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Tess O'Dwyer
Grunting and Grooming in a
Room of One's Own: On Translating Giannina Braschi's Yo-Yo Boing!
AFTER TRANSLATING GIANNINA Braschi's
collected poetry into English (Empire of Dreams,
Yale University Press, 1994), I figured her new bilingual novel Yo-Yo
Boing! (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998) would be
a piece of cake. After all, Empire Dreams is poetry and Yo-Yo Boing! is
fiction. Shouldn't prose be easier? And, wouldn't it stand to reason
that a bilingual book would take half the time to translate since the
author already did half the job? I thought so, but it didn't take long
to change my mind.
Written in an unprecedented blend of Spanish and
English, Yo-Yo Boing! takes a hard look at life in
the global metropolis of New York City at the turn of the 21st century.
In a time when elected officials are pushing for more restrictive
immigration and English-only laws in backlash to the booming Hispanic
population in the United States, Braschi insists on celebrating the
beauty and force of an explosive new American language and experience.
She rides the controversial wave of bilingualism today, making sheer
poetry out of dark politics and radiant music out of stark madness.
Though the first chapter Oh-Oh was written
entirely in (Spanish) prose, each sentence has a high-dose of
life-affirming poetry pulsating through its veins. The novel opens with
a close-up description of a woman in her bathroom doing bathroom
things. Alone in a private physical and mental space, she stands before
a mirror and performs an intimate body ritual that becomes a
self-reflexive language ritual. In her introduction to Yo-Yo
Boing!, Doris Sommer explains this ritual as the book's
refusal "to decide between performing in English and reveling in
Spanish." She writes:
"The fact that the first pages are
written in a rush of gloriously nuanced Spanish sentences, that teeter
between grotesque and burlesque bodily functions, may leave the readers
clueless about what will come next. But if the protagonist in her
toilet is a hint about things to come, it's because she doesn't decide
between her toilette's alternative meanings of water-closet
and of beautification process. Instead she relishes
the slow-motion, unnervingly detailed processes of voiding and
indulging in vanity, of grunting and grooming."
The excruciating detail of the zoom lens narration reveals as much
about seeing and writing as it does about being and aging. The scene is
as much about self-reflection and isolation as it is about inspiration
and communication. It's also as much about human nature as it is about
the nature of the Spanish language. Herein lies the difficulty in
translation: in rendering the exquisitely nuanced, meticulously
crafted, rhythmically mesmerizing complex Spanish sentences into plain
ol' English. In short: how d'ya make it flow?
Because English has always felt more concrete to
me than Spanish, the zoom lens technique that Braschi uses with
extraordinary virtuosity loses none of its perceptive or magnifying
power in translation. Precision comes with English, but melody doesn't.
Therefore, finding the explicit words was easy; arranging them in
musical order was not. I have restructured many lines and phrases in
Oh-Oh to save what must always be saved across language barriers: the
spirit of the poetry, its rhythm and run.
Lest the readers feel "clueless about what will
come next," I can tell you this much about the rest of the novel. The
camera zooms out, third person narration ends, and the rest of the book
is a fast and furious bilingual dialogue about art, sex, food, movies,
books, and everyday city life. Scenes vigorously cross-cut throughout
public and private spaces of New York City with rapid tempos and
humorous gusto-from the Upper West Side soiree to the Lower East Side
tertulia, from the diner booth to the subway platform, from the movie
theater line to the unemployment line, and from the bathroom to the
bedroom.
The ideal audience for Yo-Yo Boing!
is obviously a savvy bilingual reader who can enjoy the novel hot off
the shelf "as is." Others will have to wait until I can figure out to
translate all the code-switching bilingual dialogues, without losing
all their humor and gusto. Perhaps English-only readers can spend some
time with Empire of Dreams while I keep plugging
away at Yo-Yo Boing! In the meantime, please enjoy
this preview entitled Oh-Oh. . . .--New
York, New York, August 10, 1998
Giannina Braschi
Oh-Oh
SHE STARTS ON all fours, crawling like a
child, but she is a wild animal with a great big trunk, an elephant.
