1In the poem “Duelo del lenguaje/Language duel”, which lends its title to her bilingual collection of poetry published in 2002, Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré identifies the reason why Americans “have such a difficult time learning Spanish”: according to her, it is because “language carries with it all their fire and power” (2). She illustrates the conflict through this metaphor: “two male crabs can’t root in the same lair” (4), suggesting a war-like relationship between Spanish and English. Further along, she introduces a gendered element as she compares English to a “nuclear reactor” – a symbol of masculine power – while describing Spanish as “navigating the uterus” (6), invoking the trope of language inscribed in the body, akin to the concept of a “mother tongue.” These images demonstrate the author’s awareness of the political and gendered relations that writing in Spanish or in English entails in a postcolonial context. In this bilingual collection of Spanish poems, self-translated into English through a U.S.-based publishing house, Ferré depicts an almost irreconcilable dual identity in a postcolonial context, and the resistance that acts of translation may encounter. She also discusses the heterogeneity of cultures, languages, identities (“Coming Up the Archipelago,” “The Colonial Experience”) that constitutes not only Latin America (Caribbean included) but the entire region of the Americas. In “Juan de Oñate,” she highlights the arbitrariness of a history that chose to remember one group over another as first settlers, a choice that establishes Anglo-Saxon primacy over Spanish conquest, let alone earlier native tribes’ settlement. She also draws a connection between different colonies and their colonizers, building a network over time and space for nations that have experienced the bondage of imperialism – “only with different heroes, / and in another language” (90). As Suzanne Hintz (1995, 175–76) observes, Ferré’s critical and fictional writings, as well as her self-translations, consistently interrogate what it means to be a Latin American writer within an imperialist context.
2Ferré acknowledges here the complex cultural and political history of Puerto Rico, and her text weaves together what I would describe as several postcolonial layers: the colonization of the island by the Spanish and the Portuguese, the erasure of the indigenous Taíno people, the importation of African slaves, European settlement, and the eventual cession of the land by the Spanish to the U.S. in 1898. She adds yet another layer of the postcolonial experience in the presence of the Puerto Rican diaspora on the mainland U.S. and abroad. Today, Puerto Rico remains in an ambiguous political position as a Commonwealth of the U.S., a semi-autonomous “unincorporated territory”; its people have oscillated between options to obtain full federal statehood within the U.S., to become an independent nation, or retain the status quo, all while bearing the visible traces of colonization. Jorge Duany describes the island as a “postcolonial colony” (189). Moreover, while Spanish and English are both official languages on the island, their usage remains asymmetrical: choosing one over the other positions the text (and possibly the author, as we will see later) culturally and politically. Ferré’s writings are not only set against this multilayered background, they also grapple with the choices and implications that literature entails in the making of the identity of a writer.
- 1 “(…) it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – th (...)
3In her essay entitled “On Destiny, Language, and Translation,” Ferré locates herself in a “third space” (in Homi Bhabha’s terms1), a liminal position she occupies as a Puerto Rican, a U.S. citizen, and a female writer. Postcolonial writing and translation are similar in that they involve a transfer across spaces and boundaries; Ferré sees herself as “travelling constantly between two very different cultures” (1991a, 164), and in “Duelo del Lenguaje/Language Duel,” writing through a “double perspective” (2002, 5). Laëtitia Saint-Loubert (2018) characterizes her writing as “bifocal (re)writing” (“(ré)écriture bifocale”). This recalls Chicana authors Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s body of work (1999; 2015); they have used bilingual writing as a means to claim a hybrid sense of self. Ferré’s approach is different however, as she does not intertwine two languages in bilingual texts, but self-translates her Spanish texts into English. She explains the dichotomies found between Latin American and North American technology, political systems, which necessarily restrict literal translations from one language to the other. But the coexistence of North American and Latin American culture, an even tighter one in Puerto Rico than on the Mexican border, makes her, as a writer and a translator, a “shaman […] searching for the final unity of meaning in speech” (1991a, 154). While a whole different view of the world must be proposed in the target language, the translator still writes within the lore and ideology of the original language. However, I would argue that her translation into English leaves aside a certain number of issues that pertain specifically to her Puerto Rican culture, in order to cater to a culturally different audience. In other words, we might wonder whether translating herself for an Anglophone audience compromises the integrity of the original text in catering to the expectations and taste of the Anglophone readership in an act of self-censorship, or conversely turns it into an autonomous entity that emerges from her knowledge of both cultures.
