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Chapters (14)
  1. Salt Crystals
  2. I. THE DAMNED CIRCUMSTANCE
  3. II. NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN
  4. III. DIVISIONS
  5. IV. LICKLE GOUGH
  6. V. BOWIE GULLY
  7. VI. THE PAPERS OF TIME
  8. VII. NORTH END
  9. VIII. SALT CRYSTALS
  10. IX. IGUANAS ON THE ROOF
  11. X. THE SOUTHWESTERN CARIBBEAN
  12. XI. CREOLES AND RAIN
  13. XII. OTTO
  14. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

At last, I can see the buildings give way, a great wave rolling in, then a radiance that dazzles me blind. They’re so beautiful, all these crystals in my room. I see nothing else. I hear shouting. We rave.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

Translating an intrinsically multilingual book poses special challenges and special thrills. In the original edition of Los cristales de la sal, Cristina Bendek’s debut novel (2018), we find at least three languages. ‘At least’, I say, because Spanish is first and foremost among them, but of course there is no such thing as a monolithic or even national language; happily, human communication is far too mutable and contextual for that. So by ‘Spanish’ I mean, in part, Colombian Spanish, but also, and more specifically, the Spanish spoken in the Colombian Caribbean. Even more specifically still, I mean the Spanish spoken on the island of San Andrés: the largest island in the administrative district, referred to as a ‘departamento’ in Colombia, of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina. The book is also scattered with echoes of and references to the Spanish of Mexico City, where the protagonist, Victoria Baruq, has lived for several years before returning to San Andrés, her birthplace, after the death of her parents.

The original edition also includes quite a lot of English-language text. Bendek is urgently attentive to and concerned with colonialism, past and present, and the history of San Andrés itself is shot through with it: the island was occupied by British settlers in the seventeenth century, followed by approximately two hundred years of colonial power struggles between the British Empire and Spain. Contemporary life in San Andrés, then, is characterised by the everyday use of both Spanish and English, as well as of San Andrés-Providencia Creole, an English-based creole language with its own phonetics and numerous phrases from both Spanish and multiple African languages, particularly Kwa and Igbo languages. This type of Creole is spoken by the Raizal community, an Afro-Caribbean ethnic group from the archipelago.

Spanish, English and Creole may be the ‘official’ languages of San Andrés, but that doesn’t mean its residents have an equally intimate relationship with all three. Our main character, Victoria, for example, grew up in a Spanish-speaking family, but she is of Raizal heritage, and she struggles with the fact that she never learned Creole. The politics of language, of multilingualism – who speaks what, and how well; who ‘passes’ for a native speaker and who doesn’t; who feels comfortable in which linguistic space – are intensely alive both on San Andrés and in Salt Crystals as a narrative project.