Many English translations continue to italicise words from other languages, an approach I found neither ideologically nor pragmatically appropriate for this book. In translating Salt Crystals, I opted not to italicise anything in Spanish or Creole, as the novel’s multilingual fluidity feels like an essential part of both its identity and its form. Through Bendek’s rich explorations of language, place and culture, her protagonist constantly swerves between situations of familiarity and situations of discomfort; moments when she feels profoundly at home, or invited to feel at home, and others when she finds herself abruptly adrift in what she doesn’t understand about the island’s history and her present-day place in it. I think this makes for a powerful experience for the reader (myself included) to have as well.

Salt Crystals chronicles and interrogates race and class, personal experience and generational history, past crimes and contemporary reckonings, entire centuries of migrations and transformations. In doing so, readers will come across various place-specific terms in Spanish to reference a range of identities and institutions. I chose not only to ‘leave’ most of those terms in Spanish (although, as translator Jennifer Shyue once remarked to me, ‘even that formulation, with the word “leaving”, is interesting, because who’s to say where the border between English and Spanish really is?’), but also to refrain from over-explaining them in a way that the author and I ultimately decided (thank you, Cristina!) might feel intrusive or even patronising. That said, I’d like to make use of this space to mention and contextualize several recurring concepts (some ‘left’ untranslated) that the reader may wish to consult for reference:

cachacos: Colombians who come from the capital city of Bogotá.

champes: a term used in a mostly pejorative way to describe people who listen to the champeta brava musical genre from Cartagena; also used in San Andrés as a pejorative term for working-class mainland migrants.

Intendencia: a defunct status of territorial administration, which I’ve translated as ‘the Intendancy’, that governed San Andrés and Providencia between 1912 and 1991.

nativo: often used interchangeably with Raizal. I have translated this as ‘native’, in keeping with English-language literature from and about San Andrés.

paisas: mainland Colombians from the coffee-growing region of Antioquia, Caldas, Risaralda and Quindío.

pañas: people born or residing in San Andrés who aren’t of Raizal descent.

parce: a colloquial form of address in the tone of ‘man’, ‘mate’.

turco: a blanket term used generically to describe Middle Eastern immigrants to Colombia, and/or their descendants. I have translated this as ‘Turk’.