In this section, I present various articles and reviews which talk about the one prior translation of Don Quijote into Spanglish, performed by Ilan Stavans.
Article written by Eva Paris in Papel en Blanco:
“In un placete de la Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme…”
Ilan Stavans, de origen judío, nacido en México y residente en varios continentes, conoce bien lo que es la mezcla de lenguas y culturas distintas en un mismo ámbito. Es catedrático de Filología y Estudios Culturales en el Amherst College de Massachusetts, donde creó la primera cátedra de spanglish. Autor de obras como Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2004), sostiene que utilizan esta variedad lingüística más de 40 millones de personas en todo el mundo.
El spanglish se caracteriza por una mezcla del castellano y el inglés a varios niveles lingüísticos (morfológico, fonético, sintáctico, semántico), en distinto grado y forma según la comunidad concreta que lo emplee.
Ilan Stavans se ha atrevido a traducir al spanglish la primera parte de Don Quijote de la Mancha, una actividad con resultados no exentos de polémicas, sobre todo para algunos puristas que ven en este intento una degradación de la lengua cervantina. Yo lo catalogaría más bien de experimento (dadas las múltiples variedades del spanglish a lo largo del mundo), o de simple curiosidad. Eso sí, muy costosos en tiempo y esfuerzo: unos 10 años le ha costado a Stavans traducir la primera parte de las aventuras de don Quijote.
Al autor no parecen importarle demasiado estas críticas, y sigue embarcado en la traducción de la segunda parte del Quijote. Aquí os dejo una muestra de cómo le han quedado las primeras líneas que nos acercan al Ingenioso Hidalgo:
“In un placete de la Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para la dinner, un omelet pa’ los sábados, lentil pa’ los viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa’ los domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income.”
Article written in The Guadalajara Report by Meredith Mendell:
Evoking the ire of many Spanish linguists, Amherst College Professor Ilan Stavans is translating Don Quijote into Spanglish, the street lexicon of hispanic immigrants living in the United States.
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Standing behind the espresso machine in Starbucks one morning, barista Maria Renee Soberanes Rios is chatting with me about Spanglish. -Juan laqueo, el carro?
-No sé, voy a chequearlo.
“Asi es,” she says as we try to come up with an example dialogue. The new lexicon is a hybrid of the Spanish and English languages, where speakers use code-switching and false cognates to communicate. Rios, 23, who hails from the northern Mexican border state of Sonora says that lower-class country folk use slang like laquear derived from the English verb “to lock,” which in the King’s Spanish should really be cerrar. Then there is chequear, slang for the English verb “to check,” which, if translated in proper Spanish, is verificar.
For Rios, and many who live in Guadalajara, the Spanish colonial heart of Mexico, the use of Spanglish is considered an insult to Hispanic culture. Here in central Mexico, people are prone to rolling their eyes at Spanglish, or for that matter any cultural trend from the frontera, which many locals perceive to be violent and perhaps the reason Mexico gets a bad rep as a corrupt, backwards country.
“It’s for the rancheros,” Rios says of Spanglish, and with her hand points to a space far from her body, as if she was far-removed from those people.
But in the United States, where an estimated 40 million Hispanics reside, the fusion of Spanish and English has entered into pop culture’s mainstream – from the sassy street lyrics in a Reggaeton song to Hallmark’s Spanglish greeting cards. Supporters of the new lexicon argue Spanglish should be recognized as a language in its own right, as the lingua franca of immigrants, their children and grand-children, who are trying to bridge the gap between the world of their mother tongue and their newly-adopted language.
A key proponent of Spanglish is Amherst College Spanish Professor Ilan Stavans, whose attempt to translate Cervantes’ “Don Quijote” into Spanglish is striking a nerve among linguistic purists in the wake of 2005’s 400th anniversary celebration of the novel’s first edition.
Critics include members of the elite Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid whose stated objective is to “protect” and “defend” the purity of Castillian Spanish, to the degree that any Spanish speaker can read with facility the original 17th century version of Miguel de Cervantes work, considered by many, to be the crown jewel of Spanish literature.
