LOCATING WOMEN'S WRITING AND TRANSLATION IN THE AMERICAS IN THE AGE OF LATINAMERICANISMO AND GLOBALIZATION

NORMA KLAHN

A bridge (made of stories, ideas, theories) is knowledge. It is public; it is communal: it is where our paths converge.

—GLORIA ANZALDÚA, This Bridge Called My Back

Women's writing in Latin/Latina America—that of major figures who emerged after the 1970s, many of whom consolidated their work in the 1980s and 1990s, and who were joined by a younger generation at the turn of the century—has been a site actively marked by gender, but where questions of class, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and generation have been inexorably present. Latin/Latina American women's writings, I suggest, represented a major shift that defined them as both products and producers of what has been called the cultural turn, a defining critical moment that deconstructed the centrality of modernist epistemologies and the binary and hierarchical categories that sustained them. Center–periphery, elite–popular, male–female opposites were critiqued in the postmodernist turn as constructed antinomies that upheld hegemonic power relations privileging Anglo-Euro-centrism, patriarchal structures, and an aestheticist view of the literary (read: nonpolitical). These writings (testimonios, autobiographical fictions, poetry, essays, novels) linked to political mobilizations and social movements have been fundamental in the theorizing and construction of a sui generis practice. Latin American and Latina feminists readapted feminist liberation discourses from the West, resignifying them in relation to self-generated practices and theorizations of gender empowerment that have emerged from their lived experiences, particular histories and contestatory politics. Their interventions range from denouncing sexist practices, exclusionary nation-state structures, and xenophobic ideologies to state-sponsored violence and authoritarian regimes. From these loci, women writers can be seen as actively participating in the larger global project of an inclusive democratization process demanding full equality and dignity for women and other excluded minorities.

Whether as storytelling (fiction) or life writing, in its multiple forms, Latin American and Latina feminist work constitute poetic and politicized interventions that have opened a discursive space for self-awareness, for self-inclusion in nation-state projects, and for their role in an increasingly globalized world. In their desire to redefine and reinvent the nation-state, their writing opened a symbolic space in the 1970s, forging new political identities and subjectivities. As interventions/inventions, the prolific writings of Latin American/ Latina women of the latter part of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century represent a feminist practice that persistently addresses, especially since the 1990s, the endured disparities and unequal power relations sustained by hegemonic discourses and neoliberal policies that have shown to be—since the Great Recession of 2008—bankrupt. Their writings continue to situate them as central players in processes that point to the need to enact and strengthen renewed democracies.

Given these recent developments, this chapter is a critical attempt at locating and understanding the journeys of feminist literary (broadly conceived) texts, their travels and translations, their readings and misreadings. This is not an exhaustive list nor a detailed analysis, but a mapping of several authors and texts that might illustrate the particular ways women's writings, grounded in distinct temporalities and cultural and historical legacies, circulate beyond (outside) and within (inside) their localities. My reading identifies the writings (testimonios, autobiographical fictions, essays, novels) as poetic/political interventions or, if you wish, aesthetic/ethical ones linked to contestatory practices.

