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English to Spanish: Short Story General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Poetry & Literature
Source text - English The Guardian Angel
The day her mother died, Elena felt a kind of culpable release. On that day, she woke early to wait for the final moment as she had done during the last two months. Her mother had come back defeated from the public hospital, rejected as an in-patient. In the kitchen, while she was preparing tea for her mother, her father had approached her to explain to her what she already knew – that this time nothing would save her mother. The family had silently rejected the possibility of prolonging her life on long support, through an oxygen tank, not covered for the terminally ill by health insurance. How easy it had been to agree to promote her death as soon as possible. Also, her mother knew this – that her family was united in condemning her to an inhuman agony – and even then she kept silent. How cruel is the lack of love: the detachment from a presence before it leaves us; the banishment from our vital space of one who loves us. For the first time Elena took part in the family communion. She had taken her father’s side; she had joined her voice to that iniquitous coryphaeus to which frequently she had listened uttering: “Nasty old woman, why don’t you die?”
Many years later, Elena realized that the banishment of her mother had not taken place in her. Her mother had stayed both in her emotions and in her more intimate feelings. In family reunions she would hear her relatives say with monotonous expression that she was equal to her mother. Without noticing it, she had copied her gestures since childhood; and before she was born, she had reproduced her mother’s emotions. Elena had grown similar to her mother like a witness of infamy. She had seen her humiliated, brutally beaten, displaced by a line of vulgar and uneducated white women with whom her father would disappear for days. Elena had never listened to her mother complaining; she seemed to accept as an act of expiation the degradation to which both her and her children were subject to. She had several opportunities to leave him, to flee along with her children to a civilized country; after all, she was the one supporting them with her job. However, she would say the same thing to any charitable and kind being that would pass by her house offering an alternative to that filthy life: “my children need a father.” The death of Elena’s mother was her possibility of breaking the biological bond that united her both to her father and to her family, which was accomplice, and victim of, so much impiety and violence.
That day Elena could not stop crying; her mother told her, with all the love that her embrace was capable of: “the tears from the Vine are salty.” Her gaze grew up stained with that strange marine flavor, both humid and abysmal. It was an expression of nostalgia for a time earlier than her birth; a time that her mother would refer each instant as the family’s golden age, a link of sounds that she had listened to uttering in her latent memory… --“you are as old as my sufferings…”
Elena had grown with a kind of culpable personal history stuck like snot to her personality. It had taken to her 40 years to comprehend her own banishment: her distancing from her family; her voluntary exile abroad; her marriage… It was her, not her mother, who had deeply followed the advice to live in a civilized country as an intrinsic mechanism of salvation. She had assumed this as a savior destiny, perhaps for her need
to be what her mother could have been had she followed good advice.
The day her mother died, she did not want to go to the wake. She was not afraid of staying alone, breathing both the frozen and heavy air left by the stony body. She engraved it in her memory, outstretched, long like a cortege, and finally strong. Her mother’s straight hair was falling down at the height of her livid face of perfect nose that she had been. It was the first time the terror of the dead did not frighten her because her mother, apparently gone, had taken the shape of a guardian angel. She had realized this, also, many years later.
Translation - Spanish El Ángel de la Guarda
El día que su madre murió, sintió una especie de liberación culposa. Ese día se levantó temprano a esperar el momento final, como lo había hecho durante los dos últimos meses, desde que su madre volvió derrotada del hospital público, donde fue rechazada como paciente interna. En la cocina, mientras preparaba un té para su madre, su padre se había acercado para explicarle lo que ella ya sabía, que esta vez nada salvaría a su madre. La posibilidad de prolongarle la vida con un tanque de oxígeno, que el seguro social no cubría en el caso de los enfermos terminales, fue rechazada en silencio por la familia. Qué fácil había sido ponerse de acuerdo en promover su muerte lo más pronto posible. Su madre también lo supo, que su familia se mantenía unida para condenarla a una agonía inhumana, y también guardó silencio. Qué cruel es el desamor: el desapego a una presencia antes de que nos deje, el destierro de quien nos ama de nuestro espacio vital…
Por primera vez Ella se había sumado a la comunión familiar. Se había puesto del lado de su padre, había unido su voz a ese corifeo inicuo que con frecuencia le había escuchado proferir: “Vieja inmunda, por qué no se muere.”
