From moving translingual sources to moving monolingual targets: The case of Giannina Braschi's Yo-Yo Boing!

Can a non-standard language be translated into a standard language, without losing that which makes it a unique expression of a particular author, identity, culture, place or moment in time? Or in other words, could its diversity be preserved outside of its original linguistic ecosystem? And what if this original linguistic ecosystem is one of cultural and linguistic “hybridity” found in cultural-linguistic borderlands? This paper will reflect on these questions, starting from a discussion of Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), hailed as one of the first published works originally written in Spanglish, (a “so-called “hybrid” language variety resulting from a constant renegotiation of the linguistic borders between English and Spanish” (Attig, 2019), and later translated into English by Tess O’Dwyer (2011). A brief analysis of the challenges involved, and how they have been dealt with by O’Dwyer in her version of Braschi’s novel (2011), and how other literary translingual translations have been approached by translators using intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959/2000, pp. 113- 18) as well as intralingual translation strategies (Jakobson, 1959/2000, p. 114), will also be discussed. We will also briefly reflect on questions regarding translations of multilingual-multicultural literary works, in general, and of Latino (or Latinx) literature in the United States in particular, and on the possibilities of their entering a wider English-speaking mainstream (Sánchez, 2019) and not only, while preserving and “signaling’’ linguistic and cultural diversities (Venuti, 2008).