MOBILE EMBODIMENTS: TRACING TRANSLATION IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN NARRATIVE

• Main Author: Booker, Sarah
• Other Authors: Estrada, Oswaldo, Keme, Emil, Sá Carvalho, Carolina, Versenyi, Adam, Pollack, Sarah
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School 2022
• Subjects: Twenty-first century; Translation studies; Translation; Latin American literature; Translator; Embodiment; Mobility; Pena; Rivera; taiga
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17615/ch8h-ac38; https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/5m60r294h?file=thumbnail; https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/5m60r294h

This project utilizes a corpus of contemporary narratives written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English to conceptualize translation as a geographically, materially, and corporeally specific practice. Working within a framework of translation theory, queer theory, and postcolonial studies, this project examines the movement involved in translation, the body of the translator, the translational transformation of bodies, and the mixing of languages to argue that these works make evident that translation is a mobile, embodied practice. This project is significant because it frames translation not as an inferior copy of an original, but as a creative act that takes place within—and informed by—a specific ecosystem to add to an existing body of work. It also establishes the significance of translation and the specificity of the practice in contemporary Latin American literatures. It contributes to a growing field by broadening the corpus of “translation fiction” to include texts written by writers that are female, queer, and/or represent a racial minority to show how literature from the periphery contributes to an understanding of translation. Chapter One focuses on travel narratives and analyzes Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron (2016), and Veronica Stigger’s Opisanie Swiata (2013) to think through the geographic and temporal movement implicit in translation. Chapter Two explores the concept of embodied translation and the function of desire through an analysis of Andrés Neuman’s El viajero del siglo (2009) and Fractura (2018) and Cristina Rivera Garza’s El mal de la taiga (2012). Chapter Three examines narratives of transformation in which the body itself is translated through drag, sex change, and time travel in Mayra Santos-Febres Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000) and Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicnulé (2015). The final chapter considers the multilingual writing of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and ...