Tuning In to Characters: Translating Mónica Ojeda's La desfiguración Silva

Developments in narrative theory have seen a burgeoning of scholarly interest in the mimetic thickness of characters in fiction. Previously, structuralists were suspicious of the emotional involvement that comes with viewing characters as possible people, which may explain in part why character analysis in the practice of literary translation has been studied so seldom. My thesis seeks to address this gap, using Marie-Laurie Ryan’s ‘world model’ of characters. It seeks to argue that character analysis can be a powerful tool for translators of literary fiction. It can assist them to shape their translation strategy and define their translation choices. I argue as much through an approach that interweaves theoria and praxis. I devote half my thesis to a translation of Mónica Ojeda’s archival novel, La desfiguración Silva. In carrying out this translation, I mobilise character analysis in several ways: to formulate my preliminary translation strategy; to render voice; and to nuance other, genre-based decisions. In the process, I develop what I refer to throughout my critical commentary as an ethics of disfigurement, which recalls not only the source text through which this ethics was developed, but also Antoine Berman’s ‘textual deformation’. By way of this allusion, I cast disfigurement in a contrary posture, spotlighting the gains that works stand to accrue when they are recreated by other people in other cultures. My translation is full of deformations; it is also, if it has succeeded in what I set out to do, respectful of the work’s ‘shapeless polylogic’. Engaging with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translations and theories helped me envision this apparently paradoxical state as one I wished to strive for.

Click here to download the critical commentary of this PhD thesis.