4Many post-colonial critics have argued that translation and colonization have gone hand in hand. Eric Cheyfitz for instance has argued that translation was “the central act of European colonization and imperialism in America” (qtd. in Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, 3), which would imply that translating into a European language maintains the colonizing process. When Ferré translates herself into English, could it be that she also reinforces oppressive structures of colonial domination? As Bassnet and Trivedi note, “a post-colonial perspective foregrounds the asymmetrical relationships between cultures that are also evidenced in the translation of literary texts” (16). If, as Ivir writes, translation is more about translating a culture than a language (qtd. in Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, 20), I suggest that the culture transmitted by this postcolonial subject is a sanitized translation, stripped of its political rough edges to become palatable for the U.S. market. The issue of faithfulness in a translation becomes crucial, as Maria Tymoczko writes: “in obscuring or muting the cultural disjunctions, the translator ceases to be ‘faithful’ to the source text” (qtd. in Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, 21). I argue that Ferré indeed “obscures” or “mutes” these disjunctions, not due to a linguistic impasse, but as an editorial strategy. When Ferré chooses to edit out crude homophobic insults for an American audience, I hypothesize that this choice stems from cultural censorship rather than linguistic incompatibility. If (even imperfect) equivalents exist between the two languages, their total removal suggests that the author-translator wishes to shield the target readership from certain realities of the source culture, or perhaps avoid offending Western sensibilities. Hence, we can understand the translation strategy not so much as a faithful transposition of the author’s culture, as an attempt to rewrite for a specifically Anglophone readership.
5Focusing on Ferré’s own translation of her short story “De tu Lado al Paraíso” into the English version “The Other Side of Paradise,” I argue in this article that she reproduces the same selective erasure of colonial history that she denounced in Duelo del Lenguaje, as she appears to understate the specific racial relations inherent to the island by addressing a U.S. audience. Similarly, I posit that her representation of the narrator and main character’s homosexuality and his sadomasochistic relationship with the young lady he serves is deliberately subdued in the English version. I will thus examine under two primary lenses how the English translation differs from the original in Spanish: how the butler’s homosexuality is downplayed in the English version, with the question of race and class, especially for the butler’s character, being evaded in the translation. To better understand these editorial choices, I will first analyze the cultural and commercial contexts in which Rosario Ferré wrote “De tu Lado al Paraíso” and translated it into “The Other Side of Paradise.”
- 2 “I have argued that the Post-Boom represents a turning away from the Boom-type ‘interrogative’ nove (...)
6The cultural and commercial contexts in which Ferré’s works were originally produced, and their translations published, are to be examined first. Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) was born into a wealthy family, the daughter of Luis Ferré, Puerto Rico’s third governor. Biographical records show that she was of (apart from Puerto Rican) Cuban, Spanish and French ancestry (“Rosario Ferré”), a European heritage that would position her, given her social class, as racially white; Ferré herself did not claim a mixed-race identity. She was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico; her studies were carried out between the island and the U.S. mainland; she then returned to live in Puerto Rico for most of her life. Once an advocate of independence, she later adopted a position in favor of statehood (Ferré 2012, 115). Her works were published during the literary Post-Boom,2 an era which saw a flourishing of women writers; her feminist politics were often at odds with her upbringing and the general patriarchal values of Puerto Rico (Hintz 1995). She exhibited earlier in her life a more “militant feminism,” and some of her short stories portrayed society as “patriarchal, racist and materialistic, that is, dominated by a false and oppressive value system” (Shaw 2022, 191–92).
