{"id":7192,"date":"2016-02-22T20:39:22","date_gmt":"2016-02-23T03:39:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josemarquez.com\/xsml\/?p=7192"},"modified":"2016-02-22T20:39:22","modified_gmt":"2016-02-23T03:39:22","slug":"in-translation-it-doubled-in-size","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/2016\/02\/22\/in-translation-it-doubled-in-size\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;In translation it doubled in size&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/02\/22\/books\/rosario-ferre-writer-who-examined-puerto-rican-identity-dies-at-77.html\">Bruce Webber on the late Rosario Ferr\u00e9<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Ms. Ferr\u00e9 began writing in English in the 1990s in the hope of reaching a wider audience. Interviewed by The New York Times in 1998, she said that writing and thinking in another, less familiar language changed her style, making it less flamboyant and less complex.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I get into Spanish, I go crazy with words,\u201d she said. \u201cIn English, I don\u2019t have the same linguistic repertory. I have no choice but to wear blinders and go straight.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The result, she said, sometimes ended up surprising her, rendering changes in her characters. \u201cThe House on the Lagoon\u201d \u2014 a multigenerational story about a wealthy and problematically haughty family that begins in 1917, when Puerto Ricans were granted American citizenship, and ends in the 1980s \u2014 is told with rival narrators, a husband and wife, with often conflicting points of view. She wrote it first in Spanish, as \u201cLa Casa de la Laguna,\u201d but as she recalled in a 2011 reminiscence (recently published in English as \u201cMemoir\u201d), she decided to translate it into English and send it to an American publisher; it ended up at Farrar, Straus &#038; Giroux.<\/p>\n<p>In translation it doubled in size and changed so much that after it was published, she had to retranslate it back into Spanish. In English, Ms. Ferr\u00e9 said in the Times interview, she found that the patriarchal husband, Quintin Mendizabal, was \u201cless unpleasant, nicer and more human,\u201d whereas in Spanish, he was \u201ca scoundrel who is not worthy of forgiveness.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Webber on the late Rosario Ferr\u00e9 Ms. Ferr\u00e9 began writing in English in the 1990s in the hope of reaching a wider audience. Interviewed by The New York Times in 1998, she said that writing and thinking in another, less familiar language changed her style, making it less flamboyant and less complex. \u201cWhen I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,7,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7192"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}