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THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH, ITALIAN, AND PORTUGUESE CELEBRATED AUTHORS, DISTINGUISHED TRANSLATORS, AND ME CHRISTOPHER ABRAHAM SPRING 2020 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in Spanish and English with honors in Spanish Reviewed and approved* by the following: Krista Brune Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish Thesis Supervisor John Lipski Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Linguistics Honors Adviser * Electronic approvals are on file. i ABSTRACT This thesis combines translation practice and translation theory. With regards to practice, I first selected four short stories from some of the most celebrated Latin American authors of the twentieth century–Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante–and then translated these stories from Spanish into English. For the second half of the project, I performed a short literature review of writings on translation theory and practice. These readings informed my opening translator’s note that both presents a personal philosophy on translation and also argues for the importance of retranslation. I consider this thesis to be a creative project that presents four original translations and an analysis that reflects on the practice of translation itself. I designed this project to learn more Spanish, read more short stories by celebrated Spanish-language authors, and continue to practice translating. By the end of the thesis, I wanted to have gained a better awareness of the translator, the reader, and the craft that comes between the two. While reading and reflecting on the practice of translation, I came across hard questions concerning not only translation itself, but also language and literature more broadly. I have done my best to study the paths of distinguished authors and translators, and I am still trying to figure out how to do business here along the way. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... iii Chapter 1 Translator’s Note ......................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 “One of These Days”................................................................................... 9 Chapter 3 “The Intruder” ............................................................................................. 12 Chapter 4 “April is the Cruelest Month” ..................................................................... 16 Chapter 5 “Stale Cake” ................................................................................................ 22 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 26 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you, Professor Margaret Blue, for teaching me the fundamentals of translation. I would have never started this project without you. And thank you, Dr. Krista Brune, for taking a chance on someone you had never met before and agreeing to become my supervisor. Over these last two semesters, you have taught me more than I can say, and without your knowledge and guidance, this project would never have benefitted from translation theory. Thank you for the careful feedback on each of these stories, for taking the time to meet with me every other week, and for the many words of encouragement along the way. 1 Chapter 1 Translator’s Note Restaurants, closed. Schools, online. Parks, caution taped. Stadiums, empty. Anything that gives people space to gather has been shut down because of the pandemic, and any reason for people to come together has been postponed, at the very least. In the year of the coronavirus pandemic, when family members are just as much of a threat to each other as friends, neighbors, and strangers, we are learning how fast the world crumbles when people cannot come together safely. We are learning how much people around the world depend on each other not just for good business, but also for security, happiness, opportunity, and hope. These are not the best circumstances for maintaining relationships, much less starting new ones. When I started writing this first chapter from my parents’ house under official stay-at-home orders, I became aware of perhaps the most important reason that I started this project one year ago. Lisa Sternlieb, one of my English professors at Penn State, always says that the writer should take the reader on a journey. Sometimes, the journey feels more like a much-needed vacation. Through stories, characters, and words, the author can teach readers about another culture, share emotions, communicate ideas, and demonstrate how people relate to one another. Interestingly enough, these are some of the very things that humans can do just fine when they come together in person. When they cannot, literature can perform as a sort of substitute for the time being. During this time of social distancing, when people are still desperate for social interactions, stories are windows through which the reader can see another person, whether they be fictional characters or the writers themselves. This was my desire when I started this project one year ago: to watch and study the minds of some of the most celebrated authors from recent history. I simply wanted a reason to spend time with Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. I wanted to learn more about not just who they were and 2 who they continue to be for so many readers, but about how they wrote. So, I picked out some of their short stories. I read them and tried my best to understand them. And then I did something that brings the reader closer to the author than anything else can. I translated them. Before introducing the stories and the authors themselves, I want to share my understanding of this difficult, mysterious, and ultimately elusive practice called translation. Although most of my thoughts are nothing new to the discipline of translation studies, they represent a patchwork of my own selections and interpretations of readings from other writers and researchers that impacted me throughout this process, helped me figure out what I was thinking myself, and changed how I understand translation. I reflected on the practice after translating the stories themselves; however, this research certainly informed the choices that I made during the stages of rewriting and fine tuning. Edith Grossman, a celebrated contemporary translator of Don Quijote1 and El amor en los tiempos de cólera2, has influenced my thinking on what translators do more than anyone else. In her book Why Translation Matters, Grossman maintains that the translator does something very similar to the reader who listens closely enough to hear the author’s voice. She specifically compares the translator to a “careful reader” (9). Besides understanding the meaning of the words on the page and following along with the story, this “careful reader” picks up on those things that may escape someone who simply reads for pleasure, including sound, nuance, rhythm, and tone. While the more casual reader may notice and feel the effects of these things, the translator takes the further step to consider them separately, and then communicates the whole of these impressions through the translation. Sometimes, this process feels cold and mechanical–a trading away of magic for the chance to see the moving parts underneath. Similar to the dentist preparing his instruments from the story “One of These Days” (see page 9), translators hope that some of the warmth remains once the elements are taken far away from the source of heat. 1 Don Quixote (Grossman, 2005) 2 Love in the Time of Cholera (Grossman, 1989) 3 This image introduces two of the most fundamental questions regarding translation: how much can translators really bring with them to the target language and culture? And what is the difference between originals and translations? Since translators cannot just perform a “simple process of linguistic transfer” (Bassnett 2), there simply has to be some degree of freedom that comes with translating. Translation studies scholar Susan Bassnett writes that every theory of translation differs on how much freedom the translator should have (6). Gregory Rabassa, an American translator from Spanish and Portuguese most famous for bringing Cien años de soledad3 to English readers, encourages the translator to remember that languages can only “approach” rather than “reproduce” each other (20). In his celebrated essay “The Translator’s Task,” German writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin advises that originals and translations only share as much in common as a tangent line and a circle (82). The American translator of poetry and leading figure in translation studies Lawrence Venuti acknowledges the misguided Western tendency to simply grade translations based on how “fluently” they pass for the originals themselves (Invisibility 1). Rabassa, Benjamin, and Venuti would agree that translations can never perfectly match the originals, no matter how much readers and critics want them to. When there are no right answers, there can only be choices. In line with these earlier theorists and translators, I think the translator does create something new. Originals and translations are fundamentally different for the same reason that second sets of footprints are never exactly the same as the first ones. No matter how carefully someone tries to cover his or