Joys and Tribulations of Interconnection: Translation in Latin American and Latinx Literature

Gaspar, Martín L.; Gaspar, Martín L.

While Translation Studies in the Global North discovered its “Cultural Turn” in the 1990s, scholars of Latin American and Latinx culture have long discussed people, ideas, languages, and knowledges in terms of traveling back and forth, clashing, and finding compromise, thus forming a robust set of concepts around translation as a cultural and social practice: “counterpoint,” “transculturation,” “contact zone,” “in-between space,” “misplaced ideas,” “heterogeneity,” “mestizaje,” and “hyphenation.” Scholars have frequently found translation to reside at the very heart of nation building in 19th century Latin America, allowing newly founded countries to establish their relationships to other States and to define their cultural identities through the dialogue between cultures, as opposed to relying on Romantic notions of “unity” or “purity.” Many national founders throughout the Americas were in fact not only great statespersons, but were translators as well: Belgrano, Sarmiento and Mitre in Argentina, Andrés Bello and Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, José Martí in Cuba. Effectively, from colonial religious syncretism in Latin America to contemporary code-switching in LatinX fiction, one can argue that the most consistent gesture in the region’s cultural production is both finding and creating knowledge through the process of translation, understood as the outcome of the friction between cultures.

This panel takes a double stance vis-à-vis various gestures and outcomes of this friction—at times illuminating and joyful, at others repressing and reactionary—in the 20th and 21st century: it views translation from within the Latin American and LatinX tradition and in dialogue with the cultural turn in translation studies, especially in matters such as literary fame and prestige (Lefevere), power and manipulation (Tymoczko), novelty (polysystem theory), co-authorship (Bassnett), and activism (Baker.) Leah Leone Anderson examines Jorge Luis Borges’s translation strategies that distorted the feminist content in Virginia Woolf’s originals. She argues that the ripple effects of this distortion, exacerbated by the literary fame of the translator, can still be felt today, but are now meeting an unexpected response in contemporary media. Olivia Lott looks at the work of contemporary, Chilean-American poet Daniel Borzutzky, and argues that the translation that is the very essence of his poetry provides a key case study for rethinking the role of translation in recent Latinx poetics as not only an identitarian phenomenon, but also as a mode of hemispheric anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist critique. María Julia Rossi focuses on the “scandalous” materials included in the Buenos Aires-based magazine Los Amorales (1957-1958), devoted to queer identities and practices. By uncovering the unexpected French provenance of these texts, Rossi’s research illuminates a series of translation strategies whose textual effects impacted non-normative sexual depictions in Spanish. Martín Gaspar looks at the modernist approaches to translation taken by the renowned Brazilian concretist poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, developed in dialogue with writings by Ezra Pound. In particular, he examines their poetic principle of “transcreation” as a politically motivated, countercultural movement.

While commenting on specific primary materials, each paper also seeks a broader intervention: the articulation of core concepts and methodological lenses for enacting Translation Studies in Latin American and Latinx contexts. These methodologies involve, in some cases, viewing translation through gender studies; in others, considering how politics can be imbricated in acts of literary translation and self-translation. The excess or remainder of a translation as it moves between languages reveals as much about the culture of the “original” as it does the culture of the translation, creating a dialectic from which a new set of concerns can be articulated. These go beyond longstanding preoccupations like “national” and “cultural” identity or “center” vs. “periphery,” moving toward new articulations of transnational, systemic concerns: the effects of Global Capitalism, enduring structures of Patriarchy, Climate Change.

728 Joys and Tribulations of Interconnection: Translation in Latin American and Latinx Literature: Calls for Papers