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  • Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North-South Translation
  • Fernando De Sousa Rocha
Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North-South Translation. By Marta Elena Savigliano. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003; pp. xvii + 243. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Cultural exchanges and appropriations across the north-south border have tended to reflect the sociopolitical and economic tensions that have often marked North-South relations. Crossing borders, in such cases, might very well entail "fatal acts"—to borrow Marta Elena Savigliano's expression—especially when these cultural appropriations by North Americans involve what is considered to be one of the cornerstones of national identity. One need only recall here the negative reception in Argentina of Down Argentine Way in the 1940s. Produced in accordance with the Good Neighbor policy, the Twentieth Century Fox movie portrays horse-raising Argentines, apparently based on the gaucho tradition and the exotic appeal of the pampas. (As Domingo Sarmiento warned in the middle of the nineteenth century, Argentina's main problem is the vastness of its lands.) Most likely invisible to Americans, the stereotypical nature of such a portrait was quite evident to Argentines themselves. Marta Elena Savigliano's Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North-South Translation is a provocative contribution to the ongoing question of how one may depict an Other in crosscultural encounters, inasmuch as one of the purposes of the book is precisely to undo the mechanisms of exoticism through which tango (and the tango experience) is reduced to sexualized relations and to a destiny of femme-fatality, as Savigliano herself puts it. Nonetheless, the undoing of the mechanisms of exoticism in the book relies heavily on the question of translation—as the title itself indicates—but not in the usual linguistic sense. Translation here refers to the person who lives in translation (an idea akin to the borderlands of Gloria Anzaldúa), and, most importantly, it suggests a habitation of the foreign that is quite corporeal.

The text begins with a dispute over its own authorship in a section called "Translingual Trances and Authorial Claims/Reclamos de Autoría y Trances Translinguales." This dispute is not resolved. One of the characters of the tangópera (tango + opera), whose libretto appears in part two of the book, claims that the character of the Witch/la Bruja (a clairvoyant who incorporates different spirits) is entirely based on her own life, while being at the same time a rather grotesque misrepresentation of it. The text moves back and forth (between English and Spanish, translations and originals, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires, the librettist and the character), and, in this constant movement of different points of reference, both the Witch and the librettist develop their ideas on the question of translation. It indexes the loss and the recovery of a unifying identity; it also instills in the subject corporeality and copresence, once it is understood also as transubstantiation, that is, as "borrowings, implants, dislocations and translocations that affect corporeality and its senses" (28).

In the second part of the book, titled "The Contested Object/El Objeto en Disputa," we read the libretto of "Angora Matta: Tangópera-'Thriller' en Dos Actos y Catorce Escenas," which is the story of Angora Matta (Angora Kils), a hit woman who is hired to kill the President of Argentina. Although the contested object alludes to the authorial dispute we have just read in part 1, it also easily applies to the protagonist of the tangópera, Angora Matta, who is also, in many different ways, a "contested object" to several other characters: the President himself, who hires Angora Matta (without her having knowledge of it) in order to enact his own assassination; Elvira Díaz, who apparently shares with Angora Matta a past as ex-guerilleras; Manuela Malva, a singer who seems to be involved in the plot to murder the president; Mariano Monteamor, a milonguero (frequenter of tango clubs) who is attracted to Angora Matta's sensuality; and the detectives who are looking for the assassin. The tangópera ends with an imaginary dialogue between Angora, Elvira, and Manuela, in which the three debate the significance of the act committed by Angora, who, shaking off her ghosts, picks...

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