Voice-Overs

Translation and Latin American Literature

Edited by Daniel Balderston & Marcy E. Schwartz

Subjects: Comparative Literature
Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Paperback : 9780791455302, 276 pages, October 2002
Hardcover : 9780791455296, 276 pages, October 2002

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz

PART I. WRITERS ON TRANSLATION

The Homeric Versions
Jorge Luis Borges

Translate, Traduire, Tradurre: Traducir
Julio Cortázar

The Desire to Translate
Gabriel García Márquez

Gender and Translation
Diana Bellessi

Where Do Words Come From?
Luisa Futoransky

On Destiny, Language, and Translation, or, Ophelia Adrift in the C. & O. Canal
Rosario Ferré

Language, Violence, and Resistance
Junot Díaz

Translation as Restoration
Cristina García

Language and Change
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith

Metamorphosis
Nélida Piñon

Resisting Hybridity
Ariel Dorfman

A Translator in Search of an Author
Cristina Peri Rossi

Trauma and Precision in Translation
Tomás Eloy Martínez

Writing and Translation
Ricardo Piglia

PART II. TRANSLATING LATIN AMERICA

A Conversation on Translation with Margaret Sayers Peden
Margaret Sayers Peden

Words Cannot Express . . . The Translation of Cultures
Gregory Rabassa

Infante's Inferno
Suzanne Jill Levine

The Draw of the Other
James Hoggard

Anonymous Sources: A Talk on Translators and Translation
Eliot Weinberger

Can Verse Come Across into Verse?
John Felstiner

PART III. CRITICAL APPROACHES

Reading Latin American Literature Abroad: Agency and Canon Formation in the Sixties and Seventies
María Eugenia Mudrovcic

How the West Was Won: Translations of Spanish American Fiction in Europe and the United States
Maarten Steenmeijer

Translating García Márquez, or, The Impossible Dream
Gerald Martin

Translating Vowels, or, The Defeat of Sounds: The Case of Huidobro
José Quiroga

The Indigenist Writer as a (Mis)Translator of Cultures: The Case of Alcides Arguedas
Edmundo Paz-Soldán

Borges, the Original of the Translation
Walter Carlos Costa

Puga's Fictions of Equivalence: The Tasks of the Novelist as Translator
Vicky Unruh

Translation in Post-Dictatorship Brazil: A Weave of Metaphysical Voices in the Tropics
Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira

Bodies in Transit: Travel, Translation, and Gender
Francine Masiello

De-facing Cuba: Translating and Transfiguring Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters
Israel Reyes

Translation and Teaching: The Dangers of Representing Latin America for Students in the United States
Steven F. White

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Writers, translators, and critics explore the cultural politics and transnational impact of Latin American literature.

Description

In Voice-Overs, an impressive collection of writers, translators, and critics of Latin American literature address the challenges and triumphs of translation in the publishing industry, in teaching, and in the writing culture of the Americas. Through personal anecdotes as well as critical analyses, they engage important, ongoing debates over issues of language, exile, cultural identity, and literary markets. Institutions and personalities in Latin American literary translation are highlighted to examine the genre's cultural politics and transnational impact.

Daniel Balderston is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. He is the author and editor of several titles, including (with Mike Gonzalez and Ana M. López) The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures. Marcy E. Schwartz is Associate Professor and Academic Director of Latin American Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Writing Paris: Urban Topographies of Desire in Contemporary Latin American Fiction, also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"…the editors describe this book as 'an invitation to reflect on multiple and intersecting circuits of cultural production. ' Taken as a whole, the essays in this work provide an excellent grounding for such reflection, and will attract a wide readership among specialists and non-specialists alike. " — Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

"This book is superbly conceived: by combining statements on translation by writers and translators with research articles and classic essays, it makes available a range of resources that are both valuable in themselves and mutually illuminating. It lays the groundwork for further investigation into the question of literary translation, not only as it relates to Latin American literature, but also generally, as it relates to twentieth-century literatures, especially in postcolonial situations. " — Lawrence Venuti, author of The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference

"This book is especially attractive because of its scope—translation as cultural exchange as well as linguistic transposition—and the range of its authors. It includes essays by some of Latin America's major writers and their translators, as well as thoughtful reflections on the issues of translation specific to the heterogeneity of Latin American culture and literature. " — Gwen Kirkpatrick, author of The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo: Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and the Voices of Modern Spanish American Poetry