“My Way Bent,” or, A Flaming Queen of Carthage Mambos Home

Abstract

Challenges and pleasures abound in translating Uriel Quesada's El gato de sí mismo (Costa Rica, 2005) so that the tricky fun of the original will infuse a new version appealing to a wide readership in English. This satirical novel enlists “camp” style, high and low burlesque, and a parody of wide-ranging genres and styles to entertain readers and skewer heteronormative hypocrisy. Quesada's narrator, thrown out of his family due to sexual orientation, imagines himself in successive personae to cope with the potentially overwhelming emotions of a difficult return home. Although some particulars of the Costa Rican setting stand out as foreign, aspects of the speaker's persistently flamboyant self-dramatization appear more readily legible to a US readership than to its original context. At the level of the sentence, however, my Englishing heightens campiness in lexicon, syntax, and imagery to convey not only the zany playfulness, but also the moral resilience, of speaker and book.

Keywords:

• burlesque
• camp
• Costa Rica
• heteronormative
• imagery
• lexicon
• parody
• playfulness
• Amanda Powell
• Uriel Quesada
• sexual orientation
• syntax

Notes

¹Intercutting literary genres, registers of social class, and mood, in service to what we might call a male homosexual narrative of “successful maladaption,” is far from being new territory in Latin American fiction. Quesada's narrative evokes such literary successes as Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña (translated by Thomas Colchie as Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976), or José Donoso's El lugar sin límites (translated in Suzanne Jill Levine's Hell Hath No Limits, 1995).

²http://somethingpositive.wikia.com/wiki/Flaming_Queen

³The writer, critic, and scholar Albino Chacón, in an extensive quote printed on the book's back cover: “[una huida que] desemboca... hacia la esquizofrenia, lugar donde lo no decible y lo no experimentable en la realidad cotidiana pareciera poder tener lugar, pero incluso aquí el discurso sigue estando fuertemente reprimido.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Powell

Amanda Powell's translations include The Answer / La Respuesta by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (The Feminist Press at City University of New York, 2nd ed., 2009) and Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (University of New Mexico, 2nd ed., 2010); her essay “Traveling in Place: Baroque Lyric Transports in Translation, or Flames that Bridge the Stream,” is forthcoming in Poetry in Motion (Tamesis), and a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts translation grant supports the project described here. Her poems appear in journals from Agni to Zoland, in anthologies like This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on Teaching (American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards honoree, 2014), and in her collection Prowler (2013). She teaches Spanish and Latin American literature and translation at University of Oregon.