The New Task of the Translator in Contemporary Latin American Fiction: The Case of Alan Pauls’ The Past (original) (raw)
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Who Translates?: Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason (review)
Comparative Literature Studies, 2004
m o d e r n i t y 352 strates what we should expect such an analysis to entail. Her archive includes, alongside the novels, contemporaneous newspaper editorials, architectural tracts, home magazine articles, real-estate advertisements, interior decorating literature, books of urban sociology, and other documents that surrounded the modern migration to the suburbs. Such texts serve to draw out the map of zones, boundaries, and divisions contained in novelistic representation, a map that, far from simply embellishing or providing a backdrop to the plot, reveals the novel's participation in the production of social space. The inter-textual relation Jurca describes is one of difference as well as homology. She argues that while novels often work in tandem with nonliterary genres to define the suburban ideal, they more typically adopt a critical stance toward that ideal, an oppositional gesture that is itself no less inherent to suburban identity than the proverbial white picket fence. As the introduction points out, White Diaspora extends the study of middle-class culture and its cult of domesticity-a topic that has been widely pursued in the context of nineteenthcentury studies-into the twentieth century. This extension, however, is also a revision. The book joins the ongoing project of rethinking the concept of separate spheres. Most significantly, by focusing primarily on the suburban male, it dislodges the association between femininity and the material and emotional aspects of domesticity and brings into critical purview the intense, at times desperate, love-hate relationship between men and their homes. This emphasis on masculine affect is particularly welcome in today's critical climate, where feelings of alienation and victimization are understood, and sometimes derided, as the markers of disenfranchised identities. Jurca allows us to see how the suburban novel articulated a white, masculine narrative of victimhood that masked and, in masking, bolstered its subjects' actual privileges. White Diaspora is the first book-length study of the modern suburban novel. Its goal is to identify this genre's overarching narrative patterns, and its scope is accordingly wide, stretching across the U. S. and covering almost the entire twentieth century. In as much as Jurca's book creates a new area of investigation, one would hope to see subsequent studies more rigorously address questions of difference. How do accounts of the suburban experience vary from Levittown to Silicon Valley? From "East Egg" to the working-class towns girding Pittsburgh? And how is the discourse of suburbia transforming now that the boundaries that defined it-between center and margins, home and work, privilege and deprivation-are quickly eroding?
THE WRITER-TRAVELER CHARACTER IN LATIN AMERICAN AND INDIAN CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE
This study explores the relation with the Other that can be found through the travels of contemporary writers from India and Latin America. Since Edward Said’s Orientalism, travel writing has been mainly studied through the Center-Periphery axis. The axis is modified in this study. In the first part, the travels of Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and Damaris Calderon through Egypt, China and Chile, respectively, reveal another kind of relationship: not that of hierarchical comparison, but that in which the sense of familiarity is awakened. Guided by the perspectives of the anthropologists T.N. Madan and David Scott, we explored the presence of what can be called the possibility to live intimately among strangers. In the second part, through the travels of Pankaj Mishra in India and Juan Villoro in Mexico, we explore the possibility to view the familiar space as a stranger and thus, to unveil the inner othering. The penetration of the myth of modernity becomes central in this part and the different mechanisms to decolonize this entanglement of hierarchies is explored through non-modern perspectives, mainly Gandhi and Fanon, in addition to the contemporary Latin American and Indian theorists Ashis Nandy, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. In the last part, we explore the dark side of modernity through Bolaño’s fiction. Here we scrutinize the destiny of a classified humanity, the complicity between culture and the annihilation of the other. At the end of the journey – of this thesis – these non-metropolitan writers bring us two possibilities: we either develop a horizontal relationship with the other and we unmask our own hierarchies, or else we sink into the abyss.
