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List of contents
Introduction: Against Propriety
I. A Tradition of Translation
II. The Translator’s Visibility
1. Monsters and Parricides
I. Tea for One
II. In the Name of the Father
III. Of Bastards and Clones
2. Foreign Correspondence
I. A Few Notes on (Un)Translation
II. Fragments of a Vessel
III. The Problem with False Friends
IV. The Problem with True Friends
V. Best Enemies
3. Writing in the Margins
I. On the (Foot-)Printed Page
II. The Hermeneutic (Com-)Motion
III. A Re-writer on the Edge
IV. Playing Along
4. Writing off the Map
I. Carpet and Fringe
II. Quite a View You’ve Got Here
III. Into the Woods
Coda: Reading for Distance
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Heather Cleary is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Sarah Lawrence College, USA. Her research on contemporary Latin American culture and the theory and practice of translation has appeared in journals including Hispanic Review and Mutatis Mutandis. She has also published seven books in translation, includ two books by Sergio Chejfec, The Dark (2013), which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award, and The Planets(2015), which was a Finalist for the Best Translated Book Award.
Summary
At the intersection of translation studies and Latin American literary studies, The Translator’s Visibility examines contemporary novels by a cohort of writers – including prominent figures such as Cristina Rivera Garza, César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Valeria Luiselli, and Luis Fernando Verissimo – who foreground translation in their narratives.
Drawing on Latin America’s long tradition of critical and creative engagement of translation, these novels explicitly, visibly, use major tropes of translation theory – such as gendered and spatialized metaphors for the practice, and the concept of untranslatability – to challenge the strictures of intellectual property and propriety while shifting asymmetries of discursive authority, above all between the original as a privileged repository of meaning and translation as its hollow emulation.
In this way, The Translator’s Visibility show that translation not only serves to renew national literatures through an exchange of ideas and forms; when rendered visible, it can help us reimagine the terms according to which those exchanges take place. Ultimately, it is a book about language and power: not only the ways in which power wields language, but also the ways in which language can be used to unseat power.
Foreword
At the juncture of translation theory and literary criticism, The Translator’s Visibility reveals the radical notion of creativity behind the motif of translation in contemporary Latin American fiction, and explores the cultural and political implications of the unique relationship this gesture establishes between language and power.
Additional text
Heather Cleary’s contribution to the Fictional Turn in translation studies pushes the conversation on Latin America’s critical and creative engagement with translation to new and exciting extremes, with a socioeconomically grounded focus on 'the asymmetries of discursive authority, the conditions under which cultural goods circulate, and the persistent dichotomy between the so-called "creative" traditions of the metropolis and derivative "translating" cultures at the periphery.' Transformative scholarship; highly recommended.
