Rosario Tijeras and the Colonial Inheritance

Perhaps in one of the few mistakes of his illustrious career, Gregory Rabassa, mistranslates a key passage in Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras. What makes this passage this mistake significant—and the mistake even more regrettable—is that it is perhaps the only moment in the text that attempts to provide a historical explanation for the violence and anomie depicted in the novel’s pages. The original passage is as follows: La pelea de Rosario no es tan simple, tiene raíces muy profundas, de mucho tiempo atrás, de generaciones anteriores; a ella la vida le pesa lo que pesa este país, sus genes arrastran con una raza de hidalgos e hijueputas que a punta de machete le abrieron camino a la vida, todavía lo siguen haciendo; con el machete comieron, trabajaron, se afeitaron, mataron y arreglaron las diferencias con sus mujeres. Hoy el machete es un trabuco, una nueve milímetros, un changón. Rabassa’s translation is follows: Rosario’s fight isn’t so simple, it has very deep roots, from long ago, from earlier generations. Life weighs on her with the weight of this country, her genes drag along a race of sons of plenty and sons of bitches who with the blade of machete cleared the pathways of life. They’re still doing it. They ate with the machete, they worked, shaved, killed and settled differences with their wives with a machete. Today the machete is a shotgun, a nine-millimeter, a chopper.

While I have some other minor quibbles with the translation—for instance, I think that mujeres in the last line of the passage should have been simply translated as women—my main objection to Rabassa’s rendition is the substitution of “sons of plenty” for hidalgos. Rabassa’s choice is surprising since hidalgo is on occasion even included in English language dictionaries. For instance, m-w.com defines the word as “a member of the lower Spanish nobility.” The metaphoric “sons of plenty” in his version are, in the original, the poorest strata of the Spanish nobility who came to the Americas in order to find the riches that their self-esteem and their social ideology told them was their right. It is possible, therefore, to see in the original an attempt at tracing the violence of the Colombian 1990s, indeed the whole of the tragic history of violence in Colombia, to the Spanish conquest.