Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

of the La Onda writers of the 1960s, like them she
peppers her text with foreign words and nontraditional
language (Garcia 114). In The Love You Promised
Me, Molina combines her love of history, literature,
and music in a rich, intertextual and multilingual tapestry
with her familiar theme of a woman seeking
self-realization and independence in the aftermath of
a failed love affair. The outer frame of the novel consists
of the first-person narrator, Marcela, rereading
the letters she exchanged with her ex-lover. The inner
frame is Marcela’s search for her own identity by discovering
the secret of her father’s estrangement from
his family. Molina uses the voice of a woman speaking
her thoughts aloud to create an intimate, informal
atmosphere in the novel.
Unger’s translation of El amor que me juraste,
The Love You Promised Me, successfully transplants
this intimate tone through the use of contractions
and an informal level of diction. See, for example, a
passage in which Marcela is reflecting not only on
her relationship with her now-deceased mother but
also on her relationship with her ex-lover. Molina’s
original Spanish reads:
De pronto, alguien como Eduardo te dice que
ha dejado de quererte (un hecho) y tu cariño
ya no tiene lugar ni razón de ser, y no hay
dónde guardarlo ni protegerlo. No te sirve, no
sabes qué hacer con él, ya no es sino, algo
inservible de lo cual debes deshacerte.
(El Amor 34)
Unger’s translation of these lines captures the informal
tone and also retains Molina’s italicized
emphases:
Someone like Eduardo all of a sudden tells
you that he doesn’t love you anymore (done
deal) and your affection has no rhyme or reason
to be and there’s no place to put it or justify
it. It’s of no use. You don’t know what to
do with it, it no longer is, except as something
pointless which you must get rid of
immediately. (The Love 23)
The use of the parenthetical “(done deal)” and the
familiar “you” creates an intimacy with the reader. It
is as if we are hearing Marcela think aloud. Unger’s
translation reflects this stream-of-consciousness
technique combined with the shifts in diction level
throughout the novel that are symptomatic of
Marcela’s inner conflict as she rereads Eduardo’s
love letters and searches for the root causes of her
father’s estrangement from his family.
In addition, Unger preserves the Mexican flavor
of the original by incorporating certain of
Molina’s Mexican terms in a manner that is easily
recognizable to the English reader. One of his
strongest examples of communicating Mexican culture
through untranslated words occurs in a discussion
of Mexican textiles. Molina’s original Spanish
passage reads:
Los viajes de Ilona por los pueblos de
México le mantenían vivo el aprecio por lo
mexicano y le fueron dando al mismo
tiempo esa colección de textiles piezas de
Talavera, de La Granja, vidrio con pintura
dorada, jarrones para pulque, piezas de
hierro forjado . . . objetos en su maryoría
de estilo colonial. (El Amor 104)
Unger’s English translation places in italics the
words of the original for such Mexican cultural artifacts
as the famous Talavera ceramics from Puebla
and the La Granja ceramics of Guadalajara.
Ilona’s trips to Mexican villages kept her
appreciation of Mexican culture alive and
also helped her develop a collection of textiles,
Talavera and La Granja ceramics,
gold painted glass, pulque jars, wrought
iron—objects that were mostly from the
colonial period. (The Love 88)
Unger’s decision to maintain the terms
Talavera, La Granja, and pulque recreates the
Mexican flavor of the original and serves to build a
bridge between the cultures. This technique, however,
was not original to the translation. Molina uses
the same technique with English words in the original
novel when she describes an American brick-
76 Translation Review