Muchos años después se dio cuenta de que el destierro de su madre no se había producido en ella. Su madre se había quedado en sus emociones y sentimientos más íntimos. Su cuerpo y su rostro también eran como una prolongación de su madre. En las reuniones familiares escuchaba a los parientes decir con expresión monótona, que ella era igual a su madre. Sin notarlo desde niña había copiado sus gestos, y desde antes de nacer, sus emociones. Había crecido al lado de ella, como un testigo de la infamia. La había visto humillada, golpeada brutalmente, desplazada por una fila de mujeres blancas y vulgares e incultas, con las que su padre desaparecía durante días. Nunca la escuchó quejarse; parecía aceptar como un acto de expiación la degradación a la que ella y sus hijos eran sometidos. Tuvo varias posibilidades de dejarlo, de irse con sus hijos a un país civilizado, al fin de cuentas era ella con su trabajo quien los mantenía. Pero a todo ser caritativo y bondadoso que pasó por la casa para ofrecerle una alternativa a esa vida inmunda le decía lo mismo: “mis hijos necesitan un padre”. La muerte de su madre fue la posibilidad para romper ese lazo biológico que la unía a su padre y a esa familia cómplice y víctima de tanta impiedad y violencia.
Ese día no pudo parar de llorar, y su madre con todo el amor del que su abrazo fue capaz le dijo: “las lágrimas de la Vid son saladas”. Su mirada oscura creció teñida de ese extraño sabor marino, húmedo y abismal, expresión de la nostalgia por un tiempo anterior a su nacimiento, al que su madre se refería a cada instante como la edad dorada de la familia, cadena de sonidos que por muchos años había escuchado pronunciar en su memoria latente… --“tienes la edad de mis sufrimientos”…
Había crecido con esa especie de historia personal culposa, pegada como moco a su personalidad. Le había llevado 40 años comprender su destierro: el distanciamiento de su familia, la huida de su pasado, su exilo voluntario en el extranjero, su matrimonio... Era ella, no su madre, quien había seguido profundamente el consejo de vivir en un país civilizado como un mecanismo intrínseco de salvación, y lo había asumido como destino salvador, tal vez por la necesidad de ser lo que pudiera haber sido, si su madre hubiera seguido los buenos consejos.
El día que su madre murió, ella no quiso ir a la sala de velación. No tuvo miedo de quedarse sola, respirando ese aire helado y pesado que había dejado el cuerpo rocoso. Lo gravó en su memoria, extendido, largo como un cortejo, indiferente y al fin fuerte, con su cabello lacio cayendo a la altura del rostro lívido de nariz perfecta que había sido su madre. Fue la primera vez que el terror a los muertos no la asustó, porque su madre, aparentemente ida, había tomado la forma de su ángel de la guarda. También se había dado cuenta de esto muchos años después.
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Translation education
PhD - Pennsylvania State University
Experience
Years of experience: 29. Registered at ProZ.com: Oct 2014.
My formal training includes a Ph.D. in Spanish-Latin American Literature from Pennsylvania State University, United States; an M.A. in Latin American Literature from the prestigious Caro y Cuervo Institute, Colombia, and a B.A. in Spanish from the Pedagogical National University, Colombia.
Currently I am a Research-Focused Member of the International Network Colciencias Valor y Palabra. From fall 2012 to summer 2013 I worked as an Assistant Professor-sabbatical replacement at Minnesota State University-Moorhead; from 2007 to summer 2010 I was a tenure track Instructor/Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wayne State College, and from 2005 to 2007 I was a Visiting Instructor at South Dakota State University. My teaching experience also includes four years at The Pennsylvania State University (2001-2005) as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, and several years in Colombia as a full time Professor.
My several years of teaching experience in Latin America and the United States make me familiar and sensitive to multicultural and transnational concerns. For example, during my time at Wayne State University, I created and coordinated the English as a Second Language program at the Multicultural Center. In addition, I have extensively worked as an interpreter facilitating the communication between Latino and American communities. Because of the activities mentioned above, I am very cognizant of how to best express in Spanish ideas conceived in the English speaking culture.
Expertise