{"title":"Queer Decorum: An Episode on Translation and Marginalized Sexualities","authors":"María Julia Rossi","doi":"10.26824/lalr.252","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The queer aspect of national literary histories has been traditionally obscured, and although it is gradually being recuperated, the impact of translation has been so far overlooked. Using the example of modernist fiction from England translated into Spanish and published in Argentina, I argue that translation smuggles, purposely misappropriates and resignifies alternative sexual desires and gender identities, opening spaces for local literatures to further explore these possibilities. Translation episodes from the 1940s and 1950s in Argentina are key to reconstructing the obscured history of literary queerness and I focus on one example that is perhaps the earliest, a translation of Denton Welch’s “When I Was Thirteen” by Jose Bianco of Sur magazine which appeared as “Cuando tenía trece años,” published in September 1944. Rather than isolated instances, such translations served to slowly transform the sentimental landscape of Argentine literature in a context where the popular imagination was prescriptively heteronormative. This article exhumes this little-known episode as one of the first cornerstones in a queer chapter of literary history in translation. Strictly related to depictions of homosexual desires, I propose “queer decorum” as an approach that affects translation strategies and decisions, subsequently affecting the translated text as a result and somehow making its publication possible.","PeriodicalId":333470,"journal":{"name":"Latin American Literary Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Latin American Literary Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.26824/lalr.252","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The queer aspect of national literary histories has been traditionally obscured, and although it is gradually being recuperated, the impact of translation has been so far overlooked. Using the example of modernist fiction from England translated into Spanish and published in Argentina, I argue that translation smuggles, purposely misappropriates and resignifies alternative sexual desires and gender identities, opening spaces for local literatures to further explore these possibilities. Translation episodes from the 1940s and 1950s in Argentina are key to reconstructing the obscured history of literary queerness and I focus on one example that is perhaps the earliest, a translation of Denton Welch’s “When I Was Thirteen” by Jose Bianco of Sur magazine which appeared as “Cuando tenía trece años,” published in September 1944. Rather than isolated instances, such translations served to slowly transform the sentimental landscape of Argentine literature in a context where the popular imagination was prescriptively heteronormative. This article exhumes this little-known episode as one of the first cornerstones in a queer chapter of literary history in translation. Strictly related to depictions of homosexual desires, I propose “queer decorum” as an approach that affects translation strategies and decisions, subsequently affecting the translated text as a result and somehow making its publication possible.
传统上,民族文学史中的酷儿方面一直被遮蔽,尽管它正在逐渐恢复,但翻译的影响迄今为止一直被忽视。以翻译成西班牙语并在阿根廷出版的英国现代主义小说为例,我认为翻译是走私的,故意挪用和重新定义了其他性欲望和性别身份,为当地文学进一步探索这些可能性开辟了空间。阿根廷20世纪40年代和50年代的翻译片段是重建文学酷儿模糊历史的关键,我关注的一个例子可能是最早的,丹顿·韦尔奇的《当我13岁时》的翻译,由《Sur》杂志的何塞·比安科译为“Cuando tenía trece años”,发表于1944年9月。这种翻译不是孤立的例子,而是在大众想象是规范性的异性恋的背景下,慢慢地改变了阿根廷文学的情感景观。这篇文章挖掘了这个鲜为人知的插曲,作为翻译文学史上一个奇怪篇章的第一个基石之一。与同性恋欲望的描述严格相关,我提出“酷儿礼仪”作为一种影响翻译策略和决策的方法,从而影响翻译文本,并在某种程度上使其出版成为可能。