THE TRANSLATOR’S TASK: RECREATING THE TEXTUAL ATMOSPHERE OF ISLA COFRE MÍTICO BY EUGENIO FERNÁNDEZ GRANELL by Joseph Ellison Brockway APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Rainer Schulte, Chair ___________________________________________ Sean Cotter ___________________________________________ Charles Hatfield ___________________________________________ René Prieto Copyright 2019 Joseph Ellison Brockway All Rights Reserved THE TRANSLATOR’S TASK: RECREATING THE TEXTUAL ATMOSPHERE OF ISLA COFRE MÍTICO BY EUGENIO FERNÁNDEZ GRANELL by JOSEPH ELLISON BROCKWAY, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES - STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS December 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to first acknowledge Natalia Fernández Segarra, María Pita Ponte, Paula López Ojea, and the Fundación Eugenio Granell for their assistance and support. I would not have been able to complete my research without the access they granted to Granell’s personal archives and work. Thank you, María Pita Ponte, for your help with my research and for giving me a personal tour of the museum and Granell’s art collection that is not accessible to the public. I am also grateful for the Foundation’s permission to reproduce pages and images from the facsimile reproduction of the original 1951 Editorial Caribe publication of Isla cofre mítico. I would also like to thank Carmina Sanchez del Valle, whom I met at the Fundación in Galicia while conducting my research. Thank you for sharing stories about your mother’s experience studying under Granell in Puerto Rico. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my friends and family for enduring this long process with me. I would not have been able to do this without their constant support and encouragement. A special thanks to Lisa Jackson for her willingness to read over my work and for putting up with my constant questions about the English language . a headless man does not a horse thief make! Thank you, Neil, for constantly reminding me of how proud you are of my accomplishments and for sacrificing so much over these past nine years to support me in my academic pursuits. And thank you for struggling through difficult idiomatic expressions, especially in English! I want to thank my friends and colleagues in the School of Arts and Humanities who have helped me grow in many areas and have offered me guidance along the way, especially Shelby Vincent, Lourdes Molina, Sarah Valente, Laura Goldstein, and George Henson. iv I am grateful to my professors and committee members, Sean Cotter, Charles Hatfield, René Prieto, and Rainer Schulte. I am particularly thankful for the many seminars and workshops that I was able to take with them over the course of my doctoral studies. I appreciate Dr. Sean Cotter’s deep understanding of contemporary translation and his aid in helping me find my voice within the field of translation studies. I entered into my translation of Isla cofre mítico in one of Dr. Cotter’s translation workshops, and his feedback during that initial period set the foundation for a number of translation decisions and overall approaches as I worked through the text. He gently nudged me as I struggled through Oulipo translation exercises, a task that challenged me to think in creative ways to recreate sound and meaning, instilling in me the confidence I needed to overcome similar textual situations that I encountered on almost every page of my translation project. Without a doubt, I know that Dr. Cotter’s stimulating and forward- looking vision for the future of Translation Studies prepared me for the challenging task of translating Isla cofre mítico for my dissertation. I am thankful to Dr. Hatfield for sharing his knowledge of Latin American literature and for guiding me as I explored my interest in Puerto Rican literature. I am grateful for his encouraging words to help me overcome the challenges of completing a dissertation. Also, I want to express my joy in having discovered J. T. Mitchell’s Picture the Theory because of him. I am grateful for having been able to study under Dr. Prieto. I have gained so much from his deep understanding of Surrealism and guidance on how to perform a close reading of a text. Dr. Prieto’s approach to working through the language and ideas of a text completely changed my understanding of literature, writing, linguistic and grammatical nuances, and how to draw meaning from punctuation. These skills not only guided me through my interpretation and translation of v Isla cofre mítico, they changed the direction of my own poetry. I am encouraged by his recognition of my intellectual strengths, and his push to focus on those strengths instills confidence in my abilities. I would like to give special recognition to Dr. Rainer Schulte for serving as my dissertation committee chair and for believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself. I would not have completed this project without his patience, encouragement, and humor. I cherish the conversations we had during the long hours we spent working together to prepare this manuscript, as well his life stories that he shared with me. I will hold on to those moments eternally. I would also like to thank his wife, Sandra Schulte. The generosity of the Schultes is beyond belief. August 2019 vi THE TRANSLATOR’S TASK: RECREATING THE TEXTUAL ATMOSPHERE OF ISLA COFRE MÍTICO BY EUGENIO FERNÁNDEZ GRANELL Joseph Ellison Brockway, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Rainer Schulte In this dissertation, I introduce the Spanish painter, poet, essayist, and novelist Eugenio Fernández Granell and his seminal surrealist work, Isla cofre mítico. Granell was born in Galicia, Spain, in 1912 and can easily be described as a key figure within the surrealist movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Isla cofre mítico was Granell’s first published book, and it is the fullest published discussion about André Breton’s short work Martinique charmeuse de serpents, giving followers of Surrealism a deeper understanding of Breton’s time in Martinique. When you first pick up Granell’s book Isla cofre mítico, you are immediately struck by the cover’s fantastic, mythical creature composed of vibrant colors and amorphous features. The image is a pictorial representation of Granell’s island book that is Isla cofre mítico. The book represents the act of translation in all senses of the word. In it, Granell translates his violent experiences from the Spanish Civil War into words and images. He translates the foreign sights and sounds of the Caribbean geography and culture as he tries to make sense of the place that becomes his temporary home. He translates his experience of the world in the aftermath of the Second World War. For vii Granell, the aesthetic vision of André Breton is the only mode of expression capable of translating his experiences and thoughts into visual images and words. Isla cofre mítico is a visual, textual, and auditory experiment in translation for the original author and for me, the translator. In Isla cofre mítico, Granell translates the soundscapes of the island through the sounds created in and between words. He translates French passages from André Breton’s Martinique charmeuse de serpents into Spanish, as well as passages from other literary texts and historical documents. He translates images into words, and he juxtaposes words to produce sound and create meaning. How does one approach the translation of such a complex work? This dissertation presents an analysis of the complex textual environment of Granell’s text as well as my interpretive act of translation. I present a number of considerations for the translation process, including approaches to recreating complex patterns of repetition and textual musicality. I highlight the problematic role of textual ambiguity created by the author as translator from French into Spanish and my role as translator from Spanish into English. I also bring in translators who have contributed to the discussion of translation as an act of violence, and I attempt to demonstrate that Granell challenges previous notions of translation violence through his clashes of textual juxtapositions. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....………………………………………………………………….…. iv ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………….…….… vii LIST OF FIGURES………….………………………………………………………...………… xi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 EUGENIO FERNÁNDEZ GRANELL AND ISLA COFRE MÍTICO ..................15 Granell: The Artist and Writer ...........................................................................................16 Isla cofre mítico: The Work ...............................................................................................21 CHAPTER 3 GRANELL AND SURREALISM .........................................................................29 CHAPTER 4 THE SURREALIST CONCEPT OF ANALOGY IN ISLA COFRE MÍTICO........38 CHAPTER 5 INTERTEXTUAL CONNECTIONS IN ISLA COFRE MÍTICO .........................51 Two Islands Dialoguing .....................................................................................................56 Transcending Time and Space ...........................................................................................63 Constructing an Oral Tradition ..........................................................................................66