And little by little her neck starts popping, and little by little her
neck starts growing, one inch, then two inches, then five inches, until
her head inches its way so far from the floor that she'd almost swear
it reaches the ceiling and she'd almost swear it's grown so big and so
fast that it doesn't fit inside the house anymore. And then it dawns on
her that what has grown is not her head but her neck, which means that
she must be a giraffe. Then she starts hunching over, the bones in her
hands and feet start crackling, there's a rumbling throughout her body,
bombs exploding, fireworks, thunder, lightning, throbbing, and she
tries in vain to allay the uprising. She feels like spreading her
cheeks like a ham and cheese sandwich, opening wide, releasing that
other part of her body, those brown pebbles which are sometimes
pleasant and sometimes prolonged, which are sometimes nearly melted
inside and out, which are big and round and green, which are her
darling pooh-poohs, her little poopsie-woopsies, and the yellow waters
melting and plunging with them into the bowl, smelling of that other
smell, violently sour, enticingly foul like budding buds and violets.
She wanted to feel her black blood cascade, her body's dead blood, and
she wanted to bathe in all of the blood of the death of her youth. She
felt the urge to sit on the throne, to squat slowly, to pull down her
pantyhose which doubled as a girdle and then her panties which were so
tight that she could barely breathe. She wanted to breathe freely,
unfasten her bra, scratch and stroke her itching breasts, fondle her
nipples in front of the mirror, turn sideways, to see her nose looking
hooked and humped like a scorpion, a hairy spider, she wanted to become
the hairy spider she was and scratch the itch like she was picking a
berry, one of those pimples that look like chicken pox, and to see the
spurt of blood and suck it like a vampire, then burrow into her sex
where the wavy hair tangles into curly knots, and see the layer of
crust and smell the sweet smell of coffee skim, sugar crust, and sleep
on one of her blisters and milk its clear and frothy nectar until she
gladly felt it burst, and explore all her little nooks and crannies
until she was empty, hollow and broken. She noticed a little scab on
her knee. The top was dry. She could either yank it off and let it
bleed, or she could peel it back like a band-aid and see another layer
of skin under the first, not tanned, but musty and pink. First she
acted like she wasn't interested, then she started tracing its outline,
caressing, charming and wooing it with her fingertips, rousing a
vibration, a rich metallic sound, and it looked like it wanted to leave
the knee for the hand that played it like a guitar, yes, they made
music together, drew blood, yellow waters, then it started reaching out
to the hand, unraveling itself from the knee, while the fingertips
seduced it, the nails flayed it off the kneecap, and though the scab
was uprooted, bloody and sore, it posed like the beloved maiden in the
palm of her hand, where it was caressed again, adored by her eyes,
yearned by her saliva, suckled by her tongue, momentarily teased by her
lightning desire. After having sucked and nibbled and kneaded it, she
spit it out, stepped on it with her big toe, then picked it up and
flicked it in the sink. She turned on the faucet, and it was sucked
down the drain. Detached from her roots and whims, she restlessly
searched for another star, another match to light a fire under her
kettle of yearnings, a concrete, objective goal, a grain of sand to
roll between her fingertips, a warm bread crumb where she could stop to
think for a moment or sleep in the tenderness of what she touches. In
doing so, somewhat obsessively, her breathing began to sound like the
breathing of a weary animal, and this breathing, deliberately slow and
deep, began to sound like the breathing of a surgeon about to make the
first incision. She gently placed the bloody wound in her mouth, the
blister's sheath on her tongue, and played with all the different
textures she found on her body-her snot and the gook from her sleepy
eyes were her dolls and toys-and she played hide-and-seek and stuck
them to different parts of her body like a stamp collector, and she did
all of this while listening to slow and deliberate music, while feeling
some deep desire to push out, to breathe in, to breathe out, in and
out, in and out. There she was excavating a cave with the knuckles of
