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Reviewed by:
  • Ostrich Legs by Alicia Kozameh
  • Janis Breckenridge
Alicia Kozameh. Ostrich Legs. Trans, David E. Davis. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2013. 192p.

With Ostrich Legs (2013), David E. Davis has crafted a graceful and fluid translation that now makes available to an English-speaking audience Alicia Kozameh’s highly poetic, semi-autobiographical novel recounting childhood and adolescence. Patas de avestruz (1988) narrates the complexities of growing up with a severely disabled older sister (Mariana) in a rather repressive household while simultaneously chronicling Alcira’s (the author’s alter ego) development as a young writer. The work has been aptly described as a “modern, feminine bildungsroman” structured around the dichotomous bodies of the siblings: actively healthy versus passively infirm, sexually curious rather than seemingly asexual and, perhaps most importantly with respect to this recent translation, profoundly adept at self-expression in sharp contrast to being nearly silenced due to a pronounced linguistic deficiency (see Erna Pfeiffer, “El cuerpo-texto en Patas de avestruz de Alicia Kozameh”). The fictionalized memoir plots the sisters’ ever-evolving relationship; the intense and highly charged bond culminates with the tremendous physical and emotional impact that the spastic girl’s eventual death has upon Alcira.

From the opening paragraph of this deeply personal tale the daunting task faced by the translator becomes apparent: how to adequately render an experimental text that features various registers including sustained incorporation of child-like pronunciation together with a lack of understanding of syntax and verb tenses. David E. Davis successfully maintains the lyricism and wonderment of the original Spanish text—effectively transferring unique pronunciation patterns and lexical curiosities into English as well as creatively transposing grammatical errors and inconsistencies. For example, in the second sentence of the text, “hambe” (9)—Mariana’s distorted enunciation for “hambre”—becomes appropriately rendered as the child-like utterance “hungwy” (3) for hungry. Examples abound throughout the novel. To cite just a few: “moobie” for movie (43; “zine” in Patas, 45), “tathi” for taxi (61; “tazi” in Patas, 62) and “buth” for bus (63; ónimu in Patas, 64).

Far more difficult to convey in a foreign language are the young narrator’s humorous musings regarding her native tongue as she begins to grasp its nuances. In one instance Alcira contemplates the purpose of the expression con más razón (“even more so”), one of her aunt’s favored muletillas or fillers; curiously, this linguistic term is translated as the rather serious sounding expression “Spanish catch phrases” (137; Patas 132) rather than the more literal and catchy “little crutches.” An even more pointed example occurs when Alcira ponders the significance and [End Page 166] logic of the newly acquired Spanish words meaning fish, pez and pescado (Patas 52)—the former referring to a live creature and the latter to something dead that has become food for consumption—in relation to the contested existence of her fish-like imaginary friend. In translating a child’s internal monologue on the nature of language and reality that simultaneously demonstrates the girl’s vivid imagination, fascination with language and proclivity for endless reflection, Davis relies upon the terms tuna and tuna fish (51) to skillfully convey a distinction that simply does not exist in English.

Apart from linguistic anomalies, another challenging aspect of translation involves discretion regarding whether to decode or otherwise identify and explain culturally specific references. In the case of Ostrich Legs, Davis opts to maintain the original text’s cultural references (rather than substitute them) and at the same time entirely avoids disrupting the novel’s narrative flow with cumbersome footnotes. In this way, Mariana’s pronunciation of dulce de leche as dulcelete (Patas 15), which becomes rendered simply as “dulthelete” in the English (9), might remain inexplicable to a reader unfamiliar with the rather decadent confection. In parallel fashion, occasional references to pop culture icons such as Pedrito Rico (a wildly popular Spanish singer, dancer and actor who began to make frequent visits to Argentina during the mid-late 1950s) remain embedded in the text without authorial commentary. Ostensibly such figures are immediately recognizable to a Spanish-speaking reader; however, they most likely will be far less familiar to an Anglo readership.

Thus, as with...

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