The Translators Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction

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At the intersection of translation studies and Latin American literary studies, The Translators Visibility examines contemporary novels by a cohort of writers including prominent figures such as Cristina Rivera Garza, Csar Aira, Mario Bellatin, Valeria Luiselli, and Luis Fernando Verissimo who foreground translation in their narratives. Drawing on Latin Americas 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 Translators 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.

Reviews

[I]nsightful and deeply researched ... In addition to her thoughtful readings and radical reconsideration of the relationship between text and author, the value of Clearys project is that it opens a doorway for further dialogue about the implications of translation and its fictional representation. * Hispania *
Clearys study provides fascinating new insights into the phenomenon of transfiction and astutely illustrates that what can be gained from studying scenes of translation goes far beyond conclusions about the practice and practitioners and the notions that underpin them. Furthermore, the fact that Clearys monograph makes the particularly rich creative engagement of Latin American authors with translation visible to an English speaking readership is very welcome, while Hispanists not normally involved in translation studies will certainly find much food for thought in this framing of translation scenes as key to the contemporary works under investigation. * Translation Studies *
[The Translator's Visibility's] overarching argument complements the burgeoning studies on translation by examining the heralded richness of contemporary Latin American fiction available in English. * World Literature Today *
The history of Latin America is bound with the histories, philosophies, and practices of translation that have taken shape across the continentin and into distinct academic, economic, social, cultural configurations. The Translator's Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, Heather Clearys lucid, illuminating and strikingly original study, shows how contemporary novelists in Latin America have shaped their fictions around this complex and differentiated history, producing not only some of our times most compelling narratives, but also nuanced and far-reaching accounts of translations sometimes violent and always disruptive expression in the global cultural and economic market. It will be a model for critics in years to come. * Jacques Lezra, Professor and Chair, Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside, USA *
In her up-to-the-minute investigation of translation as it is foregrounded in recent Latin American fictions, Heather Cleary, herself a remarkable translator, apprehends a rather savage array of louche conducts, among them the dismantlement of the author, the disruption, interruption, corruption, and rupture of systems of intellectual property, the resistance to intelligibility, and the parasitic undermining of legitimacy. Obviously very much at home in this seditious underworld, Cleary provides a lucid and celebratory guide to its denizens, the unreliable narrators and translators, pseudo-originals, pseudo-translations, marginalia, prefaces, afterwords, and (especially) footnotes that conspire to overturn the world literary order in general, and in particular the weary tenets that translation is separate from writing, and fiction is separate from theory. * Esther Allen, Professor, Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, USA *
The margins in my copy of The Translators Invisibility are full of scribbled praise for Clearys sparkling sentences and the ideas they unfoldabout how translation, as both practice and trope, upends the demands of property and propriety nested in the concept of propriedad intelectual, and about how fictional texts featuring translator-protagonists can help shape new understandings of the always collaborative, sometimes contested activity that authorship always is. Clearys readings of the novels she examines are brilliant; her reworking of the concept of untranslatabilitywhich moves it away from the economy of equivalenceextremely welcome; and her writing full of humor and panache. The Translators Visibility is a book Ill be recommending, returning to, and teaching with for years to come. * Karen Emmerich, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA *
Heather Clearys contribution to the Fictional Turn in translation studies pushes the conversation on Latin Americas 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. * Douglas Robinson, Professor of Translating and Interpreting, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen *

Author Bio

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 ten books in translation, including Betina Gonzlezs American Delirium, Roque Larraquys Comemadre (Nominee, National Book Award 2019), as well as Sergio Chejfecs The Dark (Nominee, National Translation Award 2013) and The Planets (Finalist, Best Translated Book Award 2012).