Gabriel García Márquez and the Worlding of Latin American Literature

Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-209
Author(s):  
Gabija Leonavičiūtė ◽  
Dovilė Kuzminskaitė

Summary Growing interest in Spanish-speaking countries in Lithuania leads to the increased number of translations of Spanish and Latin American literature. Therefore, it is important to analyse translations from Spanish into Lithuanian and vice versa to improve the quality of translation work. One of the most difficult elements to translate are culture-specific items that reveal cultural uniqueness. The novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez contains many culture-specific items related to Colombia, that could be difficult to translate. This article aims to analyse and compare translation strategies of culture-specific items from Spanish into Lithuanian, which were used in 1972 by Elena Treinienė and in 2017 by Valdas V. Petrauskas, to translate the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Firstly, this article defines the concepts of cultural elements and culture-specific items. It also discusses the classification of culture-specific items based on the works of Eugene Nida, Peter Newmark, Sergej Vlahov, Sider Florin and Laura Santamaria Guinot. Furthermore, this article describes translation strategies of culture-specific items emphasized by Amparo Hurtado Albir, Eirlys Davies, Georges L. Bastin and Pekka Kujamäki. In this research, culture-specific items are counted and described using Santamaria Guinot’s classification, which allows to claim that there are 69 different culture-specific items in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and they are reflected by 252 examples in the text. These culture-specific items are related with concepts of ecology, social structures, cultural institutions, social universe and material culture. The most common ones are culture-specific items from the category of ‘material culture’. The results of the research allow distinguishing six translation strategies, used in different frequency: transcription, equivalence of situations, actualisation, usage of exoticism, extension and explication, and omission. Both Lithuanian translators Treinienė and Petrauskas mainly used strategies of transcription and equivalence of situations. The analysis of the translation of culture-specific items was performed using the methods of quantitative, comparative, and descriptive translation analysis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Fatima Sabrina Rosa ◽  
Barbara Rosa

Resumo: Este ensaio tem por objetivo utilizar perspectivas discutidas em torno das teorias pós-modernas e pós-coloniais como aporte para estabelecer aproximações com a literatura latino-americana, especificamente, com a obra Crônica de uma morte anunciada, do colombiano Gabriel García Márquez. Essa proposta de aproximação surge da impressão causada pela obra no leitor, denotando traços do que poderia ser visto como uma perspectiva pós-moderna e pós-colonial sobre a história e sobre a própria escrita literária. Esses caminhos da questão “pós” podem ser percebidos em uma sensibilidade trágica, que alinha o texto aos debates pós-modernos, bem como na forma como o autor hibridiza a narrativa ao colocar na mesma “persona”, narrador, personagem e autor. As chamadas “histórias menores”, isto é, discussões acerca de temas importantes da crítica pós-colonial também estão presentes, em referências tangenciais à raça, territorialidade e gênero. Além dessas circunscrições mais visíveis sobre o “pós” na estrutura da crônica, este texto é uma tentativa de decodificar alguns símbolos utilizados pelo autor para ressignificar e deslocar certos pontos fixos da ficção e da história latino-americana.Palavras-chave: literatura latino-americana; trágico; pós-modernidade e pós-colonialidade.Abstract: This essay aims to use perspectives discussed on postmodern and postcolonial theories as a contribution to establish approximations with the Latin American literature, specifically with the Chronicle of a Death Foretold by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. This proposal of approximation arises from the impression that the García Márquez’ work provokes in the reader, denoting traces of what could be seen as a postmodern and postcolonial perspective on history and on literary writing itself. These paths of the “post” theory can be perceived in a tragic sensibility, which aligns the text to postmodern debates, as well as in the way the author hybridizes the narrative by placing the narrator, character and author in the same person. Also present in the book are the so-called “minor stories,” that is, discussions about the central postcolonial critique matters, such as issues about race, territoriality, and gender. In addition to these more visible circumscriptions about the “post” in the structure of the Chronicle, this text is an attempt to decode some symbols used by the author to resignify and dislocate certain fixed points of Latin American fiction and history.Keywords: Latin American literature; tragic; post-modernity and post-coloniality.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.


Chasqui ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Evelio Echevarría ◽  
Jack Child

1977 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 598
Author(s):  
Charles M. Tatum ◽  
Richard L. Jackson

Hispania ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 1026
Author(s):  
Gaston P. Fernandez ◽  
Richard L. Jackson

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