Lost in Translation

Paternostro’s story is very intimate. She even titles the book My Colombian War because her memoir is mainly about how she makes amends with her past in Colombia. Her readers are center-left Americans who have no real knowledge of the country. Therefore, much of the story is a walk down memory lane.

This is Paternostro’s problem, narrating a personal story deeply ingrained in the Barranquilla coastal culture to foreign readers who have never been to the place. She tries to take the easy way out, oversimplifying and exaggerating things so readers wont get confused. Paternostro’s method does not work perfectly because the audience can’t get a taste of the real thing. One example of this is her story on the angelitos, poor children that beg for money the morning after Halloween. When the angelitos approached her house, Paternostro received them with candy. Insulted they chanted: esta casa es de espinas, donde viven la mezquinas, which Paternostro translates to “this house is made of thorns, this is the home of the stingy”. The problem with Paternostro’s translation is that she changed the register. Someone who knows Spanish and has lived in Barranquilla associates the chant with informality and playfulness, a kind of simple cleverness that poor costeños are famous for. I can easily imagine a group of little black boys with a look of indignation, animatingly chanting their verses with a heavy accent. Paternostro’s translation sounds formal and boring, it doesn’t have any allure. One really has to work the imagination to picture a group of poor, uneducated kids in any English-speaking country singing: this house is made of thorns! That phrase sounds more like it came from a Shakespeare play or something In the Bible.

A less good example can be seen in how Paternostro uses the term marimberos. She simply defines the word “as the men in the marijuana business were called” (p.111). A dictionary style definition that makes the term marimbero loose all of its connotations. Marimberos is a slang word that people use when speaking degradingly about those associated with marijuana, it is not something you would find in a formal report. By depriving the slang word of its connotations, the reader misses information. Namely, that the common term with which people referred to dealers was insulting and therefore,

that those associated with marijuana were not accepted by society.

It is undeniable that transmitting the true feeling of a country is something hard to do when addressing an unknowing audience in a foreign language. Nevertheless, because culture in Barranquilla is a key aspect in her book, Paternostro should have been especially careful.