La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana by Martín Gaspar

Abstract

Reviewed by: La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana by Martín Gaspar Felipe Méndez Alvarado Gaspar, Martín. La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latino-americana. Rosario: Viterbo, 2014. Pp. 225. ISBN 978-9-508-45306-8. In La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana, Martín Gaspar delivers a series of critical essays on translation as a situated social practice, the emergence of “translator-heroes” in Latin American fiction, and the field of translation studies as a culturally mediated métier. This thoroughly researched, well-crafted study will be of interest to literary and cultural theorists, traductologists, narratologists, and to academic and lay audiences who are passionate about contemporary Latin American fiction. In broad terms, this study is a significant contribution towards a principled poetics of traductology in its encounter with Latin American fiction: through its invocation of a Bourdieuian framework, it situates the act of translation as habitus and social act. This learned tome is therefore a welcome, thought-provoking disquisition on the aesthetic and philosophical underpinnings of the métier traducteur. Gaspar traces the act of translation in nineteenth-century Latin American fiction and presents it as a transformative act that is deeply meaningful to current understandings of the region’s literary production and cultural outlook. Drawing on South American, including Brazilian, novels where translations and [End Page 687] translators play a central role, and on his own sophisticated critical and philosophical thought, Gaspar writes in the tradition of great Latin American polymaths. La condición traductora makes a delectable read, for the scope, breadth, and depth found in its pages. The author’s intentions can be pithily summarized in the following lines: “Este estudio aspira a iniciar este modo de análisis: el análisis de temperamentos y proclividades en la novela contemporánea. . . . [A] mi modo de ver, una manera de examinarlas que resulta tal vez más productiva que el examen de realidades, afectos y experiencias” (214). Clearly, this argument is not without controversy, though Gaspar meets it with encyclopedic verve in this five chapter monograph, plus appendix. Truly exegetic in form, chapter one situates the act of translation and translators at the forefront of cultural creation in Latin America since the XIX century, aims to establish the genetic lineages of translation and translators, and offers a typology of translator temperaments: “traductor verosímil,” “aclimatador,” “excéntrico,” “creador de sentidos” and finally, “el traductor y la contrahistoria.” To Gaspar, the importance of that strategy is that “[l]a táctica cultural inscripta en las figuras del traductor que leímos hasta ahora—importar, aclimatar, posicionarse excéntricamente, rebelarse, jugar—es primaria y da forma a la vida representada” (78). Chapters 2 to 4 are devoted to explicating and theorizing the emergence, recurrence, and prominence of translators and the act of translation in four novels. The first work addressed is Mario Bellatín’s Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción, followed by two of Joao Gilberto Noll’s novels, Lorde and Berkeley em Bellagio; lastly, there follows a discussion of Chico Buarque’s Budapeste. In Gaspar’s critical examinations of these novels’ cultural and historical emergence, he proposes that the act of translation and of self-translation (traducirse) has come to play a central role in Latin American narrative. Gaspar argues that literary production that focuses on translation and translators warrants the invocation of a genre, “la novela del traductor,” where, “los protagonistas—entrenados por el habitus y destinados por su temperamento a la producción de equivalencias—buscan navegar la dificultad de conceptualizar la sensación de estar en medio de una totalidad” (215). In this volume, we are invited to witness the appearance of the translator as protagonist in Latin American fiction; and equally, to discern whether the translator’s habitus is indeed an interpretive, exegetic instrument in the toolkit of literary criticism, one whose nuances and limitations are eruditely addressed in chapter five. The topic of the appendix, the vastly more prosaic figure of Julio Vacarezza, an Argentinean translator into Spanish of mostly canonical English-language literature, takes account of the diminished glamour associated...