Capítulo 1: Marco Referencial Teórico
1.3. El proceso de construcción y validación de instrumentos psicológicos
Santiago’s introduction to the Spanish translation of her memoir has already been given specific attention. It should be added, however, that it bears commonalities with Ferré’s preface to her English version of Maldito amor, Sweet Diamond Dust, not least because it similarly tries to obtain the reader’s goodwill and, as such, functions as a
captatio benevolentiae. Ferré presents her introduction as a ‘memoir’ – the title to the preface being ‘Memoir of Diamond Dust’ – in which she casts a retrospective glance at her original novel, much in the same vein as Santiago did when looking back on her decision to (re)translate her childhood (back) into Spanish. Ferré opens her introduction
as follows: ‘Now that ten years have gone by since Sweet Diamond Dust was published,
I think I can better understand what made me write it.’436 She later on concludes:
Sweet Diamond Dust, ten years after I wrote it, speaks to me of the Puerto Rico of today. It describes the metamorphosis of the mythical “rich land” into the “dangerous port” we’re living in. Change, exchange – in dollar bills or coins, in English or in
434 Garcia De la Puente quotes a passage from both versions in which a ‘four poster bed’ becomes ‘una cama
de caoba’ after the author explained that ‘it was only when she translated this passage that she remembered that her mother used to proudly refer to her bed as ‘la cama de caoba’ (‘the mahogany bed’). As a result of the re-thinking entailed in self-translating into the language of the experience, Cuando gets closer to details of the self-translator’s childhood.’ Ibid., p. 219.
435 See Sara Kippur’s chapter on Nancy Huston’s self-translations in that regard, in which Kippur observes the
following about the inevitability of translation: ‘Her aesthetics of translatedness presents characters always already in translation, even before they are translated into Huston’s other tongue. Self-translation, as a literary project, defamiliarizes what is already strange, providing a concrete stylistic medium for putting forth a vision of translation as endemic to modern life.’ Sara Kippur, Writing it Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2015), p. 45.
Spanish – is at the heart of the dispute for power. The novel is all gossip, lies, shameless slander – and yet the story remains true.437
As the passages underline, Ferré first attempts to capture the reader’s attention by casting a retrospective glance on her first version of the novel in Spanish, before she ascertains the ongoing validity of her work – which is not autobiographical – by lending credence to her initial assumptions which, as she claims, are still relevant, and even ‘true’ a decade later. Although the first edition of Maldito amor did not contain a preface, the subsequent Spanish editions, from 1988 onwards, include (pre)liminal matter entitled
‘Memorias de Malditoamor’. When compared with its English counterpart, the Spanish
preface contains similar points of emphasis, particularly the parodic features of the novel which aim at debunking the ‘novela de la tierra’438, the role that Puerto Rico has played
throughout time as a harbour, turning the island into a symbol of migration and constant movement,439 or again the concluding idea that the novel ‘remains true’ despite the
unreliability of its various intradiegetic narrators.440 However, as has been pointed out by
Gema Soledad Castillo García in her study of Ferré and her self-translations, the English preface differs from the introduction added to the Spanish editions of the novel, due to its more markedly introspective nature:
En « Memoir », Rosario Ferré indica que el tiempo transcurrido también le ha permitido comprender mejor que lo que le motive a autotraducirse fue dar a conocer su isla a las generaciones venideras. […] Estas reflexiones personales únicamente aparecen en « Memoir » – la introducción de la novela en traducción – y parecen apuntar al hecho de que la autotraducción es, tal y como comenté en el primer capítulo, una manera de cuestionar la identidad bilingüe y bicultural de un escritor. Mediante la autotraducción, Ferré está tratando de conocerse y entenderse a sí misma.441
437Ibid., p. x.
438 ‘Maldito amor intentó ser, entre otras cosas, una parodia de la novela de la tierra.’ Rosario Ferré, ‘Memorias
de Maldito amor’, Maldito amor, 3rd edn (San Juan: Ediciones Huracán, 1994), p. 9.
439 ‘Puerto Rico le ha dado albergue tradicionalmente a un sinfín de refugiados que han venido a tocar a sus
puertas legal o ilegalmente; […] Estas inmigraciones recientes, sin embargo, le han dado a la isla un carácter de antesala o de patria transitoria, de peñón en medio del océano sobre el cual es útil apoyarse antes de “brincar el charco grande”.’ Ibid., p. 12.
440 The last sentence of the English introduction echoes almost word for word the Spanish version: ‘Todo lo
que ellos cuentan es chisme, mentira, calumnia desatada, y sin embargo todo es cierto.’ Ibid., p. 14.
