Translating hard-boiled slang: Raymond Chandler’s the long goodbye in spanish

Abstract

Raymond Chandler wrote seven detective novels between 1939 and 1958, but The Long Goodbye (1954) is often considered Chandler’s best-written and most profound work. While it breaks with some of the features of the hard-boiled detective novel of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, it nonetheless remains firmly anchored in this tradition. One example of this is how Chandler used hard-boiled slang, an acquired body of non-standard literary vocabulary used by other authors such as Dashiell Hammett. I will discuss the literary functions of hard-boiled slang and the narrative conventions used to mark it. Then I will discuss the translation of hard-boiled slang in the three Spanish-language versions, both titled El largo adiós (1958, 1962, 1973) and the relationship between these Spanish-lnaguage translations. There is reason to believe that the third version is an unoriginal, if not plagiarized, version of the first.