7Ferré wrote both in English and in Spanish, and translated some of her works herself from both languages, but during her career there was a shift in her publication strategy. She started by writing her original texts in Spanish; however, in 1995, she wrote The House on the Lagoon, her first work of fiction originally written in English, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a publishing house with wide access to readership. She then translated it herself into Spanish, for an Argentinian publisher. Later on, she mostly wrote in English first and translated herself into Spanish. One of the reasons for publishing (or translating) into English is for the author to have access to a broader public (the non-Spanish speaking U.S. mainland primarily); publishing in the U.S. is also a sign of cultural prestige, especially for Puerto Ricans. She did find more significant commercial and critical success as she started publishing her translated works in the U.S. However, because of the complicated postcolonial relation that exists between the mainland and Puerto Rico, the act of self-translation and the language in which authors choose to publish are inscribed in this dynamic and reflect issues of loyalty with regard to their home country and country of publication. The publication of The House on the Lagoon in English was met with “a torrent of harsh criticism targeting Ferré’s literary and political persona” from writers and critics in Puerto Rico, accusing her of betraying her commitment to the island’s identity (Rubóczki 2020, 36).
8Rosario Ferré was living in San Juan when she published Papeles de Pandora, the collection in which the short story “De tu Lado al Paraíso” appears; it was published in 1976, by the Mexican publisher Joaquín Mortiz. She then self-translated Papeles de Pandora, under the title The Youngest Doll, published in 1991 by the University of Nebraska Press. The gap in time between the two publications may explain in part some of the differences in translation. Both Hintz (1995) and Lindsey (2003) contend that Papeles was at first considered too radical and was not well-received in some bourgeois Puerto Rican literary circles, especially because of its use of obscene and sexually explicit language; but Hintz contends that the English version was designed to be “more socially palatable to a conservative reading public and less shocking as a radical social statement” (179), an interpretation I will consider in my analysis of the translation.
9Several reasons may be summoned to explain these variations. Firstly, there is more freedom for the writer to play with her own original text: in general, more creativity is allowed, and there is less concern for respect of the original work. Pérez Firmat argues: “[o]f all the varieties of translation, perhaps none is more faithless than self-translation. Although the technical challenges are the same, it adds a dimension of personal and creative reassessment missing from second-party translations” (qtd. in Ramos Rosado 1991, 81). Having the same person as both author and translator would, ideally, solve the following dilemma: is there a hierarchy between the “sacrosanct” original and the translation? Both versions would be equally authoritative. But the postcolonial context is not to be underestimated here; a translation “reflects the unstable balance between the power one culture can exert over another” (Africa Vidal Claramonte 2023, 72). When Ferré published her first novel in English, this caused an uproar in the Puerto Rican literary milieu. Following the publication of The House on the Lagoon, she announced that her allegiance to Puerto Rican independence had shifted to a support of statehood instead. In other words, one cannot help but think of her politics of publication and translation in light of her politics of national identity.
10María Esther Ramos Rosado contends that the act of self-translation enables postcolonial authors to have control over the politics of publication. She writes: “[i]n the context of the relations between the U.S. and Latin America, acting as author and translator provides a way of resisting the dominance of English as the global language of publication and of combating the domestication of their texts by and for others” (1999, 15). I would argue against this interpretation that simply glosses over the fact that the U.S. readership at large would not read a publication in Spanish, nor would the literary establishment consider a work in Spanish as a national production worth attention, certainly not a prize. Despite the fact that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, its language difference condemns its literature in Spanish to a marginalized position. The status quo remains: a U.S. national literature is one based on a single language.
11However, resistance to the colonizer’s imperialist monolingualism has been performed and theorized by postcolonial writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature he advocates the use of native African languages over English and other colonial languages. Although the context is different for Ferré, one may read her translations and publications in English as a “sell-out” to the dominant culture for both commercial and prestige purposes. As she turned to publishing her novels in the English version first, such as The House on the Lagoon (1995), they were received with harsh criticism within the island, as writing in Spanish was a means to showcase Puerto Rican independence from the U.S. cultural and linguistic hegemony (Johnson 2008).
12While, according to Ramos Rosado, self-translating authors do retain ownership over the translation, I would argue that they are still coerced into providing an adaptation that needs to take into account the target culture. This entails changes from the original text that may reflect, in Ferré’s short story, a loss or toning down of crucial issues in the context of Puerto Rico – homosexuality and race most prominently – for the English adaptation.
