🦋 Texas: translating La Grande
An interesting question in reading Schnee's translation of Texas is her rendering of La Grande as "Mrs. Big". It makes me think about how characters' names are rendered in this translation. There are many gringo characters with names which are a descriptive English word like Wild, Trust, Dry -- sometimes these are understood to be a proper name, sometimes a nickname, sometimes it is not clear. Mrs. Big is the only one of these whose nickname is given in Spanish in the original text*; it kind of sticks out because she is described as racist and jingoist American. It would stick out like a sore thumb if in the translation, she was called La Grande -- I wonder though what Boullosa had in mind here. I will be keeping an eye out for how descriptive names of Mexican and Black characters are rendered. The only one that is occurring to me right now, Juan Caballo (a cimmarón, an escaped slave who has crossed the Río Grande to Mexico), is rendered Juan Caballo -- makes sense although you lose a little wordplay when he is talking with a Seminole named Wild Horse. Native American characters have their descriptive names rendered in Spanish in the original and in English in the translation; my understanding of this is that in the world of the novel, the characters have descriptive names in their own languages.
 *Aha -- just spotted that Elizabeth Stealman's nickname La Floja is rendered as Mrs. Lazy in the translation, parallel to La Grande / Mrs. Big. This is a little different since Mrs. Lazy is what they call her behind her back -- I was thinking it was Mexicans calling her "La Floja" but maybe it is gringos too.
...Also Mocoso is rendered as "Snotty".
Here's an odd one -- the printer, a Mexican man named Juan Printer in the original, is named Juan Prensa in the translation. :)
(The frontspiece of the translation is a map showing a couple of key locations in the novel; Mrs. Big's Hotel is labelled "Mr. Big's Hotel". I spent a while trying to figure out why, before I realized how many typos there are in the text. Wishing Deep Vellum had more of a budget for copy editing.)
posted morning of Saturday, November 21st, 2020
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