Expanding translation through translational cities: The case of Ilan Stavans’s Nuyol

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to expand the definition of translation in a transdisciplinary fashion. This is achieved by understanding the cosmopolitan city as a text that needs to be translated. Taking as a case study Ilan Stavans’s particular use of language in a cosmopolitan translanguaging space, this article analyzes his Nuyol as a translation site and a translation zone. The translations of Stavans, a polyglot transmigrant, show how the contemporary interconnection between mobility, space and languages contributes to the construction of complex identities in cosmopolitan cities, particularly in his Nuyol, where people live translated. This is studied following a research avenue that sees contemporary cities both as translanguaging spaces and as translational cities. Combining these two concepts shows how Stavans’s Spanglish may be a force that can be used to deterritorialize homogeneous spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Ilan Stavans
• Jewish literature
• Spanglish
• transmigrant
• translanguaging
• New York

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The international journal World Englishes in 2020 published a special issue on “World Englishes and Translanguaging” 39 (2), in which the editors, Christopher Jenks and Jerry Won Lee, succeeded in including contributions by key scholars in the field.

2 Terminology is complex: “Recent debates in the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Blommaert 2010) have problematised paradigms such as bilingualism, multilingualism, and code-switching for reifying static language boundaries and for their inability to account for communicative practices constructed out of a diversity of linguistic and cultural repertoires. Instead, terms such as translingualism (Canagarajah 2013), translanguaging (Creese and Blackledge 2018; García 2009; Li y Zhu 2013), transidioma (Jacquemet 2005, 2013), polylingualism (Jørgensen 2008; Jørgensen and Møller 2014), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010; Pennycook 2010), transglossia (Dovchin, Pennycook and Sultana 2017; Sultana, Dovchin and Pennycook 2015), and linguascapes (Dovchin 2017a, 2017b, 2018), reflective of a translinguistic turn in sociolinguistics, have been introduced in an attempt to capture the critical complexity of language practices that are attracting greater attention in the context of late modernity. This emergent tradition in sociolinguistics reflects the difficulty if not futility, of demarcating linguistic features according to specific languages, for the fluid movement between and across languages requires different epistemologies and a new critical lexicon” (Dovchin and Lee 2019, 106; see also Lee and Dovchin 2020).

3 https://vimeo.com/403455485/a1e5511b28.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte

Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte is Full Professor of Translation at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her research interests include translation theory, migration studies, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, contemporary art and gender studies. She has published 18 books, 12 edited volumes and over a hundred articles and book chapters on these issues. She is a practicing translator specializing in the fields of philosophy, literature, history and contemporary art.