(Re)visiones de las diásporas latinas estadounidenses en Days of Awe de Achy Obejas y Rosas de abolengo de Sonia Rivera-Valdés

Abstract Most Jewish immigrants to America during the early 20th century arrived speaking Yiddish or Ladino and using Hebrew and Aramaic for liturgical purposes. When subsequent generations abandoned the first two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic were retained, used primarily for liturgy and rites of passage. Jewish American writers have often inserted Hebrew into their English texts by either reproducing the original alphabet or transliterating into Latin letters. This essay focuses on diverse strategies for representing liturgical Hebrew with an emphasis on the poetic, thematic, and sociolinguistic aspects of these expressions of both home and the foreign. Hebrew transliteration is discussed for its literary (rather than phonetic) rendering, for its multilingual creative contact with the other languages and cultures of each narrative. Among the authors whose works are discussed are Philip Roth, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, Joshua Cohen, Achy Obejas, and Gary Shteyngart.

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Viajeras de ambos lados. El género y la noción de transterritorialidad en la narrativa de Achy Obejas y Ana Lidia Vega Serova

El viaje en la literatura hispanoamericana ◽

10.31819/9783964565976-068 ◽

2008 ◽

pp. 853-864

Keyword(s):

Achy Obejas

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Ruins by Achy Obejas

World Literature Today ◽

10.1353/wlt.2009.0334 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 83 (6) ◽

pp. 13-13

Author(s):

Alan Cheuse

Keyword(s):

Achy Obejas

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A tradução como mediação cultural: as traduções da obra de Junot Diaz

Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language Literatures in English and Cultural Studies ◽

10.5007/2175-8026.2019v72n2p273 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 72 (2) ◽

pp. 273-300

Author(s):

Livia Santos de Souza

Keyword(s):

Native Language ◽

Syntactic Structures ◽

Junot Diaz ◽

American Writer ◽

Achy Obejas ◽

Caribbean Spanish ◽

Hybrid Character ◽

Foreignizing Translation ◽

Dominican American

This article has as its object the translations of the Dominican American writer Junot Díaz to Spanish, with special emphasis on the work of the Cuban-born translator Achy Obejas. Author of a short but remarkable work, Díaz elaborates his narratives in a variety of English that often incorporates elements of Spanish. His writing poetics includes the lexicon of Caribbean Spanish and syntactic structures and proper rhythm of his native language, which results in a strongly hybrid text. The translation of this text into a language that is so intensely present in the original is a challenge. To understand how the construction of this translation is processed, this article tries to analize the strategies used to try to keep up with the translinguistic character of these narratives. In order to reach this objective, some theoretical references are used, concepts such as the foreignizing translation, by Lawrence Venuti; translingualism; and D'Amore's considerations on translations of texts originally written in Spanglish. The analysis makes it clear that the work of Achy Obejas was largely able to give the texts in Spanish the same hybrid character present in the original ones.

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The problematic of identity-memory in the Cuban-American fiction of Cristina García and Achy Obejas

Complutense Journal of English Studies ◽

10.5209/cjes.66188 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 29 ◽

pp. 93-102

Author(s):

Mónica Fernández Jiménez

Keyword(s):

Second Generation ◽

Historical Memory ◽

Cristina Garcia ◽

American Fiction ◽

Cuban American ◽

Achy Obejas ◽

Identity Conflicts ◽

Cristina García ◽

American Authors

Cuban-American authors Cristina García and Achy Obejas denote in their fictional works concerns regarding the fragmented memory of second-generation Cuban-American immigrants. Owing to the turbulent political origin of this exiled community, the characters of these works have identity conflicts related to the difficulty of accessing the historical memory of their ancestors’ land and community. However, as the narratives progress, the source of these conflicts proves to be the nationalist approach to identification which they end up challenging by relating themselves to history, memory, and identity in alternative postnational ways. The protagonists of these works, thus, contest traditional postulates in the study of memory like those of Maurice Halbwachs, who believed that the historical memory of a nation had an important role in determining the individual’s identity.

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