An Absence of Shadows

My group looked at the word usage in An Absence of Shadows and compared it to the usage in A Single, Numberless Death.

The first thing I did was looked for words that are used frequently throughout each text. The most common words I found had to do with violence and torture: wires, explode, shock, electric, burning, death. I also found that body parts were frequently mentioned: teeth, fingertips, nipples, mouth, hair, bones, nails. This makes sense considering the subject matter of the texts.

In An Absence of Shadows, I noticed a recurring theme of the idea of having ownership over the dead. On page 107, it states, "A woman waits for her dead" and the idea shows up again on page 157: "Maria del Carmen asks me if I know all my dead." I am not sure if this refers to the dead people that they actually knew, or if there is another, poetic meaning, but I thought the terminology was interesting either way. I don't usually think of people as having dead.

Another similarity between the two texts is the idea of a loss of individuality. On page 151, the narrator says, "my name is Carmen, or Maria". To me, this implies that the narrator is one woman out of many nameless women, and that she could be any of them because each of them has the same story, and can easily testify for one another. It reminded me of the way that Nora in A Single, Numberless Death ceased to be an individual and became only a number. The experience was so horrific that all of their stories became one large story in which they ceased to be people and became only numbers.

Another similarity I noticed was the mention of colors. I am not sure what sort of deeper meaning the colors hold, if any, but I thought it was interesting that both authors had colors on their minds when writing about this topic.

I also compared the English translations of the poems to the original Spanish versions. Overall, I thought the translations were pretty well done. In the times where the translation differed, the English version tended to have more words, attempting to capture the same sense that the Spanish version gave with less words. One example that stood out to me is on page 145. The Spanish version says simply, "al dentista/a las escuelitas privadas", which has been translated to, "made regular trips to the dentist/attended very nice private schools". I found it somewhat amusing that English needed so many more words in order to explain and evoke the same type of emotion that is accomplished by the shorter Spanish phrases.