13This section turns to the close analysis of textual differences between the original Spanish version and Ferré’s English translation of her short story “De tu Lado al Paraíso.” The story is yet another variation in Ferré’s repertoire on the setting of a wealthy family mansion, in which “the destruction of the mansion symbolizes the family’s collapse and the collapse of the social values and presumptions which the family had endorsed” (Shaw 2002, 192). Ferré’s departure from the original text appears right from the start, as we notice a difference in the translation of the title into English: “The Other Side of Paradise.” The translation does not include the addressee with the adjective “tu,” an adjective that entails a familiarity or intimacy with the addressee in Spanish; this would be lost if the translation included the adjective “your.” The effect is that the phrase is depersonalized; the reader loses the idea of a speech directed to a hearer, or, as we will see, an ode to a loved one.
- 3 This public image campaign was initiated after the launch of “Operation Bootstrap” to invite domest (...)
14The title of the short story is taken from the danza written by Morel Campos, one of the most prolific Puerto Rican composers of the nineteenth century. It was written with women and love as a theme, and the English title does not reflect the idea of the lover praising the loved one as being associated with paradise, maybe as a metaphor to signify that the loved one is as sweet as an angel, and has all the attributes that the angel usually has. Ferré’s transformation in English removes the nostalgic and romantic attributes evoked by the Spanish song, to introduce a more somber note for her Anglophone readership. According to María Esther Ramos Rosado (1999), “el otro lado” would be the other side of the paradise that the island advertises, when in the 1970s Puerto Rico was engaged in a public image campaign aimed at presenting it as a “beautiful and economically progressive” Caribbean island.3 This other side would be the economic and moral misery that the inhabitants find themselves in.
- 4 “their [men’s] hearts were eaten up by a fear of the sickness which is rampant today on the island, (...)
15Thus, as the reader discovers later on in the short story, “paradise” stands as an ironic description for the kind of society that the young lady is living in, and how her butler describes it. As the story unfolds, we witness the life of a bourgeois class that upholds hypocritical moral values and relies on the devalued labor of an underclass. Moreover, when she dies, the young lady would be expected to go to paradise, according to a Christian point of view, if she behaved according to Christian ethics, which her family seems to expect from her. They hired the butler so that he would check on her good behavior and her remaining a virgin until she got married. But her demeanor seems to contradict this Christian standard, as she appears to have committed suicide, according to the butler, and she had sexual intercourse with him after her wedding in any case. To add to her adultery, she had engaged in sexual activity with a homosexual man, who could have contracted a venereal disease during his tenure as a hotel worker (the text in English mentions AIDS, but remains elusive, while the Spanish version does not mention this4). Moreover, as a butler, he is as far removed as possible from the social class of the high bourgeoisie that the young lady belongs to. Her actions thus seem highly sacrilegious in many respects, a fact which makes the use of the term “paraíso” ironical in this case.
16The English translation, if we were to follow Ferré’s analysis of translation, would reveal the dichotomy between two cultures, at the same time that it would acknowledge the Anglophone (and mostly U.S. continental) readership that it is addressed to. Perhaps then, Ferré decided to let go altogether of the Puerto Rican cultural reference to Campos’ danza, which would be lost on the English reader, to focus on the political aspect and social critique that the other side of paradise points to. The Spanish title evokes the romantic feelings of the danza that a Puerto Rican reader would recognize; on the other hand, the English title prefigures the darker side of the plot if one is to understand the other side of paradise as hell, or at the very least, a place certainly removed from the holiness and purity of heaven.
- 5 “waiting to someday stumble upon, as I was passing the collection plate to collect the alms in some (...)
17Moving from the title to the diegesis itself, the short story is written as a first-person narrative, in the butler’s voice. The first five pages do not identify the narrator as a man, and the first actions described would more likely refer to a woman: scrubbing the walls and floor, “getting down on my knees to wax the pink marble tiles,” preparing dinner for the masters (79). These actions, described both in the English and the Spanish versions, are usually attributed to a woman or a woman servant’s role. The text thus creates an expectation for the reader that the narrator will be a woman. The narration then presents a submissive character, performing menial tasks: “esperando tropezarme algun dia, al pasar el cepillo para recoger la limosna en alguna iglesia, al encenderle una lampara votive al Sagrado Corazón, con un hombre que tuviese un corazón como el mío” (197).5 We notice here two elements: first, a change of décor, as it is a church instead of a hotel (in the English version) where the narrator works and hopes to meet another man. Is this because of cultural difference, especially with the votive lamps that belong to a Catholic and Puerto Rican tradition, rather than a typically American Protestant setting? Or could it be because it would be shocking for a U.S. readership to think that a gay man would want to meet his lover in a church? Secondly, being an acolyte could give a hint of his skin color which, as a Black man, an Indio or a mestizo in Puerto Rico, would make him eligible for this menial work. In any case, it looks like the more humble and “domestic” tasks he is performing in the Spanish version betray his social class, which could give the reader a clue as to his gender assignment as a woman (or as a “less than man” gay male) or his possible skin color.
