| Spanish American and/or U.S. Latino authors Manuel Puig, Ariel Dorfman, Rosario Ferre, Gloria Anzaldua, and Margarita Cota-Cardenas challenge notions of authorial, textual, linguistic, and national integrity through their bold, literary translations of their own texts. Through their strategies of mistranslation, non-literal translation, translation via context, or non-translation, these writers manipulate words such that they foreground language, make the negotiations of translation visible, approximate the aesthetics of exile, expose dynamics of the literary marketplace, and, as a result, engage contradictions and ambiguities that complicate linguistic and national identities. Since their texts both are and are not translations, the often substantive differences between their texts combine to create an elusive "third" space in literary and translational practice. The unlikely status of an equally authoritative translation enables talk of "versions," "variations," "renditions," or "interpretations" in place of terms that implicitly subordinate subsequent versions of a text to a more sacrosanct "original." I provide an overview of how these authors approach translation in the context of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century North American literary marketplace and emphasize the postcolonial possibilities of their non-traditional approaches to their texts. By comparing the disparate Spanish and English versions of their texts and examining the translational strategies within their texts, I show how these multilingual authors are uniquely positioned to challenge and/or succumb to the pressures of nationalism and globalization that are reinforced by rigid perceptions of language, nation, and authorship. Whether as political exiles, "domestic foreigners," willing "traitors" of their multilingual competencies, or as cultural mediators, these self-translators extend the parameters of one or both of their assumed languages and advocate a fluid if not harmonious relationship with each. |