Despite the naysayers and having received a death threat from one infuriated correspondent, the Mexican-born Stavans welcomes the debate.
“Academia is a sleepy place,” he says. “If anything this makes people think about Spanglish. At least they cannot ignore it.”
Stavans was inspired to translate the entire work after in 2003 he published the first chapter of the Spanglish version of Quijote in “Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language,” along with a 4,500-word dictionary. He hopes to publish his complete version in two years.
Stavans supporters say that if Quijote can be translated into more than three-dozen languages, among them, Sankrit, Hebrew and Russian, then translating the novel into Spanglish should be no different.
“The most renowned philologists think it’s a corruption of the language but in truth it’s an evolution of languages. Spanish was also the result of marriage, a marriage between Latin, Greek and Arabic. That’s the way languages are formed,” said David Valenzuela, an Economics professor at the University of Guadalajara, who grew up near the Mexico-United States border surrounded by the sounds of Spanglish, and frequently lectures on the subject.
He said that erudite intellectuals should think twice before they dismiss what marks an important cultural transition in the Hispanic world. Spanglish was born from the mouths of uneducated masses of immigrants who fled their Hispanic native countries to look for better opportunities in the United States, Valenzuela says. Without Spanglish “those people would be the equivalent of deaf or mute.”
Some academics have argued that Spanglish is more than just a language but defines the entire Hispanic-American identity in the United States. Stavans believes the real fury over his work goes beyond a debate over semantics but represents, on a grander scale, a cultural rift among Hispanics around the world.
“There is a whole resentment of the Latino populations in the U.S.,” he says. “People of Latin America and Spain are not recognizing that U.S. Latios are no longer Spanish speakers, that they are creating something new.”
“In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivía, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase”, begins the first chapter of the Spanglish translation of Don Quijote de la Mancha. Profesor Ilan Stavans, the author, said that Cervantes “would be proud.”
Review written by Professor Lourdes Torres of DePaul University:
In his Spanglish-titled article “Translating Cervantes: Una vez más” Burton Raffel claims that all English language translations of Don Quixote (except his own) mangle the meaning of essential parts of the novel and that none matches the magnificent Spanish original. Although many would argue that no translation (including Raffel’s) does justice to the original, translators from numerous languages continue to undertake the Herculean challenge presented by Cervantes’s text. Other than the Bible, few books have been translated into more languages than El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de La Mancha. The first translation was published in English by Thomas Shelton in 1612. This translation was followed by the French translation in 1614 and the Italian in 1622, and many translations in numerous languages, including Esperanto, followed. More recently, in 2003, Edith Grossman, a renowned translator of Spanish literature, produced another much-lauded English language translation. No doubt Cervantes would have been most pleased to see his work spread across the globe. His narrator alludes to the importance and complexity of the translation process himself when he suggests in chapter 9 of part one that the “true” history of Don Quixote was originally rendered by an unreliable author in Arabic and had been translated into Castillan by a bilingual morisco adolescent. He implies that all retellings and translations are but partial mediations that diverge from the original story. Perhaps, then, Cervantes would have been amused by the presentday scholarly obsession with “authentic” texts and “accurate” translations.
New translations of classic texts are appropriate because language is constantly evolving. Consequently, earlier translations become dated for contemporary audiences. Cervantes was a master of reproducing a variety of dialects; he captured colloquial, informal, and formal language across historical periods, social classes, and speech styles. Don Quixote contains a plethora of voices as well as parodies of the language of chivalric novels and other prose styles while representing seventeenth-century Spanish colloquial and high-brow speech. As do all languages, Spanish has evolved significantly, and translators are challenged to produce a text that captures the vitality of the language today in the same manner that Cervantes captured the language(s) of his day. Now, four hundred years after the birth of the original, English and Spanish bilingual and bicultural readers can enjoy a new translation of part of Don Quixote in Spanglish. Ilan Stavans’s 2003 book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language is a manifesto on the legitimacy of Spanglish. It includes an essay on the origin and meaning of Spanglish; a 185-page, 6,000-word Spanglish-English dictionary; and finally, a Spanglish version of the first chapter of Don Quixote.
