acts of translation: the sounds of home in Alejandra Banca’s “From Savagery”
It begins, as life does, with burial: placing a link to the past in the earth. The burial of the dead is so often a matter of funerary pomp for the living that the body’s interment is overlooked, taken for granted. But that’s not the case now. In this part of the world, it’s not that simple. Here, putting a corpse into a hole — this ancient human custom, our relation to the earth and the generations of the living — is imperiled. By what? By the inferno people can, given power and time, make the world into. To return to dust is no easy job; the living must do it, and when everyone is busy dying, fleeing or trying to survive, a helping hand is hard to find.
This is how Alejandra Banca’s From Savagery, eminently translated by Dr. Katie Brown, begins: with a burial, or the attempt at one. It’s painful to read Angélica go through the options of how to inter her mother’s corpse: the crematoria are expensive, caskets are too pricey, and the potters’ field seems the only plausible option. Philip Roth once told a young writer “write as if your parents are dead,” and it’s a liberating sentiment if you can put the past away out of sight. But here: no. Angélica knows her mother’s body must be buried, but when the social mechanisms that orchestrate burial are overworked or breaking down, what can one person do? How do you go on among creating life among the living when the influence of the dead cannot be put away? To be dissolved into an anonymous burial place with the many other recent dead: this is a way of the world, and it is real. It’s happening now.
Venezuelans of Alejandra Banca’s generation are coming to grips with the effects of a political dream that has scattered its citizens around the world. Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, high on the 2000s surge in commodity prices — in particular, oil — faltered in the wake of Chávez’s death in 2013 and the sharp drop in oil prices beginning in 2014. The afterlife of the revolution, stewarded by one Nicolas Maduro, has been marked by economic instability, violence, displacement and flight. According to government and intergovernmental statistics, there are almost 8 million Venezuelan refugees in the world. More than 2 million Venezuelans have been displaced to neighboring Colombia, with many more looking for something like home in countries nearby and far away. The Venezuelan refugee crisis, now widely considered the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history, has created a new Venezuelan diaspora.
Venezuela is not the most recent (or only) country in the Americas to face human flight during a period of economic and governmental instability (Haiti, for example), and Latin America has seen significant outflow of human capital throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. But the Venezuelan diaspora looks different from the other exilic traditions of the past because it is not done being born. Unlike the Chilean and Argentine artists like Julio Cortázar or José Donoso who, fleeing dictatorships and political declines at home, brought their literary traditions with them into exile and expanded the possibilities of their national arts, writers of Alejandra Banca’s generation don’t have a stable past to compare the undetermined present with. Things have been falling apart all their lives, and now they can watch the collapse in high-resolution video, wherever they are. There is no past left to save: they must make it new.
“Desarraigo” is the Spanish term that Venezuelans have come to use for the sense of generational uprootedness that permeates contemporary life in the diaspora. The International Office of Migration has defined a diaspora as “Migrants or descendants of migrants whose identity and sense of belonging, either real or symbolic, have been shaped by their migration experience and background…They maintain links with their homelands, and to each other, based on a shared sense of history, identity, or mutual experiences in the destination country.” In Banca’s work, these questions of a national identity are not the explicit subject of the writing; they are implicit and dramatic and find their form in the language (or languages) the characters of From Savagery encounter in their wanderings.
As translator Katie Brown discusses in her translator’s note appended to the end of From Savagery, Banca’s original version of the book, Desde la salvajada, contains a “multitude of Spanishes,” whether the distinct and difference-making dialects of Venezuelan and Peninsular Spanish, pidgin dialects of migrant workers from Morocco and Pakistan, or the Venezuelan slang that binds characters together. There is an innate polyphony to the language of From Savagery that is Whitmanesque in its openness to experience; characters and their voices weave in and out of the visible text of the book, cohering only because they’re bound by the differences of a common tongue. Time collapses or is rather transfigured by language.
Inevitably, languages within a language communicate more than words in translation can. Something must be lost. Dr. Katie Brown remedies this with a deep appreciation for the nuances in regional and socioeconomic differences in UK and US Englishes. These Anglophone analogues for Banca’s polyvalent Spanishes aren’t trite or banal, and they don’t come off forced. These are not the Dickensian ello guvna varieties of the English idiom that readers can expect in renditions of, say, a Dostoevsky novel. Brown’s Englishes are nuanced and on-point, whether it’s the epiphany of a Venezuelan who hears another Venezuelan’s voice in the streets of Madrid or the Catalan of Barcelona that, in linguistic and political opposition to Spanish and the Spanish state, the characters cannot quite comprehend. Desde la salvajada is a book of lives told in different languages that necessarily sheds those tender distinctions of the tongue when it is retold in Brown’s English. But Brown makes sure that readers are not only aware of these distinctions of language but feel them in the varied forms of English she employs in her translation of From Savagery.
Alejandra Banca’s characters cannot return home. There will be no homecoming, no Odyssean nostos to celebrate. They can only approximate a sense of home through the language that they share. Though dispersed through the world, this language binds them to an identity that is not so easily traded for another. The characters in the stories of From Savagery taste the bitter bread of exile with the tongues they use to tell of their experiences in a hellish present. In From Savagery, Alejanda Banca has recorded a vision of home for those with none left but the sounds of a tongue reforming their exile into art.
