stephen Sarterelli who is the translator manages shades of dialect in English which sound faintly like shades of New York (New Jersey?) Italian to me and which work quite well to add color. Now obviously I wouldn’t be able to appreciate Camilleri in Italian, but I do in English.
I’m moderately fluent reading Spanish. I can read pretty much without a dictionary. This is what our instructors wanted us to do: read wihout a dictionary. But there are drawbacks to being a foreigner and reading without a dictionary, and I really am not sure that any but the most fluent of foreigners can really read a book a foreign language and get the real original flavor, this way. For instance, I don’t have the easy flexibility of knowing the same word’s meanings in various contexts without thinking about it or looking it up. This leads me to feel a certain stiltedness and lack of spontaneity. AND it matters where you look it up! Dictionaries vary hugely. I find that wordreference.com is the best option since it has not only long lists of possibilities but forums where different nuances are discussed. Of course this slows you down a bit. One approach I like is to start out looking up a lot of words. Authors tend to repeat their vocabulary, so after awhile, with the same author, you look up less and less and can get more into the flow AND learn more and more vocabulary. I took a course in the short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez from a wonderful, lively, very literary Colombian who was teaching at UNAM in San Antonio because he had had to leave Colombia as a political refugee. He LOVED Colombia and he loved Garcia Marquez and after reading many, many stories with him guiding us, I really think we got the hang of Garcia Marquez in his native Spanish. It was WONDERFUL. AND much to his joy, our maestro got to return to Colombia.
A problem with reading Mexican or Latin American or Spanish Spanish literature as opposed to popular stuff is that it is literature: it doesn’t help that much with going to the store to buy milk or asking your neighbor why there were four military Humvees at the entrance to the colonia or how their sick child is or whether they think the new governor is any different than the old. For this, go for the junk novels in translation I say. And read them out loud if you don’t get much out-loud practice every day.