Of Monsters and Parricides: The Politics of Textual Reproduction

This article examines the narrative mobilization of gendered and biogenetic metaphors of translation in two contemporary novels that feature translators as protagonists: El congreso de literatura (1999) by César Aira (Argentina) and Borges e os orangotangos eternos (2000) by Luis Fernando Verissimo (Brazil). Situating my analysis at the intersection of the “fictional turn” of Translation Studies and the rich history of writing on and through translation in Latin America, I analyze an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes gone awry in the first text and the Oedipal and hermeneutic violence that characterizes the second to argue that, by means of their explicit engagement of the translational trope of textual reproduction, these contemporary writers challenge centrist models of cultural geopolitics and posit ludic, nonhierarchical models of reciprocal influence in their stead.