Spanglish is a linguistic and cultural phenomenon born of the contact of languages and cultures. Although the term was once used to criticize the ways Latinos spoke in the United States, it has now been appropriated by many in that community as a positive term that captures the reality of bilingualism and biculturalism in the United States. In the United States today there are approximately forty-million Latinos, and many speak a range of language varieties that include English, Spanish, and Spanglish. While some Latinos are monolingual Spanish or English speakers, many more have varying degrees of proficiency in both languages, and many can and do mix the languages, producing a creative Spanglish. Language purists in the United States and across the Spanish-speaking world insist that Spanglish is an adulteration of Spanish and English. Academics and others claim that Spanglish is nothing but uneducated speech that should not be promoted because it relegates its speakers to a stigmatized, second-class status.
Sociolinguists and many writers and cultural critics agree that Spanglish represents a natural and creative blending of languages that occurs because of the intense contact between Spanish and English language and culture in the United States and increasingly, as English spreads worldwide, in other Spanish-speaking countries. However, not all writers are favorably disposed toward Spanglish; when asked his opinion of Spanish and English code mixing, Octavio Paz is said to have replied, “No es ni bueno no malo, sino abominable” (Stavans 4). And yet, despite the resistance to linguistic border-crossings, readers of Don Quijote (especially in episodes such as the “Capitán cautivo” in part one) know that Cervantes himself was fascinated with code-switching.
Although advertisers and corporate moguls utilize and exploit Spanglish for its commercial potential, for many young Latinos it is a valued part of their identity and an important symbol of Latinidad. Gloria Anzaldua reminds us that the language of Latinos has always been under attack. She refers to Latinos as “linguistic orphans” (59) because their ways of speaking are criticized by both Spanish and English language purists. For Anzaldua, “linguistic terrorism” (58) will end only when Spanglish, and the other speech varieties that Latinos use, are accepted as legitimate. Her political autobiography Borderlands/La Frontera is written in a blend of English, Spanish, Spanglish, and Nahuatl.
Spanglish may be a contested term, but it is generally understood to describe a series of phenomena that includes borrowing, code-switching, and calquing. All three linguistic processes typically occur in language-contact situations. The most common of these processes is borrowing. As an analysis of the lexicon of any language will demonstrate, all languages incorporate borrowed elements from other languages. Spanglish words can be borrowed with or without phonetic and morphological integration. In the example “Voy a jangear en el rufo,” both the English noun and verb roots have acquired Spanish endings (Spn., “Vamos a disfrutar el tiempo en el techo”; Eng., “Let’s go hang out on the roof”). On the other hand, in the sentence “Vamos a Ia office del professor,” the two nouns are not phonologically or morphologically integrated and can be considered borrowings or single-word code-switches (Spn., “Vamos a Ia oficina del profesor”; Eng., “Let’s go to the professor’s office”). Code-switching entails the alternation of two or more languages in a single utterance. Words can be mixed at the word, clause, or sentence level. Single-word code-switching and code-switching between sentences are common practices and can be engaged in by speakers with little proficiency in a second language. On the other hand, intra-sentential code-switching, which involves switching any number of constituents within a sentence, is a much more complex, rule-governed practice. Only speakers who are reasonably proficient in the languages can successfully switch between them within the sentence without violating the grammatical rules of either language. The most general syntactic rules for intra-sentential code-switching are the free morpheme constraint, which states that there will be no switching between bound morphemes, and the equivalency constraint, which predicts that a switch will not occur at any site where it would result in an ungrammatical structure in either language. In a study of a stable, bilingual Puerto Rican community in New York City, Shana Poplack found that there were almost no ungrammatical combinations of English or Spanish in the speech of bilinguals in the community. She demonstrates that it was precisely those speakers who were balanced bilinguals who most frequently engaged in intra-sentential code-switching. Speakers who have a great deal of competence in both languages are the ones who can seamlessly alternate between Spanish and English in extended discourse. Poplack even suggests that the ability to produce such intimate mixing could be used to gauge the linguistic competence of speakers in both languages. Caiques are also common in Spanglish; these are translated items that already exist in the borrowing language but that acquire a new meaning in the lending language. They can consist of single-word items (i.e., aplicacion, registrar) or phrases (eager retmtos; Spn., “sacar fotos”; Eng., “take pictures”).
