The Mask of the Translator: Exile, Memory, and (Pseudo) Translation in Max Aub’s Antología traducida

This article discusses the relationship between exile, memory, and translation—all errant entities by default—in Max Aub’s collection of apocryphal translations, Antología traducida. Given that the decision to disguise a text as a translation is both deliberate and uncommon, I examine Aub’s use of translation as a trope within the text. I propose that translation functions not merely as a playful literary joke, but as a politically deployed tool that enables Aub to articulate alternative, plural versions of Iberian historical memory that run against the grain of official history offered by the Franco regime. Critical to this analysis is a consideration of Aub’s own position as a masked speaker behind the poems, and how said position reconfigures the “task” of the translator. If pseudotranslation is, as Waïl Hassan asserts, “a parable for the impossibility of returning to the original,” Antología traducida is Aub’s attempt to piece together, through translation, his own experience of exile, contextualizing it within a centuries-long lineage of those who likewise claim the Iberian Peninsula as home, and for whom return is impossible.