The Translation of Multilingual Literature in a Migrant World. The case of Junot Diaz.

So-called Multilingual Literature is prone to become a phenomenon on the increase now that migrants are flooding majorly into countries where they speak a language these people seldom or never had any contact with before. However, whereas before writing exiles or other migrants used to either adopt their speech to the tongue of their new environment or have their work translated, many examples can now be found where the foreign language is left as such, as a testimony of the fact that the writer is not a native. An early example of this is Emine Sevgi Özdamar in the nineties, who mixed copious examples of her native Turkish with the German of her novels. Iranian author Kader Abdolah cites lengthy passages in Persian. In Junot Diaz's novels Spanish is legion. The same goes for Abdelkader Benali and Fouad Laroui and Arabic. The main question is "what do these passages mean?" Are they more than some ‘couleur locale’, adding flavour to an otherwise homogeneous literary discourse? Some kind of answer can be found while analysing the translations these multilingual novels. What happens to Junot Diaz, often considered as an example of Spanglish writer, when he is translated? Is anything getting lost, or is the text simply coming back to its home land? Considering the case of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao we investigate the consequences of the fact that the translation of a multilingual text is a real challenge to the translator, specifically in the case of a return to the original language of the author. At the same time, it allows us to view in a more critical way what the intentions, conscious or unconscious, of the author were in using two different languages.