Máseual excluido/indio permitido: neoliberal translation in Waldemar Noh Tzec

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines issues of translation in contemporary Yucatec Maya literature, using selected poems from Waldemar Noh Tzec’s 1998 Noj Bálam/Large Jaguar as a representative case of how the Mexican state and ideologies of neoliberal multiculturalism may inflect the translation of indigenous text. In arguing for the existence of neoliberal translation, I use DuBois’s notion of double-consciousness and Rivera Cusicanqui’s theory of the ‘indio permitido’ to demonstrate how some bilingual indigenous texts create a space that is simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary, a literary phenomenon I refer to as the ‘máseual excluido/indio permitido’. I suggest that when nationalizing projects reduce indigenous language texts to objects that vouchsafe the ethnic particulars of indigenous authors, they do not so much create an intercultural literature so much as reinforce the linguistic status quo of bilingual indigenous and monolingual non-indigenous subjects. Moreover, the apparent translations of indigenous texts into Spanish must in some sense correspond to the expectations of non-indigenous readers. In cases like that of Noh Tzec’s poetry, this means that indigenous- and Spanish-language texts may convey wildly divergent messages to distinct readerships.