Empire of Dreams

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The only way to know precisely what an author means is to become the author. The translator becomes the author the way an actor becomes the character. Memorizing the lines in Spanish and reciting the words as if they were my own, I traded in my voice for the dramatic voices of the lyric “I” whose adventures and emotional states vary from book to book in Empire of Dreams. Swapping names, ages, nationalities, and genders, Giannina Braschi’s characters are a cast of actors playing the roles of other characters. As a translator, I tried out for every part.

In Book of Clowns and Buffoons, I played the fortune-teller who predicted the past, the magician who torched his audience, the drunkard who cried in a room full of bottles, and the little lead soldier who marched against the smoke of the city. In Pastoral; or, The Inquisition of Memories, I was Shepherd Giannina, who led a revolution in New York City. It was chaos. Cows and sheep were grazing the sidewalks as shepherds took over St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Empire State Building. I nearly lost my voice screaming through a loudspeaker, “Now we do whatever we please. Whatever we please. Whatever we damn well please!” The roles grew more complex as I made my way through The Intimate Diary of Solitude. There I played the writer Giannina Braschi, who played the writer Mariquita Samper, who played the writer Berta Singerman and an array of other characters. With red-dyed hair, surgically implanted freckles, and a gold tooth, I especially enjoyed the role of the fairy drag queen. But the most gratifying moment was when I shot the Narrator of the Latin American Boom, who kept rewriting my diary. He was such a nuisance. Always telling me what to think, what to do, what to write!

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