hurricane season fernanda melchor review

Hughes cites Octavio Paz’s chapter in The Labyrinth of Solitude devoted to the word: « La Chingada is above all the mother. » La Chingada is another name for La Malinche - Hernán Cortés’ translator and guide, blamed for selling out the Mexican people. Hughes has said that « with every chingada I had to translate, I felt I was chipping away at some insidious but important context regarding misogyny. » Indisputably, the word chingar vibrates on many frequences in Mexican history. « In Veracruz, » an acquaintance said recently, « we use vulgarities like you in Mexico City use güey (dude). » There’s a levity, too, that the translation can’t quite carry. Many of the sexual, misogynistic terms and phrases are also baked into colloquial speech, especially Veracruzano speech. Some of the vernacularisms feel so dated or esoteric as to be unnatural: « grandma really blew her top … she accused them of being shit-stirring harpies, despicably greedy. » The translation puts « quite innocently » in the same sentence as « dipshit », « tummy troubles » alongside « clogged up to his nuts ». But it sacrifices the cohesive register of the narration. It’s at once literal, loyal, and inventive. Instead, she translated into an idiolect that combines both American and British colloquialisms, needing the slang of both Englishes to approach the spectrum of Mexican possibilities. She has explained that she decided not to include any Spanish expletives in her translations « so as not to … lift the readers out of the characters’ minds or out of the text even momentarily ». Hughes’ translation renders the prose closely, finding approximations for Melchor’s colorful language. In English, the aggressive density of slang and sexual imagery is a rough and jarring ride. But while the prose style defines Melchor’s work in both Spanish and in its English translation, the experience of reading it is different across the two languages. « Vitriolic, ribald, and brimful of expletives and slurs, the language trundles onward like a black sludge, a punishment to read », noted Bailey Trela in the Brooklyn Rail.

It « make Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy seem tame », Amanda Dennis wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

That aggression of language has struck Anglophone readers.

Hurricane season fernanda melchor review