Lost In Translation - Literature and Language of the Caribbean

The Caribbean features literature from English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and also fusions of fragments of those languages forming a dialect or sometimes a new creole language emerges. The experiences of the islands are similar, but not identical. Therefore the women and men had difference experiences and so authors will have different themes in their literature. Some may be more focused on the social aspects of the country, some political, and others try to convey the personal triumphs and hardships of the individuals that inhabit the Caribbean space. In Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, the reader experiences both differences in the way the language conveys identity and the themes from the different authors.

Literature has to be translated surely in order for the words to be read by people across the world. Reading the stories from Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Guadeloupe, I felt it perhaps lacked the hybridity of the language that the Anglo-Caribbean stories featured. The content of the Spanish and Francophone Caribbe...