Redefining the Nation: Testimonio as Mobilizing Texts

The shift that occurred internationally in the 1960s and 1970s as civil rights and social movements based on group identifications fought for recognition and built transnational alliances in solidarity with others based on shared experiences of disenfranchisement can be seen, I suggest, as a postnationalist moment. I understand it as constituting a critique of the politics of the modern nation-state whose nationalist discourses of an imagined monocultural community were, in effect, based on exclusionary practices and universalist assumptions of being. This paradigm shift that brought about gender and ethnic awareness produced texts in the post-1968 period in Latin America of a different kind than those of the modern period that were generated by the internationally acclaimed, and mainly male, writers of the Latin American avant-garde and "boom." Their critical texts, foregrounding questions of national identity, no doubt opened the space for translating and marketing Latin American literature worldwide. Their translators understand the complexity of their project and note what they consider most important as they transfer meaning from the source text into the target language to render as close as possible a parallel relationship of their acknowledged "rewriting" of the source. I mention some who have been duly recognized. For Gregory Rabassa, central to his translation is transferring the culture (1991, 44); for Edith Grossman, conveying the original meaning (Salisbury 1993, 11); for Susanne Jill Levine, capturing the voice (Estrada 2010, 7). Value was placed in the ability of the translated text to reproduce the original for a domestic audience. As their translations reinterpreted the source text for English-English speaking audiences, they familiarized and transmitted to readers the author's rendition of essentialized national cultures. The poststructuralist turn that deconstructed absolutes saw individuals or collectivities as fluid, thus privileging the instability of meaning, informing new modes of engaging translation that shifted the focus of attention to broader issues of context, history, and convention and not just to debating the meaning of faithfulness in translation (Bassnett 2007, 13).

Translation studies began, Susan Bassnett states, to "pay attention to the ideological implications of translation and the power relationships that are involved as a text is transferred from one context to another ... and where the function that translation is meant to fulfill in the target culture enables that translator to make certain choices" (2007, 14). This, says Lawrence Venuti, moved theorists toward an ethical reflection: "When motivated by this ethical politics of difference, the translator seeks to build a community with foreign cultures, to share an understanding with and of them and to collaborate on a project founded on that understanding to allow it to revise and develop domestic values and institutions. The very impulse to seek a community abroad suggests that the translator wishes to extend or complete a particular domestic situation, to compensate for a defect in the translating language and literature, in the translating cultures" (2000, 469).

For Latin America, one can say that post-1968 and post-1989 realities and politics and international feminist movements, both in dialogue and disruption, brought about shifts crucial to the collaboration of women across borders that assured the traveling of women, their writings, and translations. If early paradigms adhered to stable notions of womanhood, the genre of testimonio, bringing in ethnicity and class, was a destabilizing force that sharply pointed to the need of different translating/translocating theories and practices. The shift from a surrealist to a realist aesthetic that prompted a return to the referent, whether by engaging in testimonio or novelas testimonio (nonfiction novels), was brought about by transformed realities (civil rights movements) that generated transformed expressive venues, which could not but point to the importance of contexts. The particular social/political realities from which the new texts emerged made clear that earlier translating practices that were source text–oriented, and focused only on felicitous linguistic translation and transference, were no longer tenable. In the case of post-1968 testimonio or literary texts from Latin America that privileged the recording of witnessed realities as political critique, translators had to rethink strategies that would responsibly transfer not only the cultural content but the intended goals of the source text to the target culture.

Translation, say Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau, "maintains an apriori dialogue between outside–inside of cultures, languages, histories," and that we practice translation each time we theorize connection (2007, 6). In that case, we suggest, that Domitila Barrios de Chungara anticipated and participated in the shifts that occurred in rethinking translating practices when in 1975 in the first un international meeting on the rights of women, held in Mexico City, she confronted and corrected Betty Friedan's call for an international sisterhood by insisting on the specificity of class historical experiences in particular sites. A watershed encounter, it made clear, says Karin Monasterios, that the condition of possibilities for feminism in Bolivia, a nation with a large indigenous population, "produce identidades específicas de género y formas sui generis de patriarcado ... a partir de la condición colonial y periférica del pais" (produces sui generis identities of gender and patriarchy given colonial and peripheral condition of the country) (2007, 129).

This ethnic/gender paradigm critiquing colonial patriarchal structures found, in the emergence and practice of testimonio, a vehicle for expressing dissension and human rights abuses and establishing community. The genre, mediated by Western intellectuals in solidarity with the individual whose voice represented a collectivity, was meant to provoke immediate political responses. In the crisis of traditional/modern ethnography that was critiqued for objectifying the "other" in the 1970s, the politically urgent interventions of the testimonios of Domitila Barrios de Chungara in 1977 and that of Rigoberta Menchú in 1983 were successful in their travels and translations. In the case of Domitila Barrios, a miner's housewife turned activist, her testimony served as a catalyst for the hunger strikes that followed and brought down the military dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in Bolivia. The result of Menchú's testimony led to the recognition of the indigenous subject without rights that became a UN concern, so much so that in 1993, the decade of indigenous peoples was proclaimed for 1995 to 2004.

