Authenticity and Translation in I, Rigoberta Menchú

Introduction: The Problem of Rigoberta Menchú

On the surface, there is no "problem," one might say, given the astounding achievement of native Guatemalan opposition leader and community activist Rigoberta Menchú. Menchú won the Nobel Prize, even after she was forced to go into hiding in her beloved Guatemala and then flee her native land to Mexico, far from the land and community she loved. She remains a forceful and vigorous voice for the rights of disenfranchised Guatemalans to this day. Her resulting book, known in English as I, Rigoberta Menchú, tells of her experiences as a native Guatemalan woman and as the representative of the Guatemalan Opposition (RUOG). But because of its translated quality and the subject's own perception of herself as both a community spokeswoman and an individual sufferer of oppression — indeed, because of what it means to be an "I" in her cultural context — the text remains troubling from factual, literary, and anthropological perspectives for students of cultural studies.

Over the course of the text's evolution, as she strives to tell her story, Menchú aims not simply to speak for herself, which would be fascinating enough and a potent, heart-wrenching document of personal survival. Rather, in line with her indigenous tradition of narrative, she speaks as a representative for her people as a whole, lending a collective voice to her testimony — which renders problematic even the "I" of the English translation of the title. The first line of the text is: "This is my testimony. I didn't learn it from a book and I didn't learn it alone" (Menchú 1). Rigoberta implies that no native person is ever truly alone in life or in their perspective on life, contrary to the enclosed and personalized sense of "I" that readers accessing her text in Spanish or English are likely to possess.

Collective Identity and the Indigenous 'I'

At the time it was recorded in 1984, Menchú's story attracted considerable international attention for its shocking accounts of violence. At that time, she was also a brave organizer of resistance to the oppression of native peoples in Guatemala and a champion of Indian peasant rights. "My personal experience is the reality of a whole people," she asserted, speaking for all in the voice of one (Menchú 1). But as she understood her own story, Rigoberta did not see herself as an individual voice. Rather, she was born into the context of a larger community — the Indian populace of the mountains of Guatemala — belonging to the Quiché, one of twenty-three mestizo groups, in which one person's experience reflected a larger communal social reality of oppression.

Rigoberta Menchú would agitate on behalf of all of these people. In beginning her text, Menchú suggested to the anthropologist recording her words that her people, rather than seeing themselves as intrinsically separate individuals, believe that all Indians share a spiritual, communal responsibility for village children. For instance, Rigoberta states that two of her brothers died as infants, one of whom was tortured to death by the state. Her entire town mourned the loss of her brothers, and later mourned the deaths of her mother and father at the hands of authorities through torture and murder. It was the tragedy of a community, not merely of Rigoberta's immediate family. When one person lost their home to army violence, this was experienced as a wound upon the tribe; when the land was taken away, the tribe itself was destroyed. The Quiché thus maintain personal relationships with the land and with one another's families in a holistic sense.

Rigoberta describes her people's land, before the coming of corporations and the government, as a "paradise" (Menchú 2). She sees the natural world as a place where even working was "fun," and this sentiment illuminates why Menchú's eviction from her Guatemalan homeland — even in the name of fighting for justice for her people — was so difficult to endure. To see the land destroyed was, in her eyes, to see another family member destroyed (Menchú 5). The question remains, however, how much of this point of view reflects the sentimentality of the person who recorded the activist's words versus the activist's own feelings — a distinction that is difficult to resolve when reading the text in isolation.

Rigoberta states that her sense of responsibility was all that sustained her throughout her brutally repressed and poverty-stricken existence. The Quiché had to fight to keep the government and corporations from stealing more of their land or harming more of their people. "My village has a long history — a long and painful history," she mourns, even as she cherishes the memories of her early life with her mother and father (Menchú 4). Bereft of her biological family, Menchú assumed the role of community organizer, leader, and voice of an entire populace. "They've killed the people dearest to me, therefore, my commitment to our struggle knows no boundaries nor limits" (Menchú 1).

Translation, Language, and the Limits of Testimony

Rigoberta Menchú told her story orally to anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray in Paris in 1982. Burgos-Debray transcribed the story and published it in Spanish in 1983, after which it was translated into many additional languages. Thus the problem of translation runs deep within the work — including the question of what Rigoberta even means by "the people dearest to her heart." Not only does the reader encounter a translation of the social activist's words, but also words from interviews conducted in a language that the indigenous-speaking Rigoberta had spoken for only three years at the time of recording.

From Rigoberta's native tongue to imperfect Spanish, from the ear of the oral interpreter to the pen of the filtering transcriber, and then translated through many more languages — the layers of mediation are difficult to trace, despite the apparent simplicity of the text. Indeed, the simplicity of the prose and the clarity the anthropologist brings to Rigoberta's use of metaphor and narrative can make what is unfolding for the reader deceptively simple, rather than genuinely clarifying the complicated customs and social dynamics of indigenous Guatemalan life or the nuances of modern Latin American politics.

Doris Sommer (1991) has further observed that while I, Rigoberta is an emotionally powerful example of women's testimonial literature, there are profound implications in the contrasts of vocabulary available to the speaking subject — between Rigoberta's mother tongue and Spanish, a hierarchical language with gender concepts and family structures very different from those of her native language (Sommer 53). Thus the act of translation is not simply imperfect; there may in fact be no adequate translation between a language as culturally distinct as Rigoberta's and that of the anthropologist, let alone that of a reader accessing the text a third time removed, in English or Spanish.

Despite these difficulties, it is equally possible to argue the converse. Yes, Menchú may conceptualize family roles differently because of her tribal background, and her understanding of "brother" may not be nuclear, nor her concept of herself as an eyewitness straightforwardly Western. Yet precisely because so much of Menchú's narrative centers on her role as a collective spokeswoman and activist for the Quiché, this questionable filtering lens becomes slightly less problematic for understanding the woman and her life story. Were she speaking only for her own personal experience, the political and collective dimensions of her life would be filtered out of the tale entirely. As a modern myth and a representative community history — despite the layered nature of the written text through the framework of transcriber to translator — the text can be said to retain its value, so long as efforts are made to verify its accuracy through other local interviews and documentary sources. Even if the subject did not directly experience her own family's destruction, that does not diminish the tragedies of those in her community who did. She speaks with the confidence of what she considers truth, and for a Western reader her document may stand as an emotionally true record of the perceived experience of the tribe, even if it cannot always serve as a corroborated documentary history.

Conclusion: Reading with Awe and Caution

A reader must approach the text with both awe and caution — awe at the suffering of the subject's people, her fortitude, and her ability to speak powerfully for a larger whole. One must also approach it from an awareness of a different cultural context, recognizing Menchú as a collective rather than a singular observer of a specific world. Finally, given the imperfect translation of both the experience and the words of Rigoberta Menchú — as well as Menchú's own necessarily limited vantage on a fragment of native history — an additional layer of critical caution must accompany any engagement with this powerful yet deceptively simple narrative.

Works Cited

Hooks, Margaret, ed. Guatemalan Women Speak. Introduction by Rigoberta Menchú. London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1991.

Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú. 1984.

Perera, Victor. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993.

Sommer, Doris. "No Secrets: Rigoberta's Guarded Truth." Women's Studies 20 (1991): 51–72.

Stoll, David. Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999.