| Dominican-born writer Junot Díaz emigrated to the United States at age 7, with his mother and older brother, to join his father, who had emigrated five years earlier. The success of Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and two short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), has made him an important figure in the U.S. literary world, as will be shown in this thesis. This thesis includes an analysis and commented French translation of two of his short stories, namely “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” and “Wildwood.” It also discusses the ways in which the short story is a literary genre that suits Díaz's text, poetics and aesthetics. “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” and “Wildwood” are good examples of the author's inimitable style, which is characterized by syncopated sentence rhythms and the use of Spanglish. English sentences are peppered with Spanish, which interferes with and breaks up the narration. Díaz uses Spanglish also as a language strategy that serves his political agenda, namely to affirm his Dominican roots and engage his fellow Dominican-Americans in a direct dialogue, and to remind white readers that English and Spanish influence each other in the U.S. Díaz's language is musical and vivid, his tone, informal and conversational, and his register, sometimes colloquial—or even vulgar—and sometimes literary. Coarse and vulgar expressions are conveyors of identity and culture that punctuate the statements of Yunior, the narrator in “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” like a verbal tic. In “Wildwood” the cursing and swearing come more from the mouth of the furious mother of Lola, the narrator, than from the young woman herself, who seeks a life far from her mother, her home town Paterson, New Jersey, and Spanish. Translating Díaz's language, a combination of English and a kind of Dominican-American slang, into French is challenging, especially since translators in Canada are faced with choosing between varieties of French that are either too Parisian or too Québécois. |
