The Picaresque Novel as Eclectic Translation: Composing Heteroglossia

Abstract

This chapter examines the history of translation in/of the picaresque novel in relation to the concepts of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1935) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1984), studying the systematic strategy of borrowing intertexts that may be said to have played an important role in the development of the picaresque novel in Spanish, French, and Portuguese as a heteroglossic genre. The first part discusses the theoretical framework and designates as intertexts the translated fragments inserted as episodes or intercalary short stories into Spanish, French, and Portuguese picaresque novels. The chapter contends that the identification of such (translated) intertexts allows picaresque novels from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to be described as eclectic translations (Ringmar, 2007). The second section dialogues with previous critical works on Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35) that have demonstrated the presence of a strong component of translation in the making of the picaresque novel, first in Spanish (Berruezo, 2011) and later in French (Cavillac, 1984). The last section uncovers alien discourses within four picaresque novels published in Portuguese in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.