her forefingers pressing against a hole, when slowly out wriggled the
profile of a white worm. She pressed her knuckles harder against the
irritated skin a few more times until a blackhead emerged. Nice start,
but the lava was still bubbling inside. Another squeeze, a little pus
and blood, the volcano was erupting, but it wasn't the blood she was
after, no, blood alone wouldn't do it, all the pus had to be drained,
the pollen, the whole worm had to come out, alive and kicking. The
first attempt was too abrupt. She must steady the squeeze and hold the
pressure, she must smother the little hole, suffocate it, bust it open,
spread it wide, leave it empty-empty of water, blackhead and
blood-leave it empty, shiny and clean. Having spread its legs, it was
cornered and kicking on one side of the pore where it defended its
cavern which was attacked from all sides by cannons and rifles, but the
more it was attacked, the more it resisted, burrowing deeper into the
walls of the pore, showing no sign that it would ever surrender or
accept defeat. It had become part of her flesh, it had lived in plenty
of other pores around the wings of her nostrils, and it had sealed them
all with blackheads, but it was only here-in this little hole-that it
had felt at home. Yes, it was a cave-dwelling nomad, but it was only
here-in this little hole-that it had lingered longer at leisure,
incognito. It had tried to keep a low profile, having learned its
lesson from other places, having been ousted for wanting to shine,
bright and sunny, for pretending to be thorn, for being light, but it
was only here-in this little hole-that it had camouflaged itself and
its bitter misery. At first she thought it was a mole, but then she
noticed the edge, the crest, and she squeezed it furiously because she
had been fooled. She wet the open pore with some water. This time it
won't get away. She would force it out against its will with her firm
and steady fists, it would have to come out with its hands up, it would
have to surrender its wounds, its bulges and all its goods. And so it
did. Out came its neck, then its hands, its legs, the belly was
enormous, gigantic, it was perfect, plackity, plackity, plack, plack,
plack, that's how it emerged and surrendered itself whole, looking all
shiny and greasy on the swollen tip of her pink nose. There it was,
wide-eyed and nosy, probably trying to snoop on the blackhead, it
puffed itself up, it looked like a fly, yes, like a fly about to fly.
It crawled around the circumference of the dimple like a tick, and ate
meat, and was swarmed by ants, speckles of freckles, as we all
know-wherever you find meat, you find pesky critters. She looked
closer, oh, yes, it's you, a queer bug, queer indeed, how d'ya pick it
up, she loosened it with her finger. It danced on her fingertip like a
cricket or a grasshopper, zigzagging, wigwagging its tailend, zaggling,
waggling like a piece of wire, like a piece of white string, acting out
its joi de vivre, its lust for life. As she paused upon her captive,
her mouth began to water. It was her tongue rather than her teeth and
lips that wanted it most. And what for? To pass it along so that the
palate could taste the pleasure of taking a guest and keeping it
captive, and then after napping on the silver bed of a molar for a
second, or a few days, why not tease it some more, start a riot, make a
funny face, or have an orgy, sure, why not get it rip-roaring drunk and
then make it vanish. Bottoms up. Down the hatch. Want some more? Well,
help yourself. Now's the chance. Her mouth is open. It's now or never.
You've got to act fast. You've got to find the first little crack and
peep through the gap and squeeze yourself through, yes, jump right in
there, between her two front teeth. Com'on, hurry, hurry, you've got to
hurry, it's a golden opportunity, a once in a lifetime chance, you've
got to hurry and slide down her nose and bypass her tonsils and let her
palate say hello-good morning, tongue, excuse me, molar, yummy phlegm
is passing through-quickly, yes, run and run as fast as you can and
push your way through, swing from her tonsils, bounce off her palate,
land behind her teeth, push your way through, squeeze your way between
the gap, hoist yourself onto the front tooth, yes, the one on the
right. What a riot! Though she searched and searched and couldn't find
you, she laughed and found her dimple instead, open and naked with its
shameless grin. Look at me, sweetie. Look this way. She looked at the
cabinet mirror and saw three little hairs on her chinny, chin, chin.
