Bilingual Mistranslations: Plautus, Lorenzo da Ponte, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Abstract In attending to the complex relation between bilingualism and translation, this article analyzes passages from three bilingual texts masquerading as translations: Plautus' Poenulus, Lorenzo Da Ponte's Lamento, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres. These texts must be read through the specific power dynamics at play in their authors' sociohistorical context, which informs each author's relationship with their status as migrant, multilingual subjects. In all three cases, their bilingualism is revealed to be a creative and purposeful choice, which creates a range of different audiences through interpellation. By commodifying themselves as failures, however, Platus, Da Ponte, and Cabrera Infante's texts simultaneously implicated in and profit off translation's push toward a single (literary) language, and the often brutal political processes it stems from and feeds into. Finally, this article argues that, by reading bilingual texts against the monolingual paradigm imposed by the nation-state (and retroactively imagined to exist in antiquity too), our ongoing resistance to multilingualism past and present can be positively challenged.