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Literature

comunidad chicana e incluso fuera de ella— tiene como intención darla a conocer a un público lector mexicano.  Se plantea, además, como voz mediadora, como lo propone Martha Traba al hablar del texto femenino en su artículo "Hipótesis de una escritura diferente", en el conocido volumen La sartén por el mango. Encuentro de escritoras latinoamericanas, en donde dice que "el texto femenino queda situado en un espacio próximo a...los marginados culturales [...] En otras palabras si opera, como realmente
lo hace, desde la imaginación podría perfectamente intermediar como lo hacen todas las contraculturas."4  Y si bien el texto femenino se propone como mediador dentro de un contexto (contra)cultural, también puede funcionar como bi/transcultural y, como es posible apreciar en el proceso traductoríl, como (re)marcador de lo femenino en cuanto marcadores de género.

Going back to the aforementioned resistance, it is clear that once the Spanish code becomes "dominant" in a translation process, it can no longer function as a resistance-
marker in the same way and that alternative markers must be found.  One of the advantages of having face-to-face original and translated texts is precisely the possibility of comparing both, whereby these markers will become apparent. However, possible alternative markers could be to leave certain words in English as they appear in the original text, choosing, as an alternate resistance strategy, not to translate them into Spanish.  Another strategy is to point out these markers by using italics and /or bold type, depending on the case, thereby underscoring their function.

[[image - etching]]
Ester Hernández, Libertad © 1976 (etching).
Reproduced by permission of Ester Hernández,

The translation referred to here is linguistic, of course, although it is also cultural.  In order to illustrate this, I would like to propose an example of a text which can hardly be translated in any conventional way because the whole point is that it is address not only to a bilingual audience but to a very specifically bicultural Chicana/o audience.  Entitled "La loca de la raza cósmica", by La Chrisx, it appears in Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero's Infinite Divisions. An Anthology of Chicana Literature and is a clear example of "talking back" not only to a male Chicano text like "Yo soy Joaquín" by "Corky" Gonzales, but also to Whitman's literary tradition of me-as-male in a poem such as "Song of Myself."  "La loca de la raza cósmica" lists, starting with "soy" —always in Spanish, it is worth noting— a whole series of
definitions of what it is to be Chicana, maintaining throughout the poem a characteristic use of contradiction and humor. There are examples of different degrees of English and Spanish usage, from an all-Spanish tendency "soy la reina de la raza cósmica (al estilo Califas)" to "soy la que calienta los TV dinners" or "soy tamales at Christmas time," through to the all-English lines "[soy] dumpling my old man, even though I'm / pregnant with his child."

4 Martha Traba, "Hipótesis de una escritura diferente," in Patricia Elena
González y Eliana Ortega, eds., La sartén por el mango.  Encuentro de
escritoras latinoamericanas.  Ediciones Huracán, Puerto Rico, 1984, p. 25.

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