The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction by Heather Cleary (review)

Translation has long been a recurrent theme in Latin America, where it has been used to navigate tensions between the center and periphery, conceptualize the circulation of ideas, and reflect on labor practices. In her book, The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, Heather Cleary picks up this thread as she examines scenes from twenty-first century novels that engage with translation theory. She asks how language—especially that used in fiction—can disrupt power. Specific to this project, Cleary is interested in how fiction featuring translation disrupts the notion of a centralized authorial figure; she pushes against notions of propriety and singular ownership to instead invite readers to think about the many participants—including the reader—active in producing a text.

The book is divided into four chapters that examine prevalent questions in translation theory: reproduction, untranslatability, and the physical and textual spaces associated with the translator. The close readings are supported through a framework of translation theory, twentieth-century translation fiction, and postcolonial studies. While Cleary is an accomplished translator from Spanish into English, she does maintain a boundary between her own translation experiences and the tropes she analyzes. The one exception is that she concludes her reading of Mario Bellatin’s work with a reflection on her translation of one of his novels.

Chapter 1, “Monsters and Parricides,” explores metaphors of reproduction for translation. Following Lori Chamberlain and her critique of the gendered discourse surrounding translation, Cleary considers the metaphor of reproduction in Graciela Safranchik’s El cangrejo, Luis Fernando Verissimo’s Borges e os orangotangos eternos, and César Aira’s El congreso de literatura. In these texts, she finds that intellectual lineage is often challenged by the engendered—or translated—text that assert its own creativity and thus become monstrous in its infidelity. Through Aira’s unleashed silk work clones, for example, these writers “replace filial deference with parricidal defiance, creating the conditions necessary for a reconfiguration of the dyads of original and copy, creation and derivation, center and periphery” (29).

In Chapter 2, “Foreign Correspondence,” Cleary moves from conceptualizing translation as an independent, reciprocal text to examining specific translation choices and equivalency. Focusing on the cognate, or terms that supposedly offer minimal resistance to translation, she argues that translation is not an even exchange of terms and meanings. The notion of untranslat-ability should be central to thinking about translation as it is because of the irregularities between languages and their lack of correlation that translation is even necessary. Using Saer’s Cicatrices as a narrative thread in dialogue with Derrida and Benjamin’s theorizations of untranslatability, Cleary offers a close reading of specific scenes in Salvador Benesdra’s El traductor, Alan Pauls’s El pasado, and Pablo De Santis’s La traducción. Ultimately, these readings again underscore the complexities and creativity of translation.

While the first two chapters reconceptualize the translated text as an independent entity by challenging “the strictures of intellectual property and propriety” (19), the second half of the project turns to the fictional rendering of translators and spaces they occupy that “subvert the very notion of marginality” (19). Chapter 3, “Writing in the Margins,” focuses on the use of footnotes as a peripheral but potentially subversive space of translation. Reading Walsh’s short story “Nota al pie” as a precursor, Cleary analyzes Bellatin’s use of the paratextual space of the footnote in El jardín de la señora Murakami “to destabilize the idea of the author as privileged ‘owner’ of either the text or its interpretation” (93). The final portion of this chapter includes a compelling explanation of how three of Bellatin’s English-language translators—Jacob Steinberg, David Shook, and Cleary herself—have expanded Bellatin’s literary games in their translations. Along with providing further insight into the tricks at the heart of Bellatin’s works, this discussion provides a link between the theoretical questions Cleary explores and the practice...