18On the other hand, the English translation seems to try to emphasize a more “acceptable” personality. Whereas in general the English version tends to reduce words or sentences in the translation, for once, a whole sentence is added: “I have always searched for perfection be it in a woman or a man,” followed by “But I had only felt attracted to men” (82). The first part of the sentence thus seems to downplay the narrator’s homosexuality and emphasize his physical connection with women, which the story will then confirm. The English version also mentions that he worked at hotels without being more specific, but it could imply that he worked as a receptionist or a butler instead of as a custodian. Once again, the Spanish version presents a lower social position for the narrator, potentially giving a clue as to his racialized position in Puerto Rican society.
- 6 “society’s shit so that she can continue being the cream of the crop” (my translation).
19Further characterization presents the narrator under a particularly submissive, rather degrading light, as he wants to be “la mierda y la hielda de la sociedad para que ella pueda seguir siendo la crema y nata (192–93),”6 whereas this is translated differently into English: “I humble myself day after day for her sake, so that she may go on living on cream and custard” (79). With its ontological metaphor of being “shit,” as opposed to the English “humbling,” the Spanish version is much cruder in its language and emphasizes the narrator’s masochistic relationship to the young woman, his identification with the lowest possible status. The English version thus waters down the class hierarchy between servant and master in the Puerto Rican context that the Spanish version emphasizes with “la mierda […] de la sociedad.” Would a North American audience be shocked by such a self-characterization of the servant, which bears a resemblance to slavery?
20The narrator’s gender identity is only revealed after five or six pages in the English and Spanish versions. In the English version, he introduces himself as a man, almost apologetically. He reveals his sexual orientation immediately after:
I must be excused for saying so, but I am a very handsome, albeit a sad man. We gay people are never able to revel in the name; on the contrary, our condition usually condemns us to melancholy, as it is our ability for change, for being able to transform ourselves like chameleons into whatever we like, which most often sentences us to loneliness. (83)
- 7 “It almost looks as though Ferré, writing now in English, is attempting to distance herself from so (...)
- 8 “like cow, fag, cocksucker, fucking good-for-nothing” (my translation).
21This part has no equivalent in the Spanish original and appears as an addition in the English version; it also denotes a certain judgment of homosexuals in general on the part of the character. Of course, we cannot attribute this discourse to Rosario Ferré herself; but critics who have examined her translations have questioned her strategy,7 her way of toning down the language that presents him in a humiliating way. Could it be that Ferré wished to present her character in a more sympathetic, “integrated” and normalized light, taking into account the U.S. context in which the short story would be published? This added commentary by the narrator seems self-condescending, as opposed to the insults that introduce both the narrator’s gender and his sexuality in the Spanish version: the men that he seeks to seduce vomit insults (“como gárgolas, maricón chupabichos, mequetrefe de mierda,”8) and even severely beat him. The narrator’s homosexuality is thus more brutally revealed in the original version and betrays the extreme violence that he is faced with, whereas the English version presents a character who is open about his sexual preference and whose homosexuality is seen by his masters as an advantage in taking care of their daughter: “[b]ut, seeing that I was what they thought of as hopelessly inverted, they also entrusted me with the responsibility of caring for their only daughter, who was about to get married soon” (84). The young lady’s caretaker is thus seen by the family as a eunuch who will watch over their daughter without risks of sexual contact. Even the girl seems to take pleasure in this sadomasochistic relationship: “she would parade naked before me in all the terrible array of her beauty, reveling in my supposed impotence” (85; emphasis mine). This addition in the English text plays more explicitly with the butler’s possible sexual attraction to his mistress.
