El clock de la estación

Abstract

Fabián Severo’s collection of short stories, Viralata, from which this short story comes, was originally published in Portuñol, a “hybrid” mix of Spanish and Portuguese, as it is spoken near the city of Artigas in northern Uruguay. Portuñol, like other “hybrid” border varieties, has rarely been published, though it would seem that interest is growing since the 1990s, particularly in Uruguay.

As a scholar of “hybrid”, diaspora, and transnational languages I decided to explore the possibility of translating this work into Spanglish, the “hybrid” mix of Spanish and English commonly heard among Latinxs in the US. Though the cultural realities of Portuñol speakers and Spanglish speakers are different, there are some important parallels: literature in both has emerged only relatively recently, little has been translated into either language variety, education is not conducted in either, and the dominant discourses around language in both contexts has traditionally favoured literature written in the prestige varieties of English, Spanish, or Portuguese—which should come as no surprise. Given this, I wondered about the experience, aesthetic, and cultural value of putting two distant borders of Spanish in contact through translation.

This is my first translation of Fabián Severo’s work.