| La condicion traductora examines the emergence of translators protagonists (characters and narrators) in contemporary Latin American fiction, taking this literary phenomenon as an occasion to rethink the transnational imaginary. Translation for Latin America has been commonly conceived either as a practice or metaphor of negotiation (incorporation, appropriation, adaptation, contestation.) As such, the translator has been a key figure standing for conflicting attitudes towards the foreign. In Latin American fiction since the mid-1990s, however, the translator becomes a central character in novels. This dissertation argues that translator characters and narrators dramatize translation by transforming it from a metaphor to a subjective disposition. This is a disposition to analogize and locate the limits of equivalences, precisely at a time when the notion of foreignness permeates all spheres of life and becomes paradoxically universal.;An opening genealogy traces modalities of translation from the post-independence writers in the mid-nineteenth century to the boom novelists of the 1960s. It delineates key instances in Latin American cultural history where translation is associated with strategic ploys to enlist cosmopolitan authority (Sarmiento), native knowledge to improve upon European paradigms (Alencar), and cultural competence to contest and overcome established models (Borges, Haroldo de Campos.) Against this cultural history, the contemporary fictions analyzed then register a significant shift: there the translator protagonist exhibits and uncontrollable memory (in Alan Pauls' El pasado), a fluid identity at risk of dissolution (in Joao Gilberto Noll's Lorde, Berkeley em Bellagio and Chico Buarque's Budapeste), or a deformed, unruly body (in Mario Bellatin's Shiki Nagaoka: una nariz de ficcion).;Exemplified in these novels is a formal innovation in the contemporary Latin American novel, which I call the "translation temperament." I define the translation temperament as a narrative device whereby a disposition to devise analogies and inhabit the limit of cultural equivalence is presented as a subjective compulsion rather than a historical predicament, and as such transforms received assessments of our contemporary era as an epoch in which experience has weakened or where reality has over-multiplied. Translation, reconceived as temperament, suggests ephemeral yet possible grounds on which to inhabit spheres of language, identity, corporeality, and memory. |
