Literature in Translation: Teaching Issues and Reading Practices

The North-South Translation Border: Transnationality in the New South American Writing

188 literature in translation 188 The North-South Translation Border: Transnationality in the New South American Writing Kelly Washbourne Llegamos a pensar que América Latina era un invento de los departamentos de español de las universidades norteamericanas. (We wound up believing that Latin America had been dreamed up by the Spanish departments of North American universities.) Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez A transnational, “migrant” knowledge of the world is most urgently needed. Homi Bhabha Write for a stranger born in a distant country hundreds of years from now. Mary Oliver To what extent can a transnational writer be said to represent his or her country? Are notions of representation and national identity in literature giving way to aesthetic “islands” that transcend nationhood? What role, whether hegemonic or counterhegemonic, does translation perform in an era of globalized, intercultural identities, particularly because strict nationalisms framed much of our current thinking about the craft? The reexamination of the canon of magical realist writers by two contemporary younger generations of writers (the so-called “McOndo” and “Crack” groups) who are gaining entrée into the academy and into English translation, often embracing United States values and effacing or complicating their national origins, prompts these questions and more. Let us briefly consider these issues for transnationality in the new south american writing 189 the classroom. We will proceed through translation’s part in the acquisition and containment mechanisms of the border; the advent, continuity and resistance of the Crack and McOndo groups; changing demographics and theirimplicationsforpublicationpractices;languagepoliticsandtheredrawn maps of center and margin in North American Spanish-language writings and their translations; the reception of these young generations; national and international (transnational) writers’ “translatability” and subject matter ; and, finally, a meditation on reading in translation. Delisle and Woodsworth note that “one of the oldest meanings of translation is ‘to pass contraband’” (222), a violation of borders. An agency of this “borderland,” translation selectively polices the inflow or outflow, volume, and type of narratives on offer. Mignolo and Schiwy (23) have taken to calling this translanguaging, the “border thinking” that breaks with the equation of language with nation, and they argue that a transnational English can become the vehicle for subalternity (22). Recent works such as Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing are questioning monolithic views of literary history, while Bakhtin had already challenged the conceptual nationality of the novel, claiming that national languages are “interanimated”; thus, notions of nation and canon, as Cohen and Dever observe, are made problematic as well: “From a Bakhtinian perspective , it is simultaneously perverse and yet understandable that a novel would signify the coherence of national identity; it is a genre that dwells at borders whose policing is crucial to the nationalist project” (6). The border is the symbol of the reductive politics of imagining the Third World, whereby “the nearer the border, the more anxious the containment and policing of cultural representativity becomes” (Molloy 194). Historically, all too often it was those Spanish American works that conformed to restrictive preconceptions that were admitted into English; thus, ironically, translation rendered works accessible only to distance them as folkloristic amusements. Molloy’s criticism of the consumption of magical realism as partaking of “a regional, ethnicizedcommodity,aformof...essentializedprimitivism,”andultimately as a mode of representation, not production (195), is telling. In the context of this border crossing and policing, a few recent developments in literary production, distribution, and reception should be borne in mind. Resistance to reader expectations of myth and magic has risen among Spanish-language writers in this hemisphere in the wake of the Boom, most programmatically among the McOndo and Crack groups. These are loose 190 literature in translation affiliations of writers born, for the most part, in the 1960s. Alberto Fuguet, Edmundo Paz Soldán, and Sergio Gómez are often associated with McOndo; Mexican writers Jorge Volpi, Pedro Angel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ignacio Padilla, with Crack, whose name plays on the Boom. Both groups are more imbued with a mass-media savviness and alternate literacies than with an exclusively “high-culture” literary tradition. The McOndo group—whose name (in)famously embraces the multiple signifiers of condos , McDonald’s, and Macintosh, while making sport of García Márquez’s fabulous Macondo—is abandoning strict geographies of north and south, English and Spanish, in forming identity. Heirs to Manuel Puig, McOndo has embraced “pop culture...