Flight to Canada And Kindred: Similarities and Discrepancies in Two Neo-Slave Narratives Translated into Spanish

Miguel Sanz Jiménez

doi:10.17561/grove.v27.a9

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the Spanish translations of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, two neo-slave narratives that were published in the 1970s. It examines how Black English, the lexicon of slavery, and proper nouns have been recreated in the Spanish target texts. The linguistic variety spoken by the secondary characters in Flight to Canada and by the slaves in Kindred makes readers aware of the language of the dispossessed Other. Butler’s and Reed’s novels were published simultaneously in Spain in 2018 and translated by Amelia Pérez de Villar and Inga Pellisa, respectively. This paper observes how translators’ choices play a key role in the portrayal of alterity in literary texts.

Highlights

Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and Octavia E
Pérez de Villar uses dialect compilation, pseudodialectal translation, and compensation to deal with African-American Vernacular English in Parentesco, contrasting it with Dana’s Standard English
When slaves like Aunt Sarah and Nigel talk to the protagonist, Pérez de Villar adds italics and lowers their register as these characters postpone the demonstrative to proper nouns, utter mispronunciations, and use short forms

Summary

Introduction

Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred are two subversive novels published in the late 1970s that play with language, AfricanAmerican history, and ideas of race They belong to the subgenre of neo-slave narratives and, despite their critical success in their source context, they were not translated into Spanish until 2018—four decades after their original release. This paper looks into the strategies chosen by Pellisa and Pérez de Villar in order to cope with the lexicon of slavery, those terms alluding to skin color and Southern plantations This is followed by looking closely at the translation of the slaves’ meaningful names, which may shed some light on the underlying publishing policies that influence the reception of AfricanAmerican slave narratives by Spanish readers

African-American Neo-Slave Narratives

Black English

The Lexicon of Slavery

Proper Names

Concluding Remarks