Translation and the Exotic. Inventing the Other in Literature Call for Articles
In spite of all the century-long – theoretical, social, political, economic – noise about and around translation, which has tended to represent it as (just) replication, translators and editors, authors and other literary agents have always known that translation entails, must entail transformation. Languages, cultures, historical, political, social circumstances, and authorial idiolects are too diverse to allow for mere reproduction. While Venuti’s invisibility concept and discussion illustrate the translators’ status quo in the West rather aptly, highlighting the ways in which this obscures their presence in the public realm, there is still much work to do in order to document how translators have lived through this invisibility, i.e., how their being mostly invisible in Western world throughout time has, on the one hand, socially detracted from their rightful place in culture, and, on the other, how invisibility has made a set of practices possible that have helped shape the ways a given culture sees (and construes) its different Others. As ‘undercover agents’ (Cronin, 2003), translators were, in fact, allotted a not negligible degree of power: that of introducing and (re)presenting the other in a given culture. This has, more often than not, implied a sense of centeredness, a sense of a ‘we’ speaking about (translating) ‘them’. As Adrienne Rich (1985) reminds us, it may be fruitful to ask who ‘we’ are, inasmuch as ‘we’ have to be responsible for ‘our’ others, their presence but, to some extent, also their invention. As every piece of translation – literary, economic, political – can be both a decentering and a recentering practice, i.e., a window into the lives of others and/or a brick in the wall of self-perception, this special issue of Cadernos de Tradução aims at discussing processes of manipulation, (dis/re)figuration and (mis)understanding the Other/others. In short: the processes by which translation as creative transformation helps produce the imaginative fabric of a culture. Contributions focusing on translated children’s literature, travel writing, memoirs, migration literature, journalism are particularly welcome. The volume would like to provide tentative answers to questions such as: how have translation practices and patterns produced images of the other(s) for different audiences?, how have others been ‘exoticized’ throughout time and how has this been made part of the imaginings of different cultures?, how is fear of the other(s) construed in and through translation?, in what ways does children’s literature (as well as literature for adults) promote/detract from a cosmopolitan worldview?
Compulsive Translators: Are Narrators in Javier Marías's Novels Beguiled by Language
Hispanic Research Journal, 2017
Javier Marías’s novels are renowned for revolving around his digressive narrators, who, amongst other subjects, persistently reflect upon language and translation. This article discusses the role of these constant reflections and examines the narrators’ engagement with different forms of translation by using Roman Jakobson’s categorisation (intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translation) in four novels that correspond to Marías’s mature novelistic period (Todas las almas (1989), Corazón tan blanco (1992), Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) and Tu rostro mañana (2002–2007)). It briefly discusses the effects of intralingual and intersemiotic translation on the narrators before moving on to analysing in detail the impact of interlingual translations. The latter is a prominent aspect in Marías’s fiction; its significance is examined through the use of foreign terms and their translations (or lack thereof ), as well as the narrators’ reflections upon them. The ultimate aim of this article is to establish the link between the all-pervasive uncertainty in Marías’s novels and the narrators’ fascination with translation, especially of the interlingual kind.
The Emergence of the Mediated Poet.pdf
ABSTRACT: This essay analyzes the role of Leopoldo María Panero in the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. As a public figure, Panero also circulates in cinema (El desencanto), in the written press and on television. The mediatized image of Panero dialogs with notions of mauditism in recent poetry, with the transition to democracy in Spain and the role of poetry in the Era of Information. It is an image that both affirms the commercialization of artistic «authenticity» and also calls it into question.
Translating Fictions: The Messenger Was a Medium
TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies, 2009
In this article I will examine the ways in which the ethical gestures available to translators are inscribed in the etymologies of key terms and cognate pairs (especially in English and French) within the semantic field marked out by the category of translation: trade, transfer, transgress. translate / translater, traduire / traduce, betray / trahir. What emerges is a pattern dominated by themes of give and take, loss and gain, and above all, faithfulness and betrayal. Betrayal (like the French verb trahir) holds a pivotal position within this set, due to its two-faced character, given to both deceit and revelation. Juxtaposed on and rooted in these themes are the timeworn types in which translators have been chronically cast (when not simply ignored): the loser (mainly in the sense of the agent of loss) and the traitor. Such associations throw into stark relief the intrinsically political and ethical nature of the act of translation, which Lawrence Venuti and others have forcefully...
American, British and Canadian Studies, 2018
Literary and Cultural Circulation is made up of eighteen chapters by different authors who explore this broad issue through different frameworks. Consequently, the meaning of literary circulation varies throughout the volume, according to the purposes of each text and the specificities of each object of analysis. The quality of the essays is undeniable and, despite the differences between them, circulation, considered in its broadest sense, is the main subject explored in the texts that vary, in short, around two main aspects. One of them is the perspective from which circulation is understood. In this respect, the essays can be divided into four main thematic axes that address the role of circulation: 1) in specific authors or for a specific genre, 2) in the postcolonial condition, 3) in our times, that is, in the digital and culture industry age, and 4) in the formation of a national interpretation. Since the starting point determines the point of arrival and the specific results of circulation, the texts also differ from one another in terms of the various implications of circulation taken into account. Thus, various essays discuss the consequences of circulation for literary production, for the expression of subaltern groups, for the acclimatization of European ideas in the Americas, for reading, for culture and for literature, approaching also the theoretical issues that surround this subject as well as the methodological and market implications of this propensity of literature to circulate. Due to the very size of this book, it would not be possible to present the main ideas of all the essays. I will try instead to present the ideas of at least one of the essays from each axis. The contributors are scholars and/or professors from different countries (United States, Brazil and Spain) who, as I noted, have dealt with this academic and cultural debate in different ways in their research. Diversity, a hallmark of literary