Overview

Arguably, all of Guatemalan writer Eduardo Halfon’s fictional works deal with quandaries of translation, even in their original versions. The award-winning author of fourteen books claims to have lost his mother tongue when his family fled to the United States after his tenth birthday. This displacement, echoing the displacement of his four grandparents from different corners of the Jewish diaspora to Guatemala, gives Halfon, like his ancestors before him, good reason to consider translation a natural environment for his creative work and for life itself. Indeed, Halfon’s uncanny ability to translate his family’s history into “fictions” that resonate across the globe with readers in Spanish, English, and several other languages helps explain why he has received numerous prizes in the United States, Spain, Guatemala, and even France, some as a Latin American author, others as a Latino or Jewish author. Marilyn Grace Miller has written the first study to focus exclusively on this important voice in Jewish–Latin American letters. Only after returning to Guatemala and regaining his command of Spanish through reading literature did Halfon begin to build his life as a writer and translator. Nonetheless, the author admits that “one thing is stubbornly true, and it’s this: every sentence that I write, every verb or adjective that I painstakingly insert or remove, every literary thought that I have while writing, always . . . begins and ends in English.” Halfon’s translated works are never parallel texts, however. Thus, translation and its side effects (foreign words, linguistic lacunae, multilingual modes of perception) offer us crucial keys to understanding the author’s fictional world as a vehicle for retelling and surviving Jewish trauma and finding his own particular plurilingual voice.

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9780826507044

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Reviews

""Miller has produced a heretofore lacking comprehensive analysis of Halfon's oeuvre available in English. The result is an insightful study of the unapologetic wandering Jew and modern Latinx author who seeks reality and originality through fiction writing, aiming to find a home in a perennial adopted language and in translation, if nowhere else. Miller's study probes assumed parameters of Jewish and Latinx literatures by analyzing inconclusive identities of belonging inherited through multiple diasporas, a result of compounded migrations and languages."" --Dalia Wassner, author of Harbinger of Modernity: Marcos Aguinis and the Democratization of Argentina ""The first full-length study of this remarkable third-generation Guatemalan Jewish writer brings to critical attention the intricacies and subtleties of Halfon's richly figured nuanced work and the way in which memory shapes both identity and the imagination."" --Victoria Aarons, author of Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women's Graphic Narratives ""Miller has written a thoughtful, considered, multilayered analysis of one of the most important contemporary Jewish-Latin American/American writers. The commentary on Halfon's work is insightful yet accessible and will be a valuable resource for literary scholars."" --Avinoam J. Patt, coeditor of The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction

Author Information

Marilyn Grace Miller is Sizeler Professor in Jewish Studies and associate professor of Latin American literature and culture at Tulane University.

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