“Beauty Keepsake” is an extraordinary example of Jorgenrique Adoum’s postspanish. The poet refuses to follow rules: the grammatical rules of an imperial language, for instance. This poem is almost completely made up of neologisms, using wordplay and soundplay to guide it. In turn, postspanish gives us as translators the possibility to rework English, to break it down, to rebel against its linguistic constraints, and—through language—to attempt to defy the imperialist, neo-colonialist limitations of it. |