Translational Backformations: Authenticity and Language in Cuban America

Abstract

The creation of Cuba as a national image within literature of the United States is a contested, emotionally charged issue for the Cuban-American community. Because of the nation-building power inherent in works of literature, reviewers, critics, and readers pay close attention to how images of communities circulate, and especially to those communities with identities that are tendentious or fragile. Cuban-American literary creation and its tie to a national identification is a source of tension among the various groups wishing to claim ownership both of the island and of its various manifestations within the United States. Within her novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), Cristina García examines the struggles inherent in a search for Cuban identity and memory through the character of Pilar, who muses, "every day Cuba fades a little more inside me. And there's only my imagination where our history should be." 1 Authors like García, who writes her novels in English as she translates Cuban-American culture for an audience primarily unaware of the intricacies of Cuban history, deal with issues such as the impossible contradictions inherent in the desire to return to a singular and unchanging place of origin, the invention of an acceptable community story that reflects the multiplicity of political and social Cuban stances, and the tension that surfaces between a search for an authentic image and the inevitable forces of creativity and change within any successful translation. Any idea of originary culture and real Cuban (or Cuban-American) identity is especially complicated by the physical and psychological distance between Cuba and the United States, and by the difficulty in achieving a dialogue between the two nations.

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