Echolation as Modulation: A Case Study of Chus Pato and Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, Accompanied by a Fan Fiction of Moure’s Work More Generally

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article takes a creative-critical approach to reading Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, a translation and echolation of Chus Pato Secesión, originally written in Galician. It subversively adopts the different species of Jean Vinay and Jean-Paul Darbelnet’s procedure of modulation from their 1958 comparative treatise Stylistique Comparée du français et de l’anglais to look at the way translator’s voice, somatic experience and political situation are shifted in Moure’s translation and creative rewriting. Across the different species of modulation, it charts the way that Moure’s echolation is a metacommentary as well as an archive of her translational experience and upon translation itself, modulating author with translator, writing with translation, but also modulating time and space between Pato’s realities and her own. Woven throughout these readings are connections to Moure’s work as a whole, in particular to the provocative heteronymic figure of Elisa Sampedrín, her intertextuality and translation techniques, and how they tell another story for translation. Finally, the body of the article is interrupted with prose-poetical passages in French that carry this reflection into the fan-fictional.