Four Rulfian Voices. An Analysis of the Translation of 'Mexicanisms' in Juan Rulfo's El Llano en llamas

Abstract

This essay is concerned with the translation of regional literary voices. The case in point is Juan Rulfo's collection of short stories, El Llano en llamas, and its translation into four languages — English, German, Danish, and Italian. Rulfo's fiction, an intricate patchwork of the subdued voices of a specific people, the rural population of Jalisco, Mexico, poses interesting linguistic and cultural challenges to the translator. The author's aim of reproducing the spoken language of his region in literature has given life to works of great linguistic specificity, even within the Spanish language community. The comparative analysis proposed here centres around those lexical choices which mark the regional specificity of Rulfo's text — i.e. linguistic elements classified as 'Mexicanisms' — and their treatment in the four translations.The theoretical and philosophical starting point of this study is the notion of 'linguistic hospitality' proposed in the reflections of thinkers such as Ricœur and Berman: the aim of translation cannot be that of making the foreign comprehensible, of annexing it, but rather that of hosting it as something foreign in order to enrich the target horizon. Translation is thus a kind of appropriation which is at once 'compréhension à distance' (Ricœur, 1986) and completion, über-leben, supplement of the source text.