Article published In:
BabelVol. 62:2 (2016) ► pp.169–190
Authenticity and the indigenous
Translating the ethnographic avant-garde
This study will entertain considerations of authenticity and identity in translating Spanish American Neoindigenist fiction. Ladino writing and its translatability, its translinguistic and transcultural nature, are explored, particularly insofar as its context intersects with the oral and written traditions and their convergences and divergences. Notions about authenticity that adhere to these forms and expressions are considered. The translational origins of supposedly “pure” works of indigenousness, including the Popol Vuh, are traced in order to show an anti-essentialist hybridity that embraces an aesthetic realism rather than a mimetic one. The impure, then, describes the multivocal, multigeneric, and even multilingual texts from which translators work in this genre, creating in their turn “twice translated” texts. The tensions of these texts must be accounted for in translation. The glossary and other paratexts in Neoindigenismo and its precursor, Indigenismo, are surveyed as strategic repositories, sometimes of ideological slippages and always of contentions between worldviews. The goal of representing the cultural frame, the ecology of the source text, is championed, as are other considerations in the historicized and ethical presentation of difference.
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