Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book investigates the style, or ‘voice,’ of English language translations of twentieth-century Latin American writing, including fiction, political speeches, and film. Existing models of stylistic analysis, supported at times by computer-assisted analysis, are developed to examine a range of works and writers, selected for their literary, cultural, and ideological importance. The style of the different translators is subjected to a close linguistic investigation within their cultural and ideological framework.
In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo—the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers.
The past few years have seen an explosion of interest among U.S. readers for Latin American literature. Yet rarely do they experience such work in the original Spanish or Portuguese. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz argue that the role of the translator is an essential--and an often ignored--part of the reception process among English-language readers. Both accomplished translators in their own right, Lowe and Fitz explain how stylistic and linguistic choices made by the translator can have a profound effect on how literary works are perceived by readers unfamiliar with a foreign language. They also point out ways in which the act of translation is critical to the discipline of comparative literature. Touching on issues of language, culture, and national identity, Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature is one of the first book-length works in this newly emerging field. Combining theories and histories of literature, translation, reception, and cultural studies, it offers a broad comparative perspective rarely found in traditional scholarship.
‘This new generation of Latin American writers has exchanged history for memory, dictators for narcos and political engagement for gender and class consciousness.’ El País Ten years on from the first Bogotá 39 selection, which brought writers such as Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Alejandro Zambra and Junot Díaz to fame, comes this story collection showcasing thirty-nine exceptional new talents. Chosen by some of the biggest names in Latin American literature, together with publishers, writers and literary critics and a panel of expert judges, this exciting anthology paves the way for a new generation of household names. These stories have been brought into English by some of the finest translators around, including familiar names such as Daniel Hahn, Christina MacSweeney and Megan McDowell, as well as many new and exciting translators who are just launching their careers. With authors from fifteen different countries, this diverse collection of stories transports readers to a host of new worlds, and represents the very best writing coming out of Latin America today.
Three narrators from different historical eras are each engaged in preserving history in Carmen Boullosa's Heavens on Earth. As her narrators sense and interact with each other over time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose.
Presents a diverse sample of twentieth century Latin American poems from eighty-four authors in Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, Spanglish, and several indigenous languages with English translations on facing pages.
"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.