She took a pointy pair of tweezers out of her make-up bag and tried to
pluck the first little hair. Impossible, it was newly born, smaller
than a zit, and far from ready yet. She went after the second little
hair with another pair of tweezers that were squared at the tip. She
quickly sized it up from the corner of her eye and plucked it out with
one swift pluck. Harried and obsessed, she returned to the first little
hair, and she plucked and she plucked and she plucked until she finally
plucked it out. She moved swiftly along the course of her jaw, and yes,
there was peachfuzz, as well as scanty pricks, which, though they had
no thorny tips, stood out in the sunlight ugly and thick, and so, she
uprooted them one by one using a magnifier and the tweezers that were
squared at the tip. Then she ran her fingers underneath her chinny,
chin, chin, searching for the last prickly-pear, the third little hair.
She gave it three smart tugs, but couldn't get it. Then she took the
pointy tweezers, firmed her grip, grabbed the third little hair by the
head and savagely yanked it out, root and all. Now her chin felt flat
and smooth like an iron, and she felt happy and soothed. Then she began
browsing her jawbone for pimples to pop, but she found only little
black markings of the pimples she had already popped. Her bare face was
full of little pliers and wires, nooks and holes, warts and moles. She
had to cover these blemishes, her monotonous and daily sufferings, with
base. She dabbed some drops of Dor� on her forehead, letting it dribble
a bit, before dabbing some more on the tip of her nose and gliding it
down the wings with her forefinger, covering holes and dashing Souci on
her plump cheeks. She started spinning, smearing and encircling her
flushed cheeks, skating in concentric circles, sliding her greasy
fingertips over little lumpy bumps, shooting comets and bullets,
gliding them back over the nose as if they were trapezists or tumblers.
Crossing a catwalk of memories, memories that breeze by, quickly
regarded, as swiftly as a train leaving behind town after town in the
blink of an eye, journey and remembrance, staring out the window at
grazing animals, batting eyelashes, and dimples. She smoothed the base
into her forehead, allowing it to blend into her temples, then she gave
an orange, green and violet expression to her eyes. The eyeliner flowed
across her eyelids, startled eggshell, yellow yolk, and it started
spitting and shining and doodling little blossoms. She opened the dusty
blush-on, huffed and puffed on it, then wiped its mirror with kleenex.
She didn't see her turtle neck, pug nose or open pores. As she turned
sideways, her nose blocked the view of the bags under her eyes, but not
the blinking of her lashes. She lowered the mirror until she saw her
dry lips, which she moistened with the tip of Nimphea. She chose
Bloonight from the cabinet, as well as a round handmirror to magnify
the dimensions of her complex, perplexed, farfetched misfortunes. She
saw ticks and roaches and sank in the terrifying panic of her pain. She
flipped the handmirror over, and once again contemplated the surface of
the landscape and the geography of her continent. She coated her lashes
with Bloonight, which was sputtering at the mouth, and as she was
batting her lashes, the mascara brush hit her eyeball, causing a
furious flutter and a long, thick crocodile tear, salty and black. She
drew over the bags under her eyes with coverstick to mask the stain,
blinked again, and powdered her face with a powder puff, imagining that
she was erasing drawings from a chalkboard. A clown. All painted-up in
white, with two dark shadows over her eyes and two plums on her cheeks,
and her lips, wet and ready to kiss a cherry, were puckered and painted
in blood-red wax. And two streams flowed down her temples, two long
streaks of sweat that lingered in the wrinkles, not wrinkles quietly
settled by age, but wrinkles quickly etched by the emotion of her eyes,
by the furrows that furrowed and drained into her mouth where they
melted on her tongue and vanished beyond the knot in her throat. It was
mesmerizing to watch how the lashes resembled the blustering of an
autumn tree trying to balance its branches, how the leaves were
falling, blinking leafy and startled, how the windows of the skin
opened to breathe, and how the pores absorbed the make-up that was
melting like a candle in a candlestick, and how the illusion was
darkening, and how the powder, in trying to hide the caves and thorns,
made them even more noticeable, and how the cold transparency shined
through and how it warmed and thawed in the flames, and how the same
lights and shadows and the dance of lights and shadows were playing
havoc on the neck, while the skin was sucking the succulent juice of
the grease, and one wondered whether it was the grease that came from
within, maybe from deep within, or whether it was the cream from the
