Reconstructing Seville: Translating Eduardo Del Campo’S Capital Sur
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Varadi 1 Reconstructing Seville: Translating Eduardo del Campo’s Capital Sur By Hannah Varadi An honors thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature Faculty advisors: Prof. Sebastiaan Faber (Hispanic Studies) Prof. Azita Osanloo (Creative Writing) Oberlin College May 2015 Varadi 2 Table of Contents Introduction for the reader...........................................................................................................3 Overview and plot summary................................................................................................3 Background..........................................................................................................................7 Translated passages.....................................................................................................................17 Prologue, pages. 7-14.........................................................................................................17 The director and Federico..................................................................................................21 Pages 17-20............................................................................................................21 Pages 68-70............................................................................................................23 Pages 70-73............................................................................................................25 Pages 74-76............................................................................................................27 Pages 89-91............................................................................................................29 Pages 96-97, 100-101.............................................................................................30 Pages 108-111........................................................................................................32 The film audition, pages 120-129......................................................................................34 Salvador, the cadavers, and Juanca....................................................................................38 Pages. 170-174, 185-187........................................................................................38 Pages. 169-170, 187-190........................................................................................42 Pages. 217-222.......................................................................................................45 Feria de Abril, pages. 320-334 (excerpts)..........................................................................47 Falling action.....................................................................................................................53 Pages 354-359........................................................................................................53 Pages 392-402 (excerpts).......................................................................................57 Pages 406-410........................................................................................................61 Analysis of translation process and theories.............................................................................65 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................82 Appendix: Original Spanish-language versions of the texts....................................................84 Varadi 3 Overview Capital Sur is a 2011 Spanish-language novel by the journalist Eduardo del Campo Cortés (1972- ), currently a staff writer at the Andalusian branch of the national newspaper El Mundo. Set in Seville in 1994 (although it was written between 1998 and 2011), the book follows the daily struggles of a group of university students while also painting a picture of the city in a specific era of disillusionment, isolation, and economic crisis. Several of the main characters are modeled on del Campo, his wife, and their friends as they were in the 1990’s. Other characters and situations are loosely based on real people and events that the author had investigated in the 1990’s, but which he had had to leave out of his articles at the time. (Varadi 27). However, del Campo admits that the author stand-in character of Diego is actually not the protagonist of the novel (Varadi 31). The true “protagonist,” in my view, is the communal consciousness of the city itself. Throughout this project, I will work on acknowledging how my own perspective and motivations influence my approach to translating this work. While studying in Seville in Spring 2014, I was planning both the final project for my Magazine Writing course, and the thesis for this Honors Project proposal. Following a professor’s suggestion that I try reading Capital Sur, I eventually decided to interview Eduardo del Campo and his wife, Cristina, in order to prepare a feature story that compares the Seville of the novel with the real Seville of 1994, and contrasts both of these with the Seville of 2014. I was intrigued by the novel’s huge narrative scope, its vivid depictions of the city, and its self-commentary on the nature of journalism. Here was a meaty work that would be more than enough for a translation-based, nonfiction honors project, and which forced me to reflect further on my time in Seville; furthermore, I learned how personal this novel, born of years of working with his fellow sevillanos, was and is for Eduardo. Varadi 4 Plot summary and major themes The novel is narrated almost entirely in chronological order, with several subplots that are juxtaposed and often narratively linked. Most of the passages are told in relatively straightforward narration, but a few are escenas seguidas (continuous scenes), which convey a more poetic tone, and a couple of passages are even less conventional. Note that the seguidas are almost exclusively narrated either by Diego or by an omniscient voice. The juxtaposition of the subplots supports the novel’s major themes, thus forming an overarching “plot” in which the city of Seville is itself the protagonist. To help explain this overall “plot,” I will summarize first the book’s major themes and then its major subplots. First, Campo expresses how one can alternately love one’s hometown and feel constrained by it, especially in a time of economic recession and general public pessimism. This is why the college students in the novel are shown agonizing over their economic futures, and why the plot features impoverished, marginalized people such as a heroin addict and prostitute. Another major theme revolves around communal experience and communal memory. As I will discuss below in the background section, del Campo is working within his own cultural framework to reflect on this theme, such as when he portrays the shared emotional catharsis of a celebratory crowd during a film audition. He also examines the difficulty of trying to preserve the essence” or “memory” of a person, especially through journalistic or artistic means. Finally, he addresses the common trap that Americans (and other foreigners) tend to fall into when visiting Spain: that of exoticizing a place without truly engaging with it for what it is. Although these themes are obviously cemented within a particular culture and a particular historical Varadi 5 setting, they contain universal elements which any reader can grasp—and I suspect that the author realized that fact, as well. Diego, the “false protagonist” mentioned above, is a university student who works at the floundering newspaper Diario de Noticias. As the novel progresses, he goes apartment hunting with his girlfriend Tina, reports on several key events around the city that play into the novel’s major themes, and generally observes his friends’ lives going on around him. For example, an American film director tours Seville to find locations for a new blockbuster and recruits scores of extras from among local residents, including several of Diego’s friends. These scenes are intercut with the misadventures of Diego’s friend Federico as he bounces from job to job, thus contrasting a foreign and local perspective on the city. Later on, Diego and Tina both engage in projects involving creating profiles of others. Diego writes a feature story profiling Salvador, a former heroin addict and AIDS patient, and tries to reconcile doing the man’s story justice with his own guilt over their differences in economic status. Meanwhile, Tina and her Fine Arts classmates work at the Department of Medicine dissecting corpses, in order to build complete anatomical molds from them. This leads Tina to contemplate the difficulties of trying to portray a person’s “essence” through visual means, be it through sculpture or through this anatomy project. At one point, the novel briefly jumps back to 1974, approximately twenty years before the rest of the plot’s events. A pregnant teenager named Antonia flees from her small village in a province of Seville to the city center, where she gives birth, abandons her baby, and becomes a prostitute to survive. Her subplot contains graphic depictions of prostitution in Spain in the 90’s, and it is important because it highlights the fact that she, like Salvador, falls into the category of marginalized people whose lives Diego (and his counterpart Eduardo) is trying to portray. Varadi 6 A later subplot about Juanca, another of Diego and Tina’s friends who struggles