The Novel as Cuban Lexicon

Abstract

A lexicon, if we look it up, has two principal meanings: (1) “a wordbook or dictionary” or (2) “the vocabulary proper to some department of knowledge or sphere of activity; the vocabulary or word-stock of a region, a particular speaker.”1 In its first sense a lexicon translates; in its second, it delineates the sphere of those who already know. The two senses seem at odds, but they do not have to be; and when they come together in fiction they can wield cultural and commercial weight. The Miami-Cuban Daína Chaviano’s El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Barcelona: Planeta, 1998) is a lexicon twice over: published and sold in Spain, it is a word-book of the particular “department of knowledge” that is Cuba’s “special period in times of peace,” the years of economic hardship, still in force, following the demise of the Soviet bloc. Ironically, playfully, and overtly, its characters and narrators conspire to translate the vocabulary and experience of this period in a bargaining bilingualism defined by Cuba’s current place in an outside imaginary. Word-for-word translation, from a time- and place-specific Cuban vocabulary into a more standard Spanish, brings different cultural sites—late twentieth-century socialist Cuba on the one hand, and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world on the other—into dealings together.