Abstract
La Noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de Historia Oral is a text full of voices which had been silenced. In addition, it is a hybrid text because it combines photojournalism, the literal words of many interviewees, witness accounts of survivors and political prisoners, and extracts from documentary sources like political speeches and hospital reports. It is an example of histories narrated orally by those who did not previously have a voice. They are oral translations of the real, intralinguistic and interlinguistic rewritings exemplifying what Bastin (2006: 121) calls “oraliture”, a type of textual construction of great importance when changing the way of looking at the history of translation. Since the studies published by Paul Bandia, Jeremy Munday or Georges Bastin, translation theory has been pressing for analysis of translations which take into account the concepts of critical historiography. The aim should be to achieve translations which overcome the traditional Eurocentrism and universalism that have allowed Westerners to remain in the comfort zone, a zone which offered only the vision of the conquerors and not that of the conquered. The translator cannot ignore all these changes and must begin to construct new venues in historical text research and its translation which put an end once and for all to that Eurocentric vision presented to us as the only true one.
Highlights
The section “The historian as rewriter” explains this idea of the authors mentioned above who – proceeding from a post-structuralist perspective and assuming that there is not a real source ‘text’ in the form of actual events – understand that the historian rewrites and interprets, and gives one translation among many. We apply this new way of understanding historiography to Elena Poniatowska’s novel La noche de Tlatelolco, where the official history of Mexico is rewritten by the oral histories of those who were the authors/historians/translators of the massacre of Tlatelolco, a massacre which until had only been told by the official historians
The ultimate aim of this paper is to reflect on the ethical responsibility of the interlinguistic translator in the face of a novel that is itself two translations of specific historical events: that of the subaltern protagonists who translate history in the sense of Hayden White, and the intralinguistic translation Poniatowska makes based on these narrations
They are different approximations to history, but they all share the idea that history is not a neutral objective science that should be left in the hands of the conquerors, but that the history of ordinary people and the communities in which they lived should be written
Summary
“¿Quién ordenó todo esto?” [Who ordered this?]. Elena Poniatowska (1971/2012, p. 219). This paper sets out to show that Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco [Massacre in Mexico] is a clear example of the critical conception of history of scholars like Hayden White (1987, 1978a, 1978b, 1975), Dominick LaCapra (2013, 2004), Alun Munslow (2013), Robert Young (1990) and many others who changed historiography in the 1960s. These historiographers considered history to be a narrative, a text that translates reality, and, they consider that the author of the.
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