últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

TERESA CANEDA CABRERA–TRANSLATION AND COMMUNITY
following issue: once a foreign text is translated, it comes into being for a specific
community of readers at an equally specific historical moment. In other words, the
translation of a literary text necessarily entails a kind of rewriting which is always
contingent as it must inscribe the foreign text within the domestic interests of a particular
community. I want to argue that, paradoxically, although a translation should inescapably
remind us of its role as a particular realization, it is often the case that a translated text is
made to bear the status of universal for domestic readers of different generations.
The image of a writer and his/her work tend to evolve in the course of literary
history and criticism in parallel with the new readings and interpretations provided by
subsequent communities of readers. However, the translated text, once it has acquired a
timeless afterlife, offers an immobilization of meaning which discourages the domestic
community from a reading other than the one the translation has fixed and to a certain
extent canonized. I want to focus on how, unlike contemporary translations of
contemporary works, which usually cannot escape the influence of the critical
interpretations with which they coexist, “fossilized” translations of works from our
immediate past consequently tend to project a “fossilized” image of such works for
domestic contemporary readers.
Generally, the community of “foreign readers” is given the opportunity to benefit
from new interpretations and fresh critical turns as the work continues to be reprinted and
anthologized and its significance revised and reassessed with the appearance of new
prefaces, introductions and critical reviews. On the contrary, it is not uncommon for
domestic readers to find themselves forced to subscribe to the particular image which the
translation of a text may have been made to bear decades ago when the cultural, social
and political circumstances attached to its domestic inscription were considerably
different to present ones.
This idea first came to my mind as I started working on a translation of some
stories by Katherine Mansfield into the Galician language. The stories will be published
as part of a collection specifically devoted to popularize the works of twentieth century
women writers among Galician female readers. The translation thus responds to an
editorial initiative to “feminize” the panorama of Galician fiction, otherwise dominated
by male writers.
The translation is preceded by an introduction aimed at revealing Mansfield as a
groundbreaking female writer who, by means of ingenious techniques of indirection and
suggestion, managed to deal in her fiction with socially unacceptable issues. In fact, the
stories selected for translation share a provocative message: a denunciation of how
marriage and family function as institutionalized forms of repression for women.
This is certainly the case of “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, a story
structured around a series of objects which convey confinement within a restricted space
and metaphorically speak about the very restricted nature of the daughters’ lives. In this
respect, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” can be seen as a typical Mansfield text in
which lexical elements illuminate the meaning of the story. Unfortunately, those readers
confronted with the painful experience of having to digest the early Spanish translation
published by Editorial Juventud in 1957 in the collection Fiesta en el Jardín y otras
narraciones, were deprived (and still are, as the translation has been reprinted in 1990)
from the pleasure of experiencing a text which depends on the interplay of numerous
symbols to denounce patriarchal repression.
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