Translating a People
Translation is at best an echo.
George Borrow
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translation.
Ezra Pound
One of the best things that happened to me upon my parents moving back to Nicaragua—when I was eleven years old—was that I ceased being the translator. My mother's English-language skills were limited. Because of this, whenever we'd brave the streets of Los Angeles without my bilingual father, the moment my mother encountered a linguistic puzzle beyond her capacity to solve, she'd gently nudge me before the interlocutor to act as her interpreter. Although I found the experience interesting at first, after a few years stuck at the job, translating became a chore.
Thus, once we moved to her homeland, where she didn't require my services any longer, the freedom was exhilarating.
Yet, ironically, today, as a novelist—and I suspect it's also the case with other Latino and Latina writers—I'm once again fully engaged in a variant of the act of translation.
From the moment I took my first trip to my parents' homeland—at the age of seven—I became acutely aware that Nicaragua and Nicaraguans were a land and a people vastly different from the United States and its populace. I found the landscape of Nicaragua—physical and human—mesmerizing. Nicaraguans were open to an extent I'd never experience, and their joy toward life was contagious. But at the same time there was an underlying sadness—manifested in an acceptance of their lot that to this day I find baffling—brought on by poverty and by centuries of never-ending political turmoil.
During my Nicaraguan adolescence, I grew to adore the country and its people. I gladly shed my American skin and embraced a new identity as a full-fledged Nicaraguan. I fit in perfectly, and loved almost every minute of the seven years I lived in my ancestral homeland.
When I returned to Los Angeles, at age eighteen, to attend college, I soon learned what I wanted to do, more than anything: it was to explain the sights, sounds, tastes, relationships, and experiences I had in Nicaragua to anyone who was willing to listen. Of course, conveying these things over lunch was impossible—I could only produce the distant echo George Borrow spoke of when referring to everything that is lost in translation.
Yet I always knew, instinctively, that the best way to inform Americans about their Nicaraguan brethren—we do share a continent, after all—would be through the written word. The problem was that I had no idea what I needed to do to become a writer. Blindly, I plunged into the study of literature—in Spanish—and eventually earned a doctorate. But that was of little help at the time in bringing the Nicaraguan experience to an American audience.
The turning point, though, was waiting for me right around the corner: I was introduced to US Latino and Latina literature—a literature written primarily in English by authors with backgrounds similar to mine. Their work struck me like a bolt of lightning, and I started to read their production voraciously.
The climax of this odyssey, the moment where a light descended upon my thirsty soul to reveal the key to rendering my love for Nicaragua onto the blank page, came after I read Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies. Through that example, as well as others penned by equally talented Latino and Latina writers, I learned how to retrieve stories from my parents' homeland—originally experienced in Spanish—and reinterpret them for an English-language readership.
This is what I did in my first novel, Bernardo and the Virgin, and I've done it again in Meet Me under the Ceiba. I lifted events and wrote them in a manner that English-speaking readers can hopefully make their own.
Now the circle feels complete. I am back where I started: translating other people's experiences. Admittedly, it's a different type of translation than what I did for my mother. But it's a kind of interpreting I truly love.
This piece was originally posted in The National Examiner as part of the Meet Me under the Ceiba virtual book tour.






