3.9. Post-Dictatorship Memory in Translation: Transcultural Transmission, Circulation, Reception, and Transformation of Literature and Autofiction from Argentina and Chile
This panel (which will be held in Spanish) is positioned at the intersection of literary studies, transcultural memory studies, and research on post dictatorship memory in Argentina and Chile. It is organized by the research project Remembering and Translating Violent Pasts: Literary Translations as Media of Transcultural Memory, based at the University of Innsbruck and funded by the Austrian Science Fund. In recent years, the interplay between collective memory and interlingual translation has attracted increasing attention from scholars across various academic disciplines, including literary studies. The publication of the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory (ed. Deane Cox/Spiessens 2022) exemplifies the growing recognition of translation and memory as a distinct field of inquiry. While several recent works similarly investigate the role of translation in the transfer and circulation of memory narratives across linguistic, cultural, societal, and national boundaries, little attention has been paid, in this context, to literature from Latin America. Our panel explores the transmission, circulation, reception, and transformation of post dictatorship literature and autofiction related to the last dictatorships in Argentina and Chile. We approach translation as a complex, multi layered, and “multidirectional” (Rothberg) process, while remaining attentive to the specific translational practices at work within and between texts. This perspective allows us to address translational phenomena on multiple levels: those that occur during the creation of post dictatorship literature (e.g. the “translation” of individual and cultural memory into text), those that shape the poetics of such works (e.g. multilingualism or intertextuality as strategies for conveying mnemonic messages), and those that influence the actual translation of these texts into other languages, their circulation in new cultural and social contexts, and their reception by diverse audiences. In the latter case, the literary translator emerges as a key agent of (transcultural) memory, whose distinct role demands closer investigation and recognition.
Cecilia Rossi, British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia: Literary Translations as media of transcultural memory: literary translation and memory studies in dialogue
My paper examines the process of interlingual translation and its role in the transfer and circulation of memory narratives across linguistic, cultural, societal, and national boundaries in the context of post dictatorship literature in Argentina and Chile. The focus will be the translation process of a selection of stories from Félix Bruzzone’s seminal collection 76 (2007) and Lina Meruane’s Cercada (2000/ 2014) and will examine the translation strategies discussed and implemented by a group of translators (Spanish – English) working together in the literary translation workshops held at the International Literary Translation Summer School organised by the British Centre for Literary Translation (UEA) in the context of the AHRC (Open World Research Initiative- OWRI) project “Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community” led by the University of Manchester (2016-21). Some of the questions my paper will address are: What is the role of the literary translator when tasked with the translation of literary texts resulting from the experience of recent conflict? What can the discipline of memory studies gain from the process of making the translation process of post conflict literature visible? I will also address the ‘ethics of translation’ for translators working on these texts, as well as the more practical questions to do with what a literary translator needs to know when working in contexts which are difficult, conflict-ridden, multi-vocal and how they deal with these potentially difficult texts in the practice.
Andrea Linder, University of Innsbruck: “Continuing to Tell: Rupture, Continuation, and Continuity in Literature on the Last (Civic)-Military Dictatorships of Argentina and Chile and Their Circulation Through Translation”
This paper examines the literary reconstruction of memory in the context of the last (civic)-military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, its resonance within the second generation (Basile, 2022), and its circulation through translation. My analysis focuses on the concepts of rupture, continuation, and continuity, which are particularly significant in the production and transmission of memory. I propose that all stages of the complex process of creating, reconstructing, and circulating literary memory through translation are, at some level, shaped by dynamics of rupture, continuation, and/or continuity.
First, I explore how individual memory is shaped by a “moment of rupture – of disruption – that will turn into something memorable” (Jelin, 2017). To what extent can the act of remembering – the “work of memory” (Jelin, 2017) – whether individual or collective, be understood as a process of continuation or rupture? And how might rupture itself become the critical element that ensures the continuation of memory? Furthermore, I investigate how second-generation artists and writers can be seen as “bridge builders” between different spaces and times (linguistic, generational, and cultural) and examine the unique challenges faced by translators in their work of linguistic and cultural transmission.
Finally, I illustrate how the works of Mariana Eva Perez and Verónica Gerber Bicecci exemplify the productive potential of liminality and hybridity. By crossing forms, media, and structures, these authors create new and unexpected discourses and interpretations that can travel to new audiences through translation. It is precisely in these liminal and hybrid spaces that memory is reimagined, reconstructed, and extended across boundaries.
Ilse Logie, Ghent University: "Mar azul by Paloma Vidal: Superimposed Languages and Writings"
This paper proposes a reading of Mar azul (2012) by Paloma Vidal – a novel that forms part of the so-called corpus of the “children” (los “hijos”) – as an example of linguistic superimposition, in contrast to the dynamic of the substitution of the mother tongue that characterises, for instance, the work of Laura Alcoba. Born in Argentina, Vidal experienced her parents’ exile in Brazil from early childhood and has developed her literary career in Portuguese.
The narrator of Mar azul mirrors this gesture by reconstructing her life in Portuguese, using her father’s notebooks, written in Rioplatense Spanish, as a foundation. In the novel, there is no clear rupture between the two languages; rather, like a palimpsest, the language of the writing retains traces of the original tongue. This blurring of linguistic boundaries creates a sense of uncertainty in the narrative, which is imbued with inherited resonances and intertextual echoes of the Argentine literary tradition. This ambiguity extends to the novel’s formal structure, which is fragmentary and elliptical, reflecting the experience of displacement. From this poetics of deviation, an oblique register predominates: political violence is narrated tangentially.
If language is understood as a vehicle for intergenerational transmission (Brodzki, 2007), this process is altered when the language of writing differs from the language of lived experience. In the absence of the language left behind, the past is rearticulated through imagination, where that first language takes on a ghostly dimension. Thus, the mother tongue emerges as a site of memory that cannot be abandoned, becoming an object of mourning, longing, and fascination.
Claudia Jünke, University of Innsbruck: “Translating Memories, Translating Genre: Mariana Enríquez’s Nuestra parte de noche (2019) and Miguel Bonnefoy’s Héritage (2020)”
My paper examines two novels that engage with the crimes of the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, as well as other violent moments in the histories of both countries: Mariana Enríquez’s Nuestra parte de noche (2019) and Miguel Bonnefoy’s Héritage (2020). Both novels are characterised by a writing that draws on highly conventionalized generic and aesthetic forms: in the case of Enríquez, the genre of (fantastic) horror; in the case of Bonnefoy, the aesthetics of magical realism. In the first part of my presentation, I analyze the role of these conventionalized literary frameworks in constructing cultural memory within the original texts – written in Spanish (Enríquez) and French (Bonnefoy), respectively. In the second part, I turn to the translations of these works into languages from whose cultural contexts those conventions emerge: for Enríquez, English, with its rich tradition of Gothic literature and horror cinema; and for Bonnefoy, Spanish, a language strongly associated with the literature of magical realism. What role do these genre-specific and aesthetic conventions play as horizons of expectation that shape not only the reception of the texts but also the memories they articulate? How do these conventions enable and influence the transmission of memory across linguistic and cultural boundaries?
20260729T154520260729T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires3.9. Post-Dictatorship Memory in Translation: Transcultural Transmission, Circulation, Reception, and Transformation of Literature and Autofiction from Argentina and ChileSV403 (ART)MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
