Linguistic Varieties in Homegoing: Translating the Other’s Voice into Spanish

Miguel Sanz Jiménez

doi:10.14198/raei.2022.36.08

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to study the Spanish translation of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), a novel that adopts the form of a neo-slave narrative to chronicle a black family’s history from eighteenth-century Ghana to the early twenty-first century in the United States. The contexts in which both the source and target text were published will be described, paying attention to paratexts, to the book’s reception, and to the translation’s positive reviews. Gyasi’s debut oeuvre depicts alterity and the non-standard linguistic varieties, such as Black English, spoken by the dispossessed Other. This paper examines the strategies that the translator, Maia Figueroa (2017), has made use of to render this interplay of voices into Spanish. In addition, it considers how her choice to standardize some fragments and to introduce marked non-standard language in certain passages affects the reflection of the narrative Us vs. Otherness in the target text.

Highlights

This paper studies Homegoing’s Spanish translation by Maia Figueroa, which was published in 2017 by Salamandra
In the chapters chronicling the lives of Effia and her descendants that are set in Africa, characters are supposed to be speaking their African mother tongues, such as Twi, so the source text is written in Standard English and does not pose any additional challenges for Figueroa
The chapters focusing on Esi’s family and their ordeals in America deal with the oppression of African Americans in the United States, including slavery, and they portray several morpho-syntactic and phonological traits of Black English

Summary

Introduction

This paper studies Homegoing’s Spanish translation by Maia Figueroa, which was published in 2017 by Salamandra. ¡Y luego vas y arrancas hasta los boniatos verdes!” (Rodríguez Juiz 2017, 66) When it comes to parallel dialect translation, an illustrative example would be the Spanish version of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (2015), a novel about Bob Marley’s attempted assassination that resorts to eye-dialect and depicts Jamaican patois. An example of dialect localization would be translating the Black English found in, for instance, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) into Cuban Spanish and adapting the setting to colonial Cuba and its historical terminology, so that black characters would be enslaved at “ingenios”, instead of plantations, and slavecatchers would turn into “rancheadores” (Piqueras 2011, 72)

Homegoing’s Context and Reception

Linguistic Variation in Ghana

Linguistic Variation in the United States

Concluding Remarks