- 9 “Diluted like the fur of blonde women fallen on the floor” (my translation).
- 10 “I thought about how I had dreamed of her so many times, imagining her as a man, looking for her as (...)
22Lastly, the English translation emphasizes the possible bisexuality of the narrator by adding segments that show his attraction for women (especially young women), whereas this is not explicitly written in Spanish. Ferré adds this suggestion to the original version as the narrator compares the carpets he cleans to women’s pubic hair: “soft as the down of the pubic mound of the teenage girls I love to watch when I walk down Ashford Avenue” (79). This addition seems to explain proleptically the interest that the narrator feels for his young mistress; conversely, in the Spanish version, it is the women’s blondeness that he seems attracted to: “desleídas como vellones de mujeres rubias derribadas por el suelo” (192)9 This attraction betrays the butler’s fetishization of blonde (i.e., white) women like the young lady he attends to, hinting at their racial difference, a subject which we will develop in the next part. The end of the short story also proposes an alternative to the original story in Spanish: “She had been my true soul mate, and our mating had made me accept myself for what I really am” (88). This enigmatic ending suggests that the butler and the young lady somehow really loved each other, and possibly that he found his redemption in his possession of the young woman, while he was lost until then in his unrequited desire for men. The English text makes it clear through a few additions to the original that the butler has physically possessed his mistress, as she is “already an adulteress, having given [her]self to [her] slave-servant” (87). The crux of the story seems to lie in this anagnorisis of the narrator who discovers his heterosexual self in the love of the young lady. The Spanish version, however, never explicitly describes their coupling. A long paragraph that occupies more than two pages is, however, not translated into English. It describes how the butler entered the room of the bride on the morning before her wedding, collected some of her pubic hair in her bed, and started fantasizing about her as he entered her bathroom. The bride herself is physically absent from the scene, so that the narrator’s description of her body is only in his imagination. Even more important is his imagining of the young bride as a man: “Pienso en cómo yo la había soñado tantas veces creyéndola hombre, buscándola hombre, ocupando el espacio con el órgano impudorosamente erecto, obvio como un dios menor y sobreestimado, acostumbrado al rito consuetudinario de ser adorado […]” (201).10 In other words, the butler is fantasizing the young lady as a male god impregnating the stars with his male organ; and the coupling does not happen in reality, but in his daydreams. This part, which does not appear in the English translation, confirms the narrator’s homosexuality even through his adoration of the girl but acknowledges the wide societal gap that separates him from her.
- 11 “approaching her more each time at the time of her death, of my death, the death of the bride and o (...)
23Through some hints in the Spanish version of the story, we may infer that it is not only his social class that keeps him apart from her, but also his race, as I demonstrate in the next part. The end of the Spanish version emphasizes this desire for resemblance, and possibly equality: “acercándome cada véz más a ella en la ora de su muerte, en la ora de mi muerte, la muerte de la novia y la de su sirviente, desterrados para siempre al mismo cielo” (208).11 The same sky that the butler wishes to share with his mistress might well be, for the Spanish speaking Puerto Rican audience, the same racial space.
- 12 The Duchess of Malfi is a Jacobean play written by British playwright John Webster in 1612-1613. It (...)
24The epigraph of the short story “De tu Lado al Paraíso” is a crucial element to be analyzed, especially in light of Laëtitia Saint-Loubert’s work on paratextual elements in translations of works of Caribbean literature. We will see that while the epigraph presents the “bifocality” of the Puerto Rican author, it also creates a form of opacity for the Spanish reader (2018). The text is left in its English version, and the learned reader of English literature may identify that the quote originates from the seventeenth century play The Duchess of Malfi by British playwright John Webster.12 The presence of this epigraph, in the English language and untranslated, implies several things: that Rosario Ferré expects her Spanish readership to be able to read and understand English; that she expects her readers to recognize a Renaissance play that belongs to the canon of European literature; and lastly, perhaps, that there should be a connection between the play itself and her own short story, or at least that her text should be read in the light of this particular quote.
