The Art of Self-translation: Esmeralda, a Multilingual Short Story by Roberta Fernández

Bilingual literary writing at the US-Mexico border

Roberta Fernández is a Chicana writer who was born in 1940 in Laredo, a border town in Texas, into a Mexican American family that has been living in the US for several generations. As a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia, Fernández has dedicated her life to creative writing, literary criticism and Chicana feminism. She has also been editor of Arte Público Press (1990–1994) and she has held different positions in artistic projects. Writing in a bilingual context has always been a challenge for Chicano authors and each one of them deals with the question of identity and language in different ways. Fernández first published Intaglio. A Novel in Six Stories in English in 1990, and then translated the work into Spanish. Her self-translation Fronterizas. Una novela en seis cuentos was published in 2001.

Fernández considers both languages, viz. English and Spanish, as her mother tongues (Fronterizas, “Agradecimiento,” viii).¹ This is not always the case for bilingual writers, who sometimes make a distinction based upon the way they feel about each language. In her book Beyond the Mother Tongue, the Postmonolingual Condition, Yasemin Yildiz examines the concept of ‘mother tongue’. Even though it is a “highly ideological, charged and misleading term,” she considers it useful to “think with this term rather than to ignore it” (Yildiz 13). Yildiz clarifies that “[l]ike many forms of multilingualism, writing in two or more languages was more common prior to the rise of the monolingual paradigm” (Yildiz 112). According to this monolingual paradigm, which emerged only in the eighteenth century, “every writer can produce original work only in his mother tongue.” (Schleiermacher qtd in Yildiz 112) This view was due to “a conception of originality and creativity as rooted in authenticity.” (Yildiz 112) Yildiz then comes to the following conclusion:

[…] what is called the ‘mother tongue’ combines within it a number of ways of relating to and through language, be it familial inheritance, social embeddedness, emotional attachment, personal identification, or linguistic competence. Contrary to the monolingual paradigm, it is possible for all these different dimensions to be distributed across multiple languages […]

(Yildiz 205)

Intaglio: creation and recreation of a short story cycle

The short story cycle Intaglio and the re-write into Spanish are the only fictional works published by Fernández. In 1991, Intaglio was awarded the “Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange award for Best Fiction.” Several of the short stories included in both editions have been published in anthologies and literary journals. Although Intaglio and Fronterizas can be considered to be remarkable, literary critics have paid little attention to them so far.

Both the original text and the translation contain six short stories, each about a Chicana woman, as can be seen in the six titles: Andrea, Amanda, Filomena, Leonor, Esmeralda and Zulema. We find some of the characteristics of short story cycles, especially the tension between unity and diversity and between homogeneity and heterogeneity (Audet 36, Nagel 17). The six stories are clearly interconnected. The three different family trees that precede some of the stories (Intaglio 14, 112, 136) visualise the relationships between the main characters. Every story has the same narrator, viz. thirteen-year-old Nenita, called “The Girl,” who narrates the lives of these women in the first person.

The book can be defined as a “coming-of-age novel,” in which the six women “serve as the role models for the maturing narrator” (Intaglio, back cover). There is an explicit cyclical structure. The first story, “Andrea,” is particularly well chosen as an opening story; it gives the reader information on the Chicano context, the historical setting, the family history, etc. The last story, “Zulema,” closes the cycle: the girl Nenita starts to write in her journal after having heard all these stories. Nenita then refers to the collection of images that her mother kept as a memory book, the family album, which is essential in the first story.

In her interpretation of...