make-up, or whether it was a combination of both, with the dusty,
crusty blush-on and the dry, chapped lips, having used all the
lipstick, and even when she wouldn't remove any of these facepaints,
when her face had already become the mask it was, when she could no
longer rid herself of the magical spell of her sweat, and the furrows
and reefs where the currents of her tears flowed, and the smile and
elongation of her squinting eyes and the wrinkling of her expression,
smoothed, cooked, uncooked in its crucifixion had been sculpted into
caterpillars, warts, turtles, spiders, hunchbacks, tattoos, in markings
that no longer grow or, if they grow, they only grow old, but at least
they don't crawl backwards like crabs, instead they persist in
prolonging themselves, in opening themselves wider, in extending their
movement and growth until it's paralyzed in high maturation and stunned
by the death of youth, and the ear of a wrinkle listens to the sounds
in a seashell, and one wonders whether they will ever be warts or moles
or wrinkles again. Oh, mirror, mirror on the wall, shattering into so
many faces, which is the realest of them all, which always lies, which
fears it's not the call of death, which is too real, but the very death
that is reality, and won't swallow lies or mask itself in make-up. She
turned on a little green bulb, spotlighting her left side. As the light
spread across her face, she closed her eyes slowly and strained to open
them again. Reflected was the displeasure of seeing herself sideways,
half in darkness, deformed, not only by the light, but also by the
disharmony she felt in her eyes and crooked mouth. She searched her
face for the cause of her displeasure. She fancied it was a fixation,
just a peeve, that made her see herself this way, if she had some
distance from the image reflected, she would have liked being herself,
yes, maybe that was it, that she was sick and tired of seeing herself
confined to the loneliness of her own face. And if that weren't so,
then how was it that others found her attractive, how could they,
unless they saw her differently than she saw herself. She thought about
the tone of her voice, so shrill when she screamed, when she didn't
know why or how she became so enraged with a rage that sent tremors
through her jaws, hardened her gullet, and scorched her throat. She
thought about all the times that she had the exact image of how her
hair should look, but no matter how she combed it, her hair took
whatever shape it wanted. But what bothered and baffled her, truly
baffled her, and set her beside herself, was the desire to see herself
as others saw her. She wanted to know what they were thinking of her,
and if they kept what they were thinking to themselves, and if they
were thinking something different than what they were saying, and why
was her face, and not only hers, but everyone who looks at herself, a
high cement wall, so impenetrable, so truly impenetrable, mysterious
and silent. Why were they at war in her face, the accumulation of
grease and the shine in her eyes glazed with crocodile tears, and the
devastating bags under her sleepless eyes, and she heard within
herself, throughout herself, in a muted stillness forming a shore in
her face, shores of thoughts, not thoughts buried in a tomb of an alarm
clock, not thoughts barred in a coffin with padlocks, but those
wrinkles that flourish and blossom, those subways heading downward from
the tip of the nose, toward the half-open mouth, because they were
puckered and marked and cooked, they were the ruminations of the face
with the face, the encounter between the interrogator and the
interrogated, between the trench and the ditch. As the film, awash with
stains, was developing in the sunlight, as she was revealing herself at
this very moment, as if she had been veiled in white, as she was
appearing, never the same in the changing movement since the first
slide down the toboggan of her profile, she wanted to free herself from
herself, and from all her thoughts. She wanted to reflect without them
behind her, forcing the way. When her eyes were focused on a fixed
point, and she began to project all kinds of images on the screen of
her forehead, it was almost always after spending a night far away from
her yearnings, her desires, when they eagerly returned and struggled to
appear on screen. And they almost always came light, soft, not rough,
like a bubbling waterfall, like cheerful solace, refreshing her face,
allowing her eyes to recover the first illusion. Indeed, her eyes
clouded and cried with childish excitement, and while the music played
on the stereo, she started speaking with the projected images that
suddenly appeared, bubbling, easy, uninterrupted, with no short circuit
of communication, as it was impossible to short circuit because it had
surged from the pleasure of a night when the drunkenness and its
