“Like in the Gringo Movies”: Translatorese and the Global in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Abstract

Were one to dare, situating Roberto Bolaño in one specific national literary tradition would be a hard if not impossible task, as well as an insult to his beliefs about exile, which he conceived “not so much a circumstance as an ethics of life and writing.”¹ Bolaño was born in Chile but moved early in life to Mexico, to move again years later to Europe, where he settled in the 1980s in Barcelona, Spain. As a Spanish-language author, Bolaño would be more easily placed among cross-Atlantic writers of the literary caliber of Gabriel García Márquez and Ramón J. Sender. Detached from a particular national tradition yet participating in a number of them at once, Bolaño avoided composing reductive, essentia l ist nar rat ives of aut henticit y rooted in a given count r y’s nat iona l culture. Instead, he succeeded in circumventing them by deploying an exilic prose style with which to elicit a distinct global authenticity that is grounded precisely in the dispersion of such narratives. In a novel like 2666 (2004), Bolaño presents in his writing certain features that are symptomatic of the global world that he sought to portray so ambitiously yet, as Grant Farred puts it, with “no epic pretentions.”² Bolaño assembles a complex arrangement of perspectives, voices, and techniques in the five sections that constitute his widely acclaimed and perhaps most famous novel, a crime narrative that inhabits the liminal space between the global and the local.