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

TERESA CANEDA CABRERA–TRANSLATION AND COMMUNITY
seeking its own satisfaction. The underlying sexual connotations of the title in English
gradually come to light in the evolution of the character as the story progresses.
The significance of this interplay between title and text is nevertheless absent
from the Spanish version published by Alba Editorial in 1999. Translated as “Felicidad”,
a much more neutral word which only partly captures the meaning of the English “bliss”,
the Spanish title does not necessarily trigger off a reading which relies on sexual
connotations. It seems obvious to me that the Spanish translator does not read “Bliss” as
a story concerned with the investigation of female sexuality, an issue which this story
shares with other stories written by Mansfield. Ultimately, the choice of a word which
favours a “more innocent” or “less committed” reading reveals how different forms of
reception construct the significance of foreign texts and foreign writers. In this case, this
particular Spanish inscription refuses to comprehend the radicalism of Mansfield’s
proposal and thus rewrites a text in which the discourse of female sexuality is
marginalized if not ignored.
In my experience as someone involved in the teaching of early twentieth century
Literature in the English language I often find that my approaches to some well known
authors and works of fiction must compete with the institutionalized approaches which
students have acquired through the reading of the translated/domesticated text. I am
aware that my present “knowledge” of a particular literary period and similarly my reading
of certain works is informed by the changes that have affected the paradigms of Anglosaxon
literary criticism in the last decades. After all, “a literary work is not an object that
stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period […] It is much
more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers” (Jauss:
165-166). And so, for instance, when it comes to teaching of English Modernism and the
authors commonly referred to as modernists, I realize that in the last few years my
position has been gradually changing according to the revisions to which the concept has
been subjected. If modernist works were once viewed as characterized by their
uncompromising intellectuality, formalism, detachment, reflexivism, emphasis on
subjectivity, alienation and loneliness, today, contemporary critics are rereading the
modernists as writers that “open new public spaces or spheres for the expression of varied
responses to modernity, and various political and social claims of reality” (Blair: 162-
163).
This contemporary revision of early twentieth century works is manifested in the
inclusion of new prefaces and critical introductions written with a vocabulary which bears
obvious ideological connotations, for the most part absent from previous publications of
the same works. Thus, today, the discourses of postcolonial criticism and feminism as
well as perspectives dealing with political concerns have been incorporated in prefaces,
biographical references and in many case such discourses dominate contemporary critical
studies of authors such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
In this respect, whereas Joyce’s collection of short stories Dubliners has been
traditionally read as a piece of “scrupulous” naturalist prose, most recent criticism has
referred to it as “a book which derives its power from ambivalence” (Voelker: 126). The
stories expose the equivocal and multiple nature of typical modernist narratives in which
meaning is not homogeneously established and the reader is at play producing, somehow
re-writing, the text through his/her own activity.
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