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[ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] mire the highly crafted narrative structures, as well as their innovative and often self-reflexive perspectives on reality. For this reason, many critics Magical Realism and the Reception of Latina/o Literatures 33 have adopted a humanistic, universalizing approach. Donald Shaw, for ex- ample, has concluded that these novels demonstrated the abandonment in Latin America of the novela comprometida or politically committed novel, and the emergence of the novela metafísica or metaphysical novel (Shaw, Concerning 322). Other critics, however, have pointed out that while the Boom could be read as detached from sociopolitical concerns, such practices nullify the fact that texts, literary or otherwise, are at once products of history in the broader sense as well as participants in ongoing sociopolitical debates. Gerald Martin s Journey through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century, for example, locates Latin American literature, including the Boom novels, in a sociopolitical context and highlights politi- cized readings. At the other end of the critical spectrum, in terms of degree of contex- tualization and engagement with specific political struggles, is Richard Watson s reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude. His reading proposes that the novel is, in form and content, one of self-negation where death and life are the same thing, nothing changes, and ultimately everything is irrelevant, meaningless.17 According to Watson, the novel is a pig s tail. I do not know if the same ambiguity hangs on a Spanish pig s behind, and I am not going to look it up. I hope you can go from tail to tale in Spanish, because if you cannot, then the English novel is that much better than the Spanish (Watson 90). In these lines, Watson centers his interpretation on the play between tail and tale, which is inoperative in Spanish (cola and cuento or relato, respectively). Yet, he is unconcerned regarding whether the connection does or does not work in the original language, since the book he is discussing is One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel in English written by Gregory Rabassa based on a novel in Spanish by Gabriel García Márquez. This is not merely because I don t read Spanish, but also because this text exists as an object in itself that has been received as a novel in English by numerous ordinary readers, critics, and even scholars (Watson 89). Watson s point, namely that a translation of a text becomes a different text, authored by the translator, has been articulated by various critics working in translation theory.18 A particularly poignant illustration of this position is Borges s story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote [ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ]. The story explores various approaches to translation, leading to an exact reproduction of the Quixote being re- 34 Latino American Literature in the Classroom ceived as an original work by Pierre Menard. Watson s evaluation re- garding the English language novel being that much better than the Spanish even echoes the critics position in Borges s story. The obvious fact that Boom novels relied on translation to reach the international audience, which in turn defined the Boom as a phenomenon, is a key point. Emir Rodríguez Monegal asserts that although conditions paving the way for the Boom were well underway in Latin America prior to the works appearing in translation, it is only after they are made avail- able in French and English that they gain the audience and market that Latin American narrative had never before experienced.19 For Monegal, the Boom in translation begins with Borges sharing the first Premio Formentor with Samuel Beckett and consequently his Ficciones appearing in translation throughout Europe and the United States in 1961.20 Thus, while Borges s writing actually predates the Boom, its availability in trans- lation links his work temporally to the phenomenon. It seems particularly appropriate that translation has played such an important role in the reception of Boom novels, given that the process of translation itself is a running subtext within many of them. This is espe- cially true in Cien años de soledad, as generations of the Buendía family struggle to decipher, or translate, Melquíadez s text written in Sanskrit.21 The preoccupation with translation is actually not surprising in light of the Boom novels obsession with the writing and reading process. Since we can ascertain that reading making meaning through a deciphering of codes is a form of translation, then the inverse, that translation is a form of reading, must also be considered. Gregory Rabassa makes the observa- tion that translation is the closest reading one can possibly give a text (Rabassa 6). Reading a work in translation, then, is performing a reading of a read- ing. This shift to the twice removed facilitates Watson s exclusion of García Márquez s novel and its language from his discussion and interpretation of the English language version. It is also worth mentioning that the transla- tors responsible for rendering most Boom novels in English, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, approach translation as reproducing the text as if it had been written in English.22 As translators, they seek semantic and cultural equivalents recognizable to an English-speaking audience. This, too, facilitates the displacement of the text. Yet, by isolating García Már- quez s novel from its linguistic context, readers such as Watson are also isolating it from the historical and literary conditions that produced it. The removal of Boom novels from their language, Spanish, also erases Magical Realism and the Reception of Latina/o Literatures 35 the hierarchical relationship between languages in a U.S. context. As Arteaga elucidates, in this country, Spanish is the language of the poor, the foreign, the dise powered and as such has become established as a low- status language (Arteaga 14). The fact that novels such as One Hundred [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ] |