While Spanglish is primarily associated with the speech of bilingual and bicultural working-class Latinos in the United States, it is found to be occasionally used by Latinos of all social classes as well as across the Hispanic world, especially in the media, music, and cyberspace. In the U.S. context, each Latino community has developed its own regional Spanglish variety. Although all varieties share common rules of code-switching and borrowing, each variety incorporates some lexical items that are unique. Tex-Mex is the name associated with the Chicano variety from the Southwest, while Spanglish or Nuyorican has been used to describe the Puerto Rican variety, and Cubonics identifies the variety from Miami.
Nuyorican and Chicano poets have been documenting the code-switching ways of speaking in the Latino community since the 1960s. Poets like Alurista, Tato Laviera, and Victor Hernández Cruz experimented with a mixture of English and Spanish in their poetry in an effort to capture Latino lives and voices. Writers like Tomas Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, and Roberto Fernández produced prose bilingual texts that challenged linguistic norms and expectations of both Spanish and English monolingual audiences. These writers, as well as more recent writers who experiment with bilingualism in more modest ways, created a space for the publication of new Latino texts that can only be read by bilingual readers. The reality of the growth of Latino communities in the United States and the success of Latino authors in the mainstream market have paved the way for writers who are attempting more daring linguistic experiments. For example, Giannina Braschi and Susana Chávez-Silverman have recently published writings that can only be read by a bilingual audience. Braschi is a Puerto Rican poet who wrote Yo-Yo Boing (1998), her first work of prose. This playful text contains bilingual poetry, monologues, and dialogues sandwiched between two lengthy Spanish-language chapters. Killer Crónicas (2004) is a series of letters that began as e-mail correspondence that Chávez-Silverman developed into “crónicas.” This epistolary text is completely bilingual from beginning to end. There is rarely a sentence that does not contain both Spanish and English. It is a good example of sustained intra-sentential code-switching, the type that is only seen in the speech of the most fluent bilingual speakers in a bilingual and bicultural community. In all these texts, setting the language down in print lends legitimacy to the Latino community’s ways of speaking and serves to validate Spanglish as a linguistic code worthy of literary expression. Stavans follows in this tradition of validating the oral language of a bilingual Latino community when he dares to translate a revered Spanish masterpiece into the Latino people’s vernacular. It is a democratizing and political move of which Cervantes probably would have approved. After all, Don Quixote is, above all, a novel about the encounter of cultures, classes, and ways of speaking.
Since the mid 1990s, Ilan Stavans has argued for the legitimization of Spanglish. He offered a university course entitled “The Sounds of Spanglish,” and in 2000 he hosted the First International Conference on Spanglish at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He argues that it is important to study the variety as a reflection of the culture of the Latino population, which is the largest “minority” group in the United States. Stavans explains that he was inspired to translate Don Quixote during a trip to Spain in 2002. In the course of a radio interview, a language purist affiliated with the Real Academia Española de la Lengua Castellana scoffed at the legitimacy of Spanglish as a language and asserted that only when Spanglish produced its own Don Quixote would it qualify as a true language. Stavans reports that, subsequently, he was asked by an editor for La Vanguardia in Barcelona to produce the translation. It was first published in the supplement Culturals in 2002. Predictably, purists responded with horror and disapproval, arguing that Stavans was desecrating the Spanish language and degrading Cervantes’s masterpiece.
In his quest to translate Don Quixote, Stavans was challenged by the fact that Spanglish is primarily an oral language. Furthermore, there is not just one Spanglish because each Latino region in the United States produces its own variety. Thus, in Stavans’s dictionary he indicates the particular regional origin of many terms; for example, he claims that con safos (“may God protect us”) originates in the Southwest, whereas polls (“police”) originates in New York City. These etymological assessments are based on Stavans’s research and the contributions of his students and friends. Therefore, rather than reproducing a particular regional Spanglish in his version of Don Quixote, Stavans elected to produce a text that incorporates lexical terms from a range of varieties. In this sense, his translation becomes an artificial and abstract rendition. But his point in producing both the lexicon and the translated chapter was to lend legitimacy to Spanglish as a creative, avant-garde, linguistic practice, not to reproduce an “authentic” language. Stavans is aware that what marks the development of a language and separates it from dialects is the appearance of a grammar, a dictionary, and a literature. He is the first to acknowledge that Spanglish is an emerging variety. His book is an initial effort toward a process of standardization.
