Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA by Julia Alvarez

[afterannabel.livejournal.com]

3) Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA by Julia Alvarez

I have mixed feelings about this book. My biggest complaint was that I was often frustrated by Alvarez's use of Spanish words and idioms, of which she rarely provided translation. I took Spanish on and off in high school and college, and some words' meanings are intuitive (familia) or obvious from the context, so that was helpful. But it made me stumble many times throughout the book. I really liked the fact that Alvarez dug deeper and explored how young Latina women in America struggle with incorporating both cultures into their lives in meaningful ways, without compromising themselves.

Comments

[omnivorously.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you want to sit back and be spoon-fed your education on Other People.

I don't think writers are obligated to make it easy for their readers, taking into account the expected audience. Sometimes readers have to work. This doesn't just go for whether you're reading a book about the experience of a marginalized/oppressed group you don't belong to, but in this case: a writer who is a PoC is no obligated to break everything down into easily digestible chunks for people who don't want to, for example, find a Spanish-English dictionary or use google.

I think Alvarez and Christie are a weird comparison, in this situation. Christie was probably assuming that her readers *would* know a fair amount of French, hence whole paragraphs of the stuff - so we're talking about British class politics in the earlier 20th century. Whereas Alvarez is a cultural and linguistic Other in the country in which she writes, and a writer who (it seems) is consciously making it difficult for the native English speakers who compose part of her audience.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I think Alvarez and Christie are a weird comparison, in this situation

It's not a weird comparison. I have the same reaction to spy novels that pepper the text with foreign words and don't explain them.

I want to understand what the writer is saying. Any writer. White, PoC, whatever. I just want to understand. I think that communicating with the audience is part of the point.

Whether the writer is being unclear because she expects the audience to be bilingual or because she DOESN'T expect the audience to be bilingual and WANTS to confuse them, the end result is still confusion. And I don't see that one kind of confusion is any better than the other because the writer's reasons for causing it differ.

And Googling isn't always as useful as all that. I do know this, because I've tried it with other writers who pull the same thing. Foreign words often shift form according to tense or declension. It isn't always possible to find the words online in a particular form that you're looking for. Or you can find and translate the words, but you're translating an idiom which, if you take it literally, is nonsensical. So I'm left with a translated phrase (probably badly translated, considering that I don't speak the language) and no concept of what it means.

That's happened to me a number of times. It doesn't add anything to my experience of the book. It just makes me feel that I'm missing a lot, because I'm pretty sure I'm not grasping all the meanings or connotations or idioms even when I look the words up.

[shati.livejournal.com]

In this case, the author is communicating by using Spanish that monolingual English-speaking readers may not understand. For some readers, she's communicating the feeling that we're missing something, and that works for me. (I am missing things -- cultural nuances, memories of similar experiences, a whole lot of things that other readers may not be missing. It's a reminder that I'm reading from a distance.) If it doesn't work for you, that's unfortunate, but what you're arguing feels to me like saying Tolkien writes badly because you have difficulty with archaic language. That's a valid reason not to read Tolkien, but it's a feature, not a bug.

Anyway -- I don't think there's anything wrong with writing specifically for a bilingual English and Spanish speaking audience, but Alvarez isn't an example of that. I don't speak any Spanish and I haven't had trouble understanding her books. Sometimes I skip over a phrase (or look it up, which I have done successfully with Google), but I used to do that all the time when I was 8 and still learning a lot of the less common English words. (Which many authors use without regard for the parts of their audience who will have difficulty with them, because while they may not be transparent to every person who reads English-language novels, they add something to the text.)