IN WHICH The Girl Gets Lost in Translation

“Do you know what sign fool put up on our dorm door? Speak, friend, and enter. In f—king Elvish! (Please don’t ask me how I knew this. Please.)” 

Yesterday, I finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the latest pick for my book club. We celebrated the completion of the book by going out for jibaritos sandwiches (a delicious combination of steak, fried plantains, salt, and garlic) and then drinking mamajuana (red wine soaked in spices and then mixed with honey and rum) in a 7-11 parking lot. We are a super classy book club. While we purposefully sought out a multicultural experience, Diaz’s book bakes multiculturalism into every aspect of his characters’ lives. The result is a brilliantly told tale of how our families, beliefs, cultures, politics, and even roommates irrevocably mold our lives, for better or worse.

The title, back cover, and even the first chapter all imply that the story will focus on Oscar, the socially awkward, obese, and perpetually love struck Dominican “hero” of our story. But while Oscar serves as a home base connection for all the characters, the book quickly delves backwards into the history of his family, tracing the effects of a fuku, or “the Curse and the Doom of the New World” that may or may not have been placed on the de Leon family by the infamous Dominican dictator, Trujillo. While this family certainly does seem cursed, and at times the book will break your heart, it never becomes truly depressing because of the narrator, a smart-talking, ridiculous, and completely unreliable storyteller:

“Dude used to say he was cursed, used to say this a lot, and if I’d been old-school Dominican I would have (a) listened to the idiot, and (b) run the other way. My family are surenos, from Azua, and if we surenos from Azua know anything it’s about f—king curses. I mean, Jesus, have you ever seen Azua? My mom wouldn’t even have listened, would have just run. She didn’t f—k with fukus or guanguas, no way no how. But I wasn’t as old-school as I am now, just real f—king dumb, assumed keeping an eye on somebody like Oscar wouldn’t be no Herculean chore. I mean, shit, I was a weight lifter, picked up bigger f—king piles than him every damn day.” 

All in all, Oscar Wao provides an entertaining portrayal of some very unique characters while questioning your belief in curses and fate, exploring the cyclical nature of dictatorship, and teaching you the history of the Dominican Republic. However, there are two aspects of the book that might throw some readers off: the mix of Spanish and nerdy pop culture references that pop up on every page of the book.

Almost every character in the book has one foot set in the Dominican Republic and the other in America, including the narrator. Like most bilingual speakers, both the characters and the narrator mix the two languages together in what Michiko Kakutani from the New York Times calls “a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale.” I happen to agree that even non-Spanish speakers, like me, can grab most of the meaning from the context and some basic knowledge of languages, but I also know that I’m missing some of the meaning along the way. While the novel includes an unexpectedly high number of footnotes, none of them are translations. There are really three ways to react to the language:

1. Get frustrated that you don’t understand the language and give up. Hopefully, no one does this because you would miss out on an excellent book.
2. Pull up a Spanish/English dictionary and translate every phrase. One reader went through this process and generously put the results online here for other readers. I didn’t actually discover this website until I was almost done with the book.
3.  Just read the novel straight through, figuring the Spanish sections out by context and any words you might happen to know.

I went through door number three for a few reasons. One, I’m a little lazy and didn't want to have to look up every word. I did look up some of the Spanish words that kept repeating and I thought were important, but otherwise I left the dictionary alone. In addition, I think stopping to figure out each Spanish line would have distracted me from the story itself. I would have been so concentrated on the translations that I would not pay as much attention to the characters and plot. Reading this novel is a lot like listening to a friend tell you about his or her life. You want to just absorb the tale without interruption.

However, even more importantly, I believe that I should be left a little in the dark. I don’t know Spanish – through this really did make me realize how much I should know Spanish – and, therefore, I am slightly outside of the culture of the book, as I am in real life. I am the immigrant in the Oscar Wao land. When asked in an interview how he felt about readers who cannot understand the language, Diaz responded:

“I've almost never read an adult book where I didn't have to pick up a dictionary. I guess I participate more in my readings and expect the same out of my readership. I want people to research, to ask each other, to question. But also I want there to be an element of incomprehension. What's language without incomprehension? What's art? And at a keeping-it-real level: Isn't it about time that folks started getting used to the fact that the United States comprises large Spanish-speaking segments?”

But even if you do know Spanish, another language weaves its way through this book, what I’m going to call geek-speak. We quickly learn that Oscar feeds on comics, science fiction, fantasy, and Lord of the Rings. Even the narrator, who claims to be cooler than Oscar, fully understands and uses tons of references to the “Genres,” as he calls them. According to the narrator, Oscar:

“Could write in Elvish, could speak Cakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. . . . Perhaps if like me he’d been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn’t. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.” 

This geek-speak provides another barrier for those who don’t follow comics and science fiction closely. I consider myself pretty nerdy, but I only caught about a quarter of the references. Again, you can choose whether to look up all the references or just give them your best shot through context. I will say that these references do add to the entertainment value of the narrator though. It should be noted that Oscar’s propensity for speaking oddly keeps him isolated from both friends and family, just as we are isolated from the novel by not fully understanding the languages.

Despite these language barriers, I thoroughly enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and highly recommend it to others. There are so many other things I could say about it, but I’m getting tired, so I’ll let you discover the wonders of the book all on your own. Now, I just need to start on my new bucket list of nerdtastic books, shows, and movies referenced in the novel.