25The result for the Spanish readership in Puerto Rico is somewhat jarring, since the author chooses not to translate the epigraph into Spanish; and the implications are that the original language should be respected as it is, and possibly that it is superior in its English version, or at least that it would lose some of its impact if it were to be translated. Once again, the question of hierarchy between the original and the translation is, somehow, exhibited right at the beginning of the short story. Addressing a Puerto Rican audience, Ferré expects them to be able to read English, as it is the other official language there, a result of the postcolonial status of the island. In a somewhat similar fashion, she is also addressing a broader Spanish-speaking Latin American audience, which could allude to a more recent postcolonial experience with the U.S.’s political and economic intervention in Latin America. But it also presumes that Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi, would be a text known to her Latin American and Caribbean audiences. Eventually, she positions herself as an author whose global prestige is supported by her knowledge of the Western canon and her mastery of English acquired through her education in a mainland U.S. university; a language in which she can not only write, but into which she can also translate.
- 13 While Plato did not equate physical human beauty directly with a sense of morality, he argued that (...)
- 14 “this special quality of her skin, heaped up at the top of the abyss like a ladder on which the ang (...)
26Let us turn to the implications of the content of the quote itself. It reads: “Methinks her fault and beauty, blended together, show, like leprosy, the whiter, the fouler.” The emphasis is thus placed, from the beginning, on the idea of whiteness and morals, and more specifically on the relationship between whiteness as beauty and morality. Interestingly enough, the expectation that whiteness equals purity is reversed here. Beauty standards in seventeenth-century English higher society called for a white skin in women, as a sign of beauty and nobility. Adding to the Platonic tradition of beauty as sign of morality,13 whiteness was also symbolic of purity and chastity, all qualities considered desirable for a woman. Yet in the case of the quote from the play, the whiteness of the lady contradicts the expectations of her purity, thus turning around the traditional episteme that the lady betrays through her sin, just like the young woman in Ferré’s short story. The butler admires her skin but the Spanish version makes it particularly unclear what its complexion actually is: “esa calidad especial que tiene su carne, hacinada en lo más alto del abismo como una escalera por la que suben y baján los ángeles” (195).14 Whereas the reference to angels might conjure up an idea of purity and whiteness, the word “abismo” refers to darkness, and he compares her face to a ladder on which angels could ascend but also descend, alluding to their possible fallen (and thus dark) nature. In the English translation, it is surprising to read that her skin is not the focus of the attention of the simile, but her whole body which is compared to the ladder of angels (81).
- 15 “I looked at myself in the mirror and I could see that the short cut flattered my features, enhanci (...)
27Similarly, the idea of the butler’s skin color is completely erased in the English version, whereas in the original he admires how his servant’s uniform fits his (“clara”) skin, which translates to “pale”, though not necessarily white: “Me miré al espejo y pude ver que el corte sencillo me iba bien a la cara, destacaba esa calidad de clara batida que tiene mi piel, a la vez dura y liviana, cercenada por un solo golpe de la espátula” (197–98).15 This comparison relies on a strange trope: the color of his face would resemble beaten egg whites, which turn out very white. Why would the butler insist so much on the paleness of his skin? Could it be that his ethnicity is an indicator of his social class, and that his fascination for the whiteness of the family, and especially the young woman he serves, permeates his view of his own skin color, as in a fantasy? He has already mentioned that he would “be the shit of society” for her to remain “the cream of the crop” (my translation); another culinary metaphor that emphasizes her whiteness, while he would literally defile himself for her to remain “white as cream,” whether physically, morally, or both.
28Metaphors of whiteness and purity thus run through the Spanish text, connecting the butler with his young mistress. Several other metaphors suggest the identification of the narrator with the young lady, especially through comparisons with an angel; for instance, he imagines that his servant’s white jacket gives him “two starched wings” (197, my translation). We have discussed the ambiguous symbolism of whiteness in the short story, which can be a hypocritical sign for purity. Significantly enough, in the Spanish version the narrator mentions that his servant’s gloves are white (“guantes blancos,” 198) while the English translation only reads “cotton gloves” (83); however, these gloves are, in the two versions, a reminder of the criminal’s accessories to prevent any of his fingerprints from being left on the scene of his crime. If we are thus to compare the differences between the two versions, Ferré seems to be implying that the imperative of whiteness in Puerto Rican society is not as important in the U.S., by erasing altogether these references to whiteness, and its supposed value of purity, in the English translation.