hangover had freed her from her anxieties of feeling clenched in her
own jaws or tied down by the chains that bound her to the hips of her
own body. But it was necessary to feel the heaviness and the bitterness
of her body, to feel the whip and the bar, in order to later soar like
birds and sing as she had never sung before, in perfect tone with the
color of the music, which, emerging from her mouth full of feverish
illusion, would communicate the splendor of her liberated agony. She
had to sustain the note, hold it firmly, loving it, but resisting and
pushing it because it should keep rising, surging up through the elbows
of the imagination, down through the armpits of the earthquake, and
trembling in the vibrant, divided gravity of the tone. She had to
conduct it with the baton and at the same time resist its invasion from
afar, and control her emotions, and be the producer, the motor, the
speed, as well as the ear listening to the rise of emotion and
interrupting the imbalance, disharmony, tone-deafness, and be the hand
holding, grabbing, lifting and encouraging it, causing the pain of
pleasure as her blood rises. And she had to do all of this not only
with the flight of her hands, but with slow and deliberate movements,
by lowering her eyes to intensify the movement of her hands, and by
following the movement of silence and the pause of her finger, by
allowing her hips and shoulders and breathing to be moved by her hands,
and by conducting the measure and the diapason, making her neck arch
back and her brows furrow, maintaining the emotional current running
throughout her body, while her feet are tapping to the beat in her
head, her eyes are feeling the vibration, and she opens her mouth
uttering certain mute words, and then lowers her tone and submerges it
in a balanced effervescence that lowers the voice even further until it
vanishes, down the hatch, and then it rounds out the corner of her lips
mouthing a round O, and then a vibrant semi-open E
to dot the aggressive divided i that precedes and
interposes another gracious figurative note laughing like a goat, which
is an E that comes before a white open A.
Proud and distant, a minor climbs the scale of A
major, and from there looks for E and tells it how
to act toward the most fertile U, while O
is too self-absorbed, it's like a closed ball, assuming it can't join E
or i because they're always together or mingling
with other fertile couples, but O is the motor of O,
of the exclamation OH-OH! You close your mouth
slowly. But your yawn slowly dawns again-it opens its desire to see the
sky cloudy-yawn falling from the sky-open, open your mouth wide, never
keep it closed, even a yawn like a prayer can turn into a replica, a
replica of the same, the very same thing, when the open mouth opens the
open mouth O and it becomes the exclamation OH-OH!
And it awkwardly balances on its two swings, on its two hips, moving,
holding and enclosing itself in the claustrophobia of a whole orange, a
full moon, or the sun in its highest permanence and splendor as the
other vowels of the alphabet make their wigwagging, zigzagging
pilgrimage toward the closed O, toward its
obscurity and silence, musically rendering their desire to be loved or
joined at last to O. Imagine U's
fury when it almost touches it, but U feels like
it's missing a few hairs on its head, or it's missing a hat to cover it
completely and protect it from the burning sun. And by now, A,
standing tiptoe on top, arches its leafy branches, covered with
bouquets and herbs that make it feel so important in the power of the
music and the scale. And all of them, each and every one at its own
level, feel completely potent and vigorous and fulfill their mission of
exalting the production of her name, in complementing and developing
all her vigor, from the tip of O's big toe, to the
weedy crop on top of E, they are formed by forms
that have formed forms, they have tightened the measure of her forms,
exercised her muscles, heard the grumbling in her belly, the rumbling
of her ribs, the knuckles and joints in her hands, the underarm hair,
the counterbeat, the countersweat of the smell, the sulfur and the
sopor, the white steam of black breath, the black steam of white
breath, the intense soporific contractions, the warm breath of the open
mouth, closing and opening, opening and closing in the slow and
deliberate movement, attentive to the movement it makes when opening
and closing, the supreme control of herself over her own death,
watching this death while closing her eyes, falling silent as she
closes them, listening to the gentle tremble of her eyelids, and gently
trembling with them in the splendor of this gentle tremble, in the
union of the body with the body, dying and opening, contracting and
fading, dividing and closing itself off from everything, on all sides,
full of permanencies.
(translated from the Spanish by Tess
O'Dwyer)
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