Abstract
Abstract: In response to the 2017 Puerto Rican hurricanes María and Irma, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s 2019 while they sleep (under the bed is another country) alternates between various Spanish-English translingual strategies. This paper discusses one of these translingual strategies, a technique named here as (anti-)translation. As exemplified by the collection’s poem 45, (anti)translation is the ironic performance of a failed and violent style of translation––critically staging how Puerto Ricans were translated into silence in the hurricanes’ wake. In the poems that (anti-) translate, fragments of Spanish-language voices return in the footnotes to haunt the failures of English-language, translated texts. As English is subverted by Spanish and the main text is undermined by paratext, Salas Rivera’s (anti-)translation dramatizes how translation has reinforced colonial power through the stories that such translation has left actively untold.
Published Version
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