The first two sentences of the translation read:
In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivia, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antique, a skinny caballo y un greyhound para el chase. A cazuela with más beef than mutón, carne choppeada para Ia dinner, un omelet pa” los Sábados, lentil pa’ los Viernes, y algún pigeon como delicacy especial pa’ los Domingos, consumían tres cuarers de su income. (253)
The strategies Stavans employs in these two sentences are typical of the entire translation. There are many borrowings or single-word code-switches from English; some of these are incorporated without integration into Spanish such as “rack” and “skinny” and “greyhound” and “chase.” Many other lexical borrowings are integrated phonologically and morphologically into Spanish such as “remembrearme,” which consists of the English root verb “remember” with the most common ending for new verbs that come into Spanish “-ear” and “choppeada,” which is similarly integrated. “Cuarers” derives from “quarters” but is spelled as Spanglish speakers might pronounce it. Stavans also uses a spelling system that corresponds to vernacular pronunciations; for example, he uses “pa’ ” to show that “para” has undergone apocope. He capitalizes the names of the days of the week, following the rules of English, even though the days are rendered in Spanish. It is difficult to identify either English or Spanish as the base language in the chapter. This serves to represent intra-sentential code-switching as produced by those bilinguals who have a strong proficiency in both languages. In these two sentences and throughout Stavans’s translation, there are a number of examples that violate the equivalency constraint, specifically the adjective placement rule, which is different for English and Spanish. For example, “Buckler antiguo” follows the adjective-placement rules of Spanish but violates the adjective-placement rule for English. Conversely, “a skinny caballo” follows the adjective-placement rules of English but violates the rules of Spanish. Some constructions such as those that include the switching of a lone preposition or relative pronoun seem unlikely, such as “Livin with él eran. . .” (253). Also, some of the Spanglish terms that Stavans employs throughout his translation-such asforgetear (“to forget”), pleasura (“pleasure”), regarde (“regard”), and awakeado (“awake”)-seem entirely implausible to me (a native Nuyorican Spanglish speaker). Stavans claims that all the items in his dictionary and, presumably, in his translation have been attested in oral or written speech at least three times, but I remain skeptical. Nonetheless, despite the numerous violations of the equivalency constraint, the bound morpheme constraint, and the unlikely neologisms, the translation will probably provide pleasure to many Spanglish speakers. To his credit, Stavans acknowledges that Spanglish is primarily an oral language, so that his literary experiment is bound to be forced and inelegant in some places. In any case, the translation is a fun, clever, and linguistically interesting extravaganza. It will not win any literary prizes, but it is engaging and readable.
Although this Spanglish translation is only accessible to Spanglish (or bilingual) readers, it is important to realize that there are probably not any Latinos who are exclusively Spanglish speakers or readers. Just as monolingual speakers control a range of varieties in their linguistic repertoire, most Spanglish speakers can switch to Spanish or English when confronted with monolingual speakers or texts. That they can also converse in this creative, mixed code is a result of living in a bilingual and bicultural context. Stavans’s translation undoubtedly captures the linguistic possibilities of Spanglish much better than it does the cultural and linguistic nuances of Cervantes’s text; but then again, that is its purpose. Additionally, it is an intriguing parody that certainly does capture the complexity of multiple voices that is very much true to the spirit of Cervantes’s great obra. Who knows, perhaps Latino bilingual readers new to Cervantes’s Don Quixote will enjoy Stavans’s translation so much that they will be compelled to pick up a copy of the entire text in either English or Spanish. If not, they will have to wait until Stavans or another Spanglish virtuoso decides to take on the challenge of completing the Spanglish translation.