What is it about?
The characters in Bolaño's novel speak different (first) languages (German, Spanish, English, Italian, French, Russian). However, the author does not generally clarify which language is being spoken at any given point, nor do the characters' different linguistic backgrounds seem to hamper communication between them. The article argues that this is not a weakness of the novel or an attempt to make it more marketable, as some critics have maintained. Rather it should be understood as a consequence (and manifestation) of Bolaño's particular views on communication and the seamless translatability between different languages. These views appear to be derived from Bolaño's readings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the author's own experience as an avid reader of literature translated from other languages into Spanish.
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Perspectives
What provoked me to engage with this particular aspect of Bolaño's monumental novel '2666' was the observation that the shocking femicides in the Mexican border town Santa Teresa described in the long fourth part of the five-part novel tend to grasp critics' and readers' attention to the point where the text's specific linguistic and narrative make-up goes largely unnoticed.
Dr Tilmann Altenberg
Cardiff University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Bolaño against Babel: Multilingualism, Translation and Narration in
2666
, ‘La parte de los críticos’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, February 2018, Liverpool University Press,
DOI: 10.3828/bhs.2018.13.
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