Translating Ghosts: Reading "Cambio De Armas" and "Other Weapons" as Haunted Texts

• Published in: Chasqui 2008-11, Vol.37 (2), p.76-87
• Main Author: Kanost, Laura M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American literature; Argentine literature; Collective memory; Cultural heritage; Deconstruction; Electricity; Ethnicity; Ghost stories; Ghosts; Interpreters; Language translation; Literature; Metaphor; Power; Psychoanalysis; Rape; Sexual violence; Sociology; Theory; Torture; Translation; Translation studies; Valenzuela, Luisa (1938- ); Weapons; Writers
• ISSN: 0145-8973; 2327-4247

[...]Jill Suzanne Levine cites the ingrained perception of the dynamic between author and translator as similar to that of a rapist and his victim.2 As an alternative to such offensive analogies, the metaphor of the ghost is ideally suited to discussions of translation as a political practice intricately bound up in an ongoing multidirectional exchange of ideas. [...]a foreign text is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fixed only provisionally by any one translation [. . .] Within the context of English-language translations, a foreignizing trend could work against cultural imperialism by forcing readers to open up to learning about other cultures and languages rather than passively consuming homogenized imports all made to read as though they were made in the U.S.A. By the same token, foreignizing English-language translations run the risk of exoticizing the Other and reinforcing imperialistic patterns. If one ghostly function of the plot of "Cambio de armas" is to represent the intricacies of power relationships in the Guerra Sucia, "Other Weapons" is not entirely successful. Because of the change of language, the translation does not refer so obviously to the Guerra Sucia, since instead of speaking Argentine Spanish, the characters and narrator now speak in English.