441 Gema Soledad Castillo García, Rosario Ferré y la (auto)traducción: “(re)writing” en inglés y en español
As this extract shows, Ferré not only re-contextualizes Maldito amor for later generations of (Anglophone) readers through her act of self-translation, she also (re)asserts her hybrid identity as a Puerto Rican woman writer. To a certain extent, ‘Memoir of Sweet Diamond Dust’ therefore introduces a new pact with the reader, in which the author highlights the alterity intrinsic to her novel, bound to evolve with time while retaining its original description of Puerto Rican society. Furthermore, this new ‘self-translational pact’442 questions the relevance of classifying Puerto Rican (and, to
some extent, Caribbean) literary works according to criteria of nationality and citizenship. This point seems all the more verified in the context of Puerto Rico, whose literary canon is mostly (if not entirely) regarded as ‘national’ when limited to writers of Spanish expression, at least on the island. Through their acts of self-translation, made visible in the very thresholds of their texts, Ferré and Santiago argue for a reconsideration and legitimation of bifocality as a driving force of Puerto Rican aesthetics that bypass lines of demarcation often drawn between diasporic writers, expressing themselves in English, and their ‘home’ counterparts who privilege Spanish as their language of expression. 443
Although similar phenomena can be observed in a number of Caribbean writers who similarly choose one language of expression over another depending on whether they wish to address local or metropolitan readers, the self-translational pacts observed here disrupt the concept of national literature on another level. In fact, as has been observed, if self-translation often entails being assimilated into (at least) two distinct national literary canons for writers like Julian Green or George Semprún, such dual, parallel integration does not seem to apply in the case of the Puerto Rican writer.444 Marlene
Hansen Esplin shows how Ferré’s The House on the Lagoon, soon followed by La Casa
de la laguna, was considered an act of treason for many Puerto Ricans, all the more so as
442 The term refers to Alessandra Ferraro’s concept of the ‘pacte autotraductif’, itself deriving from Lejeune’s
‘pacte autobiographique’. See Alessandra Ferraro, ‘« Traduit par l’auteur »: Sur le pacte autotraductif’,
L’Autotraduction littéraire: Perspectives théoriques, ed. by Alessandra Ferraro and Rainier Grutman (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2016), pp. 121–140.
443 See chapter 7 and more particularly the references to Nuyorican works (re)published by Isla Negra Editores. 444 Ferraro notes: ‘Par cette déclaration [qu’est le pacte autotraductif], donc, l’altérité de l’œuvre est révélée et
son statut unique mis en question, ce qui souvent soulève également le problème de son appartenance à une seule littérature nationale.’ Alessandra Ferraro, ‘« Traduit par l’auteur »: Sur le pacte autotraductif’,
the English publication coincided with the writer’s political support of statehood (as opposed to independence) at the time.445 Thus, despite its status as Estado Libre Asociado
of the United States, Puerto Rico could be said to divide its literary heritage along lines of linguistic loyalties, although recent adaptations for the stage of Cuando era puertorriqueña and literary events on the island attest to more complex cultural realities.446
If some Puerto Rican writers prefer to clearly dissociate English from Spanish, and may still write in both languages, Ferré and Santiago prefer to address their ‘Hamlet complex’447 through visible acts of self-translation, navigating from one language to the
other, whilst claiming their right to do so. Their authorial intentions differ, in that regard, from other self-translators who opt for a complete erasure of their multilingual experiences as writers, 448 once again asserting their identity and auctoritas through their
position as cultural hybrids.
445 See Marlene Hansen Esplin, ‘Self-translation and Independence: Reading Between Rosario Ferré’s The
House on the Lagoon and La casa de la laguna’, Translation Review, 92 (2015), 23–39 (p. 23).
446 During my research project in Puerto Rico, I attended a stage production of Cuando era puertorriqueña
with Puerto Rican actress Yamaris Latorre in the lead role at the Teatro Braulio Castillo in Bayamón, a suburb of San Juan. Esmeralda Santiago was moreover invited to the Festival de la Palabra that was held in San Juan in October 2016 and during the event her works appeared on various book stalls in both languages.
447 The expression is borrowed from Rosario Ferré who used it in both her prefaces to Maldito amor and Sweet
Diamond Dust to refer to the Puerto Rican condition: ‘País esquisinfrénico con complejo de Hamlet, nuestra personalidad más profunda es el cambio, la capacidad para la transformación, para el valeroso transitar entre dos extremos o polos.’ Ferré, ‘Memorias de Maldito amor’, Maldito amor, p. 13.
448 In a chapter devoted to the Argentinian writer Bianciotti, who enjoyed a prestigious literary career in France
(and originally wrote in French), Kippur shows how in his case the ‘bilingual project as a whole – and his engagement with autobiographical representation in particular – depend[ed] crucially on a strict separation between languages that cannot be breached by self-translation.’ Kippur, Writing it Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French, p. 102.