29José Piedra talks of “rhetorical whiteness” as “a symbolic acceptance of the system,” and “draws our attention to the discursive marginalization of minority writers who refuse to eradicate all traces of their cultural difference and blend into the hegemonic practices of institutionalized discourse” (Chanady 1994, xiii). The criticism here is directed at the silencing of minority writers who deal with issues of race; whereas our author is, in the Puerto Rican context, not so much part of a racial minority as she seems to belong to a line of Spanish rulers over the island. Of course, her difference would be emphasized in the U.S. context, though possibly not as much as, for example, an Afro-Hispanic writer from the island. Considering her (mainly) U.S. readership, it might very well be that several issues, such as the violence that homosexuals have to face or the still prevalent valorization of a European (i.e. “white”) heritage in Puerto Rico are downplayed by Ferré as she translates her own text into English.
30Ferré’s treatment of her text in her self-translation is not an isolated case; there are many other instances where Rosario Ferré modifies her approach to a character or erases statements that could potentially make some readers wince. Marlene H. Esplin (2012) has demonstrated how Ferré portrays Gloria the mulatta prostitute in a different light in her English version (Sweet Diamond Dust) of her Spanish novel Maldito Amor, where Ferré presents Gloria more abruptly as a prostitute, using crude language. But she also portrays her, in the English version, as the epitome of the Puerto Rican identity, a cross-over between cultures that facilitates communication between humans; in other words, she compares her to a translator. The differences of presentation, whether sociological, political, historical, between the two novels have been discussed by some critics previously cited (Saint-Loubert; Hintz; Ramos Rosado; Shaw). The question of her national allegiance has been brought up and has focused on reading the author, not the novel itself, as changing identities to be better accepted by a North American readership (Beatson 1998, 40). Pro-independence statements were indeed carefully erased from the English version of Sweet Diamond Dust, possibly to present a more favorable view of Puerto Rico to a North American readership.
31We might thus ask whether through the process of translation and its intransigence, the various postcolonial issues at play in the Puerto Rican landscape can still be represented for a “foreign” audience. Ferré aimed at a wider readership with her translations, but that also meant that she bore the responsibility for bridging two cultures, “trying to overcome the barriers of prejudice and misinterpretations, which are often insuperable barriers that divide the customs of different peoples (Africa Vidal Claramonte 2023, 81). While some authors (including Ferré) and critics see translation as a possibility for a new, original creation that may be as rich, if not richer than the original it was born from, Vladimir Nabokov complains about the dictatorship of the cultural compromise made in translations: “The [...] worst degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days” (1981, 315). One may bemoan this conformism, and possibly see it as a practice of impoverishment and submissiveness in the context of postcolonialism.
- 16 Anzaldúa’s chapter “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” in Borderlands/La Frontera develops this idea in par (...)
32Could it be that the possibilities opened by a new language of expression and publication allow space for a reinterpretation of national, ethnic, and even gender and sexual identity? Chicana authors like Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga have claimed bilingual writing as a space of resistance and expression of difference while opening up, in their own way, to a larger audience by being more inclusive (1999, 2015).16 Ferré’s practice of self-translation from Spanish into English is different; it requires a choice to deliver a text in a single idiom, and to tone down her initial criticism of a deeply oppressive society, a point of view which she thought she could best express in the Spanish language, to awaken her Puerto Rican readers to social reform on issues such as racial, sexual and gender identities (Hintz 1995, 184-85). It is a prime example of what Saint-Loubert sees as an inherent tension of “bifocal” writing: while Ferré retained authority over her text through the act of self-translation, and created an original text, this new text also reflected the “evolution of the ideological and political thought of the author” (2018, 180). The Puerto Rican author has championed in her theory of translation the endless possibilities of creation and the necessary hybridity of the language she would translate, whether English or Spanish, but one cannot help but notice that the end product of the translation of this short story has been emptied of its sensitive material – like questions of sex, sexuality and race. The Other Side of Paradise has tamed an essential part of its subversive message from the original text to accommodate its North American audience.
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