Description
Book SynopsisCannibal translators digest, recombine, transform, and trouble their source materials. Isabel Gomez makes the case for this model of literary production by excavating a network of translation projects in Latin America that includes canonical writers of the twentieth century.
Trade Review“Gómez’s hugely erudite, multidisciplinary study of translation in Latin America--which finds theoretical sources not only in translation studies but also in anthropology, philosophy, Latin American studies, and other fields--brilliantly decolonizes, decenters, contests, and undoes prevailing paradigms. Gómez pushes back on translation studies’ Anglocentric tendencies by focusing primarily on translations between Spanish and Portuguese, and pushes boundaries in other directions, as well, not limiting her analyses to the printed word but including songs, graphic design, and even, in the final chapter (which redefines translation once again), digital media from Augusto de Campos’s Instagram account.” - Esther Allen, translator of
Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto
“Cannