Latin American Writers In English Translation

In Voice-Overs, an impressive collection of writers, translators, and critics of Latin American literature address the challenges and triumphs of translation in the publishing industry, in teaching, and in the writing culture of the Americas. Through personal anecdotes as well as critical analyses, they engage important, ongoing debates over issues of language, exile, cultural identity, and literary markets. Institutions and personalities in Latin American literary translation are highlighted to examine the genre's cultural politics and transnational impact.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book investigates the style, or ‘voice,’ of English language translations of twentieth-century Latin American writing, including fiction, political speeches, and film. Existing models of stylistic analysis, supported at times by computer-assisted analysis, are developed to examine a range of works and writers, selected for their literary, cultural, and ideological importance. The style of the different translators is subjected to a close linguistic investigation within their cultural and ideological framework.

Presents a collection of critical essays analyzing modern Hispanic American writers including Junot Diaz, Pat Mora, and Rudolfo Anaya.

This book is a critical study of the work of Gregory Rabassa, translator of such canonical novels as Gabriel Garcìa Márquez's Cien años de soledad, José Lezama Lima's Paradiso, and Julio Cortàzar's Rayuela. During the past five decades, Rabassa has translated over fifty Latin American novels and to this day he is one of the most prominent English translators of literature from Spanish and Portuguese. Rabassa's role was pivotal in the internationalization of several Latin American writers; it led to the formation of a canon and, significantly, to the most prevalent image of Latin American literature in the world. Even though Rabassa's legacy has been widely recognized, the extent of his work's influence and the complexity of the sociocultural circumstances surrounding his practice have remained largely unexamined. In Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy, María Constanza Guzmán examines the translator's conceptions about language, contextualizes his work in terms of the structures and conditions that have surrounded his practice, and investigates the role his translations have played in constructing collective narratives of Latin American literature in the global imaginary. By revisiting and historicizing the translator's practice, this book reveals the scale of Rabassa's legacy. The translator emerges as an active subject in the inter-American literary exchange, an agent bound to history and to the forces involved in the production of culture.