These testimonios were working toward the systematic transformation of structures rooted deeply and connected to what Anibal Quijano calls the "coloniality of power," defined as the space where a conflict of knowledges and structures of power occur (1997). I understand this as the ways state, church, and political social elites transposed/imposed and finally negotiated a hierarchical structure that worked in complicated ways to ensure the hegemony of patriarchal colonial powers, still very much in sight and in situ. To understand this "coloniality of power" means also to comprehend the unequal traveling and translation of feminist practices, theories and texts, and their reception. The testimonios by Rigoberta and Domitila made clear the untranslatability of Western feminism (not necessarily understood as a place on a map), pointing to the differentiated projects at work that positioned women differently in Latin America in accordance with their ethnic, class, sexual, religious, historical and political situatedness, and even generational affiliation and that deconstructed any essentializing that posited "woman" as a universal category.

These represented interesting cases in which the protagonists' oral histories are already translations/transferences from their indigenous languages and transculturated communities into variants of Spanish. The language of empire, that the ethnographers, as mediating facilitators, then rewrote and reproduced, and that in turn found English translators, ended as critique and in solidarity with their political projects. For Francesca Miller, what distinguished the work on and by Latin American women, especially that of feminist scholars, was a commitment to Freyrian concientización, and the need to collect and distribute more accurate information on women's lives, a basic premise of the United Nations Decade for Women, 1976–85 (Miller 1991, 231). Once the testimonies of Domitila and Rigoberta were translated—by Victoria Ortiz (Chungara and Viezzer 1978) and by Ann Wright (Menchú and Burgos-Debray 1984), respectively—informed women reviewers ensured their circulation by contextualizing the texts and rendering them intelligible to wider audiences. A case in point was the review by Nirmala Banerji (1981), who brought in comparable contexts such as those of English coal miners in the nineteenth century, the story/film Norma Rae in the United States, and most interestingly drew parallels between poor women in Bolivia and India, positing a global South connection. In the case of reviews for Rigoberta's story, in later editions, Linda Larson states its importance for feminist and indigenous politics and women's cultural roles (1994, 106), whereas Ximena Bunster signals its contribution to women's and human rights studies (1985, 12). In most cases, the reviews do not address the processes of translation. Banerji offers a one-line comment that the translation "misses out on the earthiness and the originality of Domitila's dialect" (Banerji 1981, 1653). It seems most reviewers were engaged in constructing interest around the texts and building community, rather than attending to the technicalities of transference.

The translocated testimonio of Rigoberta found felicitous readings, and also misreadings, disregarding the long line of literatura de denuncia, a genre of denouncement that from Bartolomé de Las Casas's Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) to testimonio calls for urgent action, privileging rhetorical strategies rather than "facts" to capture the racism and atrocities being experienced. Anthropologist David Stoll's insistence on an empiricist reading from the generic conventions of journalist documentation was in fact seeking equivalences between the origin (reality) and the text (constructed reality) in "modern" terms, searching for a faithful reproduction rather than what the text was trying to achieve—the continued existence for the community being destroyed and the transmission of the story to guarantee the first. In an important book that spoke directly to the subject of "translating" Latin America culturally and linguistically, Javier Sanjinés alerted us to the generic difference that Stoll's cultural misreading represented as other issues came into play, that is the poetic/ political perspective that privileged a collective identity not as "an ancestral reconciliation, but a cultural and political practice necessary for future survival (1991, 186). Stoll had reduced otherness to sameness and used similar judgment tools in his (mis)reading rather than understanding the appeal of the narrative to human rights abuses that were foregrounding questions of ethics rather than accuracy. An understanding of colonialism's legacies could have rendered an ethical response to alterity.