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“My Way Bent,” or, A Flaming Queen of Carthage Mambos Home

Challenges and pleasures abound in translating Uriel Quesada's El gato de sí mismo (Costa Rica, 2005) so that the tricky fun of the original will infuse a new version appealing to a wide readership in English. This satirical novel enlists “camp” style, high and low burlesque, and a parody of wide-ranging genres and styles to entertain readers and skewer heteronormative hypocrisy. Quesada's narrator, thrown out of his family due to sexual orientation, imagines himself in successive personae to cope with the potentially overwhelming emotions of a difficult return home. Although some particulars of the Costa Rican setting stand out as foreign, aspects of the speaker's persistently flamboyant self-dramatization appear more readily legible to a US readership than to its original context. At the level of the sentence, however, my Englishing heightens campiness in lexicon, syntax, and imagery to convey not only the zany playfulness, but also the moral resilience, of speaker and book.