LWRS June 2020 Volume 1, Issue 1

Rhetorics of Translation in Tino Villanueva’s Cronica de mis años peores
intangible epistemologies they can access. Recycling, upcycling, making do, and
making new meaning through whatever is available is an explicit performance of
rasquache” (p. 2). As previously noted, Villanueva is a prolific writer in English and
Spanish, but he made the choice to use exclusively Spanish for Cronica de mis años peores
and have Hoggard translate the text. In doing so, Villanueva shows the reader how the
oppressive nature of colonialism can function by allowing it to manifest within the text
via Hoggard’s translation. In one way, he is following the academy’s rules. But by
coding the narrative not simply in his own text but in the space between the two texts,
Villanueva enact a trickster rhetoric, a rasquache, un jale Chicano.
Within Crónica de mis Años peores, Villanueva engages an exclusively Spanish text
to define his childhood and to recover his history. Villanueva explains (as cited in Lee,
2010, p. 176) that in this poetry collection memory should:
serve as inspiration--memory as muse, and ultimately, memory as identity. So
you see, memory, for me, becomes a useful device to go back in time to recover
a history which would otherwise be lost--a personal or communal history, no
matter how lackluster or unsettling that history might have been.
The rhetorical use of Spanish to relate this painful childhood illustrates the complexity
of his story. Villanueva utilizes not only his memory to build a story, but by allowing
readers to see the perpetuation of such oppressive practices he speaks of, he builds
theory. At times, the lack of action is action and is necessary for us to witness.
By allowing the two narratives to exist side by side, Villanueva forces us to
recognize the artificiality of language itself. While they are seemingly a mirror reflection
of each other in a different tongue—the reflection is distorted; the reflection is
incomplete. Thus, we must question the source of the reflection. Whose voice do we
hear? Who is the witness and who is the storyteller? In the process of forcing us to
think about these questions, Villanueva asserts (as cited in Lee, 2010, p. 175) that a
text is always a reflection, always a translation:
I would say poems are what they are; they do what they do. Some of them, if
deep-textured enough, will admit multiple interpretations, and the latter are
left up to each reader, as you know. One is not privy to what each reader may
or may not derive from what they read--you get out of literature what you bring
into it.
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