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Alliteration
Dialect
Explanation and Analysis—Spanish Word Choice:
Hemingway uses Spanish words sporadically throughout The Old Man and the Sea, creating a unique Spanish-English dialect that is a small window into the authentic voice of the Spanish-speaking Cuban people. This dialect helps convey the setting of the story, as the characters of the book presumably speak Spanish despite the fact that the book is written in English.
The specific Spanish words that Hemingway chooses are particularly significant. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of them are words related to the sea and/or fishing: a non-comprehensive list includes "salao" (unlucky), "la mar" (sea), "brisa" (breeze), and "calambre" (cramp, a non-literal translation but the one provided by Hemingway in the novella). It is worth specifying that calambre is used in the context of Santiago's left hand cramping up due to both his age and the fact that he has to hold on to a fishing line for a very long time. In this context, the word is related to fishing. This dialect helps center the specific kind of fishing described in the novella within a particular cultural context. Santiago and his peers belong to a unique culture that fishes on skiffs despite an increasingly industrializing world: they belong to a world almost certainly foreign to the reader, one with an accordingly unique dialect.
Related Themes:
