Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders: Studies in Honor of Milton M. Azevedo ed. by Laura Callahan (review)

Dedicated to Milton M. Azevedo, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley, with individual chapters authored by his former students, this Festschrift constitutes a collective scholarly testament to his enduring professional and personal impact on them during their graduate student years and beyond. Those who know Professor Azevedo can attest to his ability to exert a constructive and positive influence on the people who surround him. In her introduction, Laura Callahan includes her own testimonial on the effect of Professor Azevedo on her own career as well as glowing tributes by the contributors to this volume, all of whom confirm his amiability, accessibility, good humor, dedication to academic rigor, and his role as a consummate model of professional conduct.

Callahan deserves praise for assembling this anthology because it entails a significant amount of logistical effort and the deft coordination and gracious cooperation of all fourteen authors situated on three separate continents. Moreover, this anthological tribute to a great scholar and linguist possesses all of the hallmarks of a carefully edited and integrated professional collection of individual chapters including a list of figures, a list of tables, acknowledgments, notes on contributors, introduction, and an index.

Spanish and Portuguese across Time, Place, and Borders: Studies in Honor of Milton M. Azevedo consists of two parts: 1) “Linguistics and Literature: Translation, Society, and Language Variation” (which includes eight chapters); and 2) “Language Change, Language Contact, and Language Users” (which includes six chapters). In what follows, the contents of each study will be briefly noted in the order of their appearance. The excellent studies in this volume reflect Azevedo’s multiple academic interests and keen intellectual curiosity about various facets of language and linguistics in both Spanish and Portuguese.

Part 1 addresses literary language and its various manifestations. In the first chapter, Ricardo Muñoz Martín (“‘Ah jist likes, dinnae ken how ye do it’: Translating the Literary Dialect of Trainspotting into Spanish”) expounds on the complexities of translating two dialects (Scots and English) into Spanish while trying to capture that same distinction in the target language. As Muñoz Martín observes, literary dialects are evocative rather than replicative of the dialect imitated. Next, Anna E. Hiller (“Queer Geographies: Federico García Lorca’s ‘Oda a Walt Whitman’ in English Translation”) discusses the translation of a single poem by Lorca and the enigma that it poses, which include, but are not limited to, language, sexuality, and geography. In particular, the translation of slurs involves historical and attitudinal dimensions, which elude a precise rendition. Chapter 3, by Rakhel Villamil-Acera (“Pedro Muñoz Seca (1881–1936): The Comic Effect of the Grotesque”), addresses literary dialects, hybrid languages, and linguistic puns in the theatrical subgenre known as the astracán, which shares features of the sainete and the juguete cómico and is intended to appeal to the humorous necessities of commercial theater. In the following chapter, Alfredo Cesar Melo (“The Predicaments of Transculturation: A Materialist Reading of ‘Meu tio o Iauaretê’ by João Guimarães Rosa”) addresses brilliantly the cultural complexity inherent in Brazilian diversity encompassed in a single short story. The fifth chapter, by Simo K. Määttä (“Discourse and Ideology: Why Do We Need Both?”), offers a profound examination of the effects of framing ideology through discourse to represent a particular critical analytical perspective. Next, Magdalena Coll (“Representation of Charrúa Speech in Nineteenth Century Uruguayan Literature”) argues that the literary dialect employed to represent the indigenous Charrúa populace is an admixture of Guaraní and Spanish even though both tribes and their languages are distinct, and thus constitutes a stereotypical rendering of alterity. In the penultimate essay in part I, Sonia Montes Romanillos (“The Dialect of Vargas Llosa’s Storyteller”) considers the strategies employed to evoke “foreigner talk” (indigenous lexicon and abbreviated, repetitive syntactic structures). Finally, Martha Mendoza...