After reading Drown, you may have been intrigued by the sheer amount of Spanish words that pepper the text. Even more interestingly, Díaz makes the choice not to include a glossary or translation of these Spanish words in the text. Instead, anglophone readers are expected to navigate the text by looking up the words on their own time or deciphering their meaning through contextual clues. In fact, Díaz's decision not to provide a translation for the Spanish was deliberately made. Additionally, when you are reading the text, words in Spanish are not set apart from their English counterparts by italics, quotation marks, or any other editorial choices. Instead, as Ana María Manzanas-Calvo points out in "From Locus Classicus to Locus Lumpen: Junot Díaz's 'Aurora,'" Spanish and English words are treated the same by the text: "Spanish simply alternates with English without calling attention to its presence."
In the same essay, Manzanas-Calvo leaves us with several interpretive questions when navigating Díaz's text: "What happens when a monolingual reader picks up a volume such as Díaz's Drown? How are we as readers to interpret this Spanish interspersed in the English text?"
One answer to these questions is to understand Díaz's use of Spanish in his fiction as a rejection of the foreignness of Spanish in the English-speaking world. In 2000, Díaz was interviewed by Diógenes Céspedes and Silvio Torres-Saillant to much critical attention. In the interview, Céspedes and Torres-Saillant asked Díaz about his use of Spanish. "For me allowing the Spanish to exist in my text without the benefit of italics or quotations marks a very important political move," Díaz told his interviewers. "Spanish is not a minority language. Not in this hemisphere, not in the United States, not in the world inside my head. So why treat it like one? Why 'other' it? Why de-normalize it? By keeping Spanish normative in a predominantly English text, I wanted to remind readers of the mutability of languages." Díaz's conception of languages, then, is incredibly aware of the political connotations that languages carry in the world. In the United States, and across the world, English has attained the dominant position as a lingua franca. It is assumed that immigrants coming into the United States must learn and master English in order to be able to succeed. Díaz pushes back against that narrative, reminding us that Spanish has existed in the United States just as long as English has, and, as the number of Spanish speakers in the United States continues to grow, it demands to be taken seriously as an American language.
Another way to interpret Díaz's use of Spanglish is offered by Drown's epigraph, a poem written by Gustavo Pérez Firmat: "The fact that I / am writing to you / in English / already falsifies what I / wanted to tell you. / My subject: / how to explain to you that I / don't belong in English / though I belong nowhere else." This poem explains an immigrant's fraught relationship with the English language as a baseline and mandatory means of communication in the United States. It is clear that the use of English is problematic for the speaker of the poem, as it "falsifies" the truth of what the speaker wants to tell us. As Manzanas-Calvo explains the epigraph, "writing in English implies a non-belonging, a falsification or forgery that paradoxically becomes a form of belonging. Similarly, Díaz's writing in English, which would be considered a mark of belonging or assimilation, opens the paradox of non-belonging." In other words, by including Spanish words in his text, Díaz combats the falsifying nature of English and turns it into something more authentic for himself. In this way, the Spanish words allow Díaz to portray a more richly authentic personal experience in his fiction that is not bogged down or limited by the English language.
When a monolingual English speaker approaches Díaz's fiction, then, they are not offered the comfort of easy translation when they encounter Spanish words. Instead, they must navigate a foreign linguistic environment. This has an incredibly powerful effect. If you are an English speaker (particularly if English is your only language), think about how many times you have read books entirely in English without questioning it. Then, think about how many books you have read that used words other than English in its text. Were those words italicized or translated? Presumably, the answer is yes. These tools allow the reader to not stumble over the words that they don't know and progress smoothly through the narrative. However, Díaz is adamantly against this way of negotiating foreign languages. Instead, he wants readers to get a sense of what it is like for non-English speakers to enter a monolithically English-speaking world—which is exactly what happens during the immigration process into the United States. In his interview with Céspedes and Torres-Saillant, Díaz calls his own use of English following his immigration from the Dominican Republic a "violent enterprise." He goes on to say that his fiction is intended to "represent a mirror-image of that violence on the page." In this way, as Allison Fagan points out in "Translating the Margins: Attending to Glossaries in Latino/a Literature," Díaz's use of Spanglish in this way is an "effort to resist providing comfort" to English-speaking readers who would expect to find "transparency" in the text.
Finally, another way to explain Díaz's use of Spanish without translation in his fiction is that often the Spanish words he includes are what Lourdes Torres calls "cultural words or slang from Caribbean Spanish" in her essay "In the Contact Zone: Code-Switching Strategies by Latino/a Writers." She uses two examples from the text to back up her analysis: the use of guiso in "Otra Vida, Otra Vez" (188), and pato in "Drown" (91). As Torres points out, the meaning of these words "would not be found in most dictionaries" because they carry a specific cultural context. However, they also provide a level of accuracy and authenticity to Díaz's text, as he allows his characters to say things as they actually would have said them, including the slang words which, to them, are not foreign.
If you are a monolingual English speaker, don't be intimidated by the sheer number of Spanish words in Drown. Instead, make use of the "Glossary" section of this guide, where we translate the slang words that might be hard to find on the net. Additionally, tools like WordReference.com or SpanishDict.com are your friends, as they contain detailed English translations for thousands of Spanish words. Finally, try to relax, and lean into the uncomfortable feeling you might be experiencing when reading the text. As Díaz pointed out, this is how many people feel from around the world when they are forced to come into contact with English. It's an opportunity to learn, to expand your horizons, and to enjoy a completely new kind of literary experience. Take advantage of it!
