The Fifth Commandment and Translations of Other Short
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THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT AND TRANSLATIONS OF OTHER SHORT STORIES BY ROCÍO QESPI by ALEKSANDRA M. CARBAJAL A Thesis submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Program in Spanish written under the direction of Phyllis Zatlin, Ph.D. and approved by ____________________________________ ____________________________________ ____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2008 ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS The Fifth Commandment and Translations of Other Short Stories by Rocío Qespi By ALEKSANDRA M. CARBAJAL Thesis Director: Phyllis Zatlin, Ph.D. Rocío Qespi is a Peruvian author who writes short stories that center around the themes of love, chess, and personal experiences. Her prose is a rich tapestry of allusions to the work of other Latin American authors and artists as well as a reference to events from her own life. As her translator, I had the opportunity to work closely with the author as I resolved problems encountered during the process of translating her prose. Following a brief introduction that describes these problems and their solutions, is a selection of the translated stories taken from the collection El cuarto mandamiento, which has been published by Mundo Ajeno in Peru. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to Professor Phyllis Zatlin, Professor Jorge Marcone, Professor Marcy Schwartz, Jeff Saxon, Mary Katherine Hogan, and the author, Rocío Qespi, for their guidance, creative and generous suggestions, and timely replies. iii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Bogda and Wojtek. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...........................................................................................iii DEDICATION...............................................................................................................iv TABLE OF CONTENTS................................................................................................v SHORT STORIES: INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................1 ON VISITING MUSEUMS..........................................................................................15 FEDERICO...................................................................................................................19 THE ISLAND OF SALT...............................................................................................33 THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT.................................................................................45 SLEEPING IN THE WATER........................................................................................58 THE CEMETERY OF ACARI.....................................................................................68 GETTING A HANDLE ON THE GUITAR.................................................................81 BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................91 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………95 v 1 INTRODUCTION Rocío Qespi, a professor of Colonial Spanish American Literatures and Post Colonial Studies and Peruvian author whose name in Quechua means “light, reflection, mirror,” started writing short stories at the age of seventeen. The themes of love and chess resonate throughout her stories, intertwined with personal experiences and preferences. Her writing style draws readers into the story, allowing them to live vicariously through the same moments, in turn providing the author-protagonist’s perspective. Furthermore, Qespi alludes to other works, thereby heightening the readers’ sense of aesthetic pleasure. As her translator, I had the privilege of gaining entry into the “author’s head” and accessing the experiences and allusions to an even greater degree. By keeping in touch with her, I learned that she enjoys traveling, visiting museums, and reading Cortázar and Borges, all experiences which have influenced her stories. However, it is the cooperation that Rocío Qespi extended to me when I first contacted her about a class project that initially inspired me to translate more of her stories. While completing graduate coursework, I enrolled in a translation workshop in which I translated an excerpt from Qespi’s “El cementerio de Acarí.” Throughout my research, I learned a great deal about the Peruvian cultural references such as food, dress, speech, and geography, included in the story. Furthermore, I was captivated by the colloquial style of the narrative, and felt as if I were at the narrator’s side while she shared the flashback. I decided to translate the rest of the story for the final project in the class and contacted Rocío Qespi to obtain permission and answers to questions I had regarding the translation of geographical names. Her immediate response and enthusiasm 2 about my project led me to choose her stories for my translation thesis. Subsequently, she and I collaborated in submitting the translation of “El cementerio de Acarí,” to the literary translation journal Metamorphoses where it will be published in the Spring of 2008. “El cementerio de Acarí” received the Atenea literary award for short story in Spanish (Salamanca, Spain 1999) and was the first runner-up in the Ana María Matute Literary Competition (Madrid, Spain 1999). It has been published in the collection Ellas también cuentan (Madrid: Torremozas, 2001). Another story,“El cuarto mandamiento” received La Regenta literary award for short fiction (Salamanca 1999) and it has been published in Writing Towards Hope (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006). Mundo Ajeno (Peru) is publishing Rocío Qespi’s collection of short stories, titled Durmiendo en el agua, in June 2008. The stories from the Mundo Ajeno collection that I have translated are: “El cementerio de Acarí” (“The Cemetery of Acari”), “Federico” (“Federico”), “Para visitar museos” (“On Visiting Museums”), “Guitarra en riendas” (“Getting a Handle on the Guitar), “El cuarto mandamiento” (“The Fifth Commandment”), “La isla de sal” (“The Island of Salt”), and “Durmiendo en el agua” (“Sleeping in the Water”). Each story presented specific challenges but I applied translation theory to resolve them. “The Cemetery of Acari” tells, in flashback form, about the life, times, and death of the narrator’s Grandma Emilia, for whose grave the narrator is looking. The main challenge in the translation of this story lay in the dialogues and in the references to Peruvian food. The dialogues in the story where black servants were involved, posed a problem because the speech was of a “broken,” colloquial Spanish spoken in the mid 19th 3 century when slavery still existed in Peru. For example, Teodoro, one of the servants, says: --Tómeselo, amita, é bueno pa las tripas. Uté viene de a caballo y se come eta carne. Tómese el vinito pa que la ayude a bajarla. I had to reflect the colloquial speech of that specific time period and group in the English version without conjuring up unwanted stereotypes or associations of African- Americans or of a different time period. Researching dialogues from 19th century American fiction, such as Gone With the Wind and Roots, revealed how blacks spoke and duplicating the style of speech found in those works of fiction in the translation resulted in a type of cultural transposition. Cultural transposition involves avoiding a literal translation of culturally specific source text (ST) components by transferring them into the context of the target culture (Hervey, Higgins, and Haywood 20). Thus, the translation of Teodoro’s utterance became: Drink up ma’am, it be good fer da belly. You’s comin’ frum herse ridin’ n’ you be eatin’ dis meat. Drink up da wine so’s it help ya’ll diges’. This is very similar to the dialogue found in Gone With the Wind and Roots: GWTW p.19: “Is ya’ll aimin’ ter go ter Mist’ Wynder’s? ‘Cause ef you is, you ain’ gwine git much supper…de niggers tells me she is de wustest cook in de state.” Roots p. 273: “Dey could of, an’ been inside de law. Jes’ like when dat white man broke my hand…” It is interesting to note however, that when I submitted the story for publication in the literary translation journal Metamorphoses, the editors suggested that I change the translation in order to be more politically correct. Specifically, the editor, Thalia Pandiri wrote me the following email: 4 One thing that you will notice is some modification in the way servant speech is represented. This is a contested issue among schools of translation, but it is pretty widely accepted that too much "phonetic" spelling is distracting to the reader, and (depending on your beliefs) denigratory towards the represented speaker. It's enough to suggest class, race, geography and then not overdo the spelling. Another issue is importing the wrong "baggage" with dialectal representation: a sort of imitation of a slave-nanny of the American deep south in the 19th century carries all sorts of connotations with it. And it seems that the Spanish is not nearly as exaggerated as the English. The translation suggested by the editors of Metamorphoses was: Drink up ma’am, it be good fer the belly. You’s comin’ from horse ridin’ and you be eatin’ this meat. Drink up the wine, it’ll help you digest’. I agreed to this change, and this is how the black servant speech will be represented in the published version of the short story.