The contributions of these forum engage in conversation with Edwin Gentzler's Translation and Identity in the Americas (2008); Andrea Pagni, et al.'s Traductores y traducciones en la historia cultural de América Latina (2012); María Constanza Guzmán's Mapping Spaces of Translation in Twentieth-Century Latin America (2020); and Isabel Gómez's Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (2023). These non-prescriptive and interdisciplinary approaches stem from methodologies initiated by scholars such as André Lefevere, Susan Bassnett, and Lawrence Venuti. They emphasize the cultural and ideological dimensions of translation practices, privileging the target culture over the source culture. Thus, these authors have opened new avenues for studying how translation interacts with identity formation and gender, cultural, political, and social norms in Latin America.
The panel will be divided into two thematic blocks: one focused on gender and translation, and another on peripheral literatures and their circulation within Latin America. Each participant will have 10-12 minutes to develope their argument. Then, the discussant will have a 4-5 minute intervention to summarize key points and ask 2-3 guiding questions for the 20 minute discussion that will conclude the panel.
The first block is dedicated to gender and translation. Ana Duclaud will open the conversation with a paper on Xavier Villaurrutia’s translation of André Gide’s “Le retour de l'enfant prodigue.” Duclaud examines how Villaurrutia’s translation, published in the literary magazine Contemporáneos, functions as an act of anti-homophobic resistance in 1920s Mexico. The comparison between the original French text and the Spanish version reveals the Mexican avant-garde’s engagement with European modernist thought and its role in shaping queer discourse in Latin America. Subsequently, Prof. Marko Miletich will explore the gendered dimensions of translation in Suzanne Jill Levine’s English rendition of José Donoso’s El lugar sin límites. Miletich examines how Levine’s translation negotiates the fluid sexual identities of Donoso’s characters and the challenges of rendering gendered ideology across linguistic and cultural boundaries. These two presentations highlight the critical intersection of gender, translation, and literary modernity in Latin America.
The second block focuses on peripheral literatures and the transnational networks that facilitated their circulation. Dr. Gabbay will examine the experimental nature of Jewish translation in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, in poetic works by Carlos M. Grünberg, Denise León, as well as Hwarang Publisher’s transcreation projects. This paper illustrates how translation practices involving Judeo-Spanish, Castídish, and Hebrañol have enriched the multilingual fabric of contemporary Spanish. The final paper, presented by Lara Norgaard, investigates an overlooked period of translation within Latin American cultural diplomacy. She examines the efforts of Brazil and Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s to build literary and diplomatic bridges with Indonesia through initiatives such as the bulletin Informaciones de Indonesia and the poetry collection Poemas de Indonésia. Norgaard argues that these translations reflect both Latin American Orientalist perspectives and the search for alternative modernisms that redefined Latin America’s cultural identity.
These diverse yet interconnected perspectives position translation as a creative act that both experiments with language and reorients literary horizons. It fosters a comparative approach that contributes to discussions from the Global South on the shaping of global literatures and the circulation of identities in the 20th and 21st centuries. Despite extensive scholarship on translation within English-language literature studies, the study of translation in Latin American literatures remains largely unexplored. .
This panel is diverse in multiple ways. It consists of three female scholars and includes voices from Latin America, North America, and Europe. The organizer and discussant, a Colombian researcher, and the Brazilian presider ensure a Latin American presence. PhD candidate Duclaud, from a British institution, and Dr. Gabbay, from a German one, joins American scholars Professor Miletich and PhD candidate Norgaard, both experts in Latin American literatures. This diversity extends beyond nationality and gender to thematic concerns, as the panel foregrounds queer and non-binary voices alongside less studied literary traditions, such as Jewish and Indonesian literatures in Latin America. Moreover, it deals with different textual formats such as periodical publications and books. By engaging with diverse translation practices by means of multilingual and interdisciplinary perspectives, this panel contributes to a better understanding of Latin America’s literary and cultural landscapes.