Abstract:
In “The Part About Fate,” one of the five sections of his widely acclaimed novel 2666, Roberto Bolaño deploys a parodic translation effect that emulates the singular way in which certain popular American crime movies are translated and dubbed into European Spanish, reproducing ill-sounding idioms and expressions that once appeared strange to the Spanish speaker and now have become part of a specific cultural sub-code. “The Part About Fate,” then, presents in the original Spanish edition a secondary level of meaning based on parody that the Spanish-speaking reader can recognize as authentic despite the fact that it originated as a result of mistranslation or of what is commonly known as “translatorese.” In this chapter, I examine a number of examples of this parodic translation effect. Then, I compare them to their official English translation, highlighting the passages in which the translation is unable to show the parodic spirit that underlies the language of the novel’s section. In the last part I conclude that this exercise in parody not only adds to the multiple, rich layers of meaning that overlap in the novel’s sections such as the blind academicism of the critics or the excessively digressive subterfuge the novel becomes at times, but it also stresses the importance of transnational questions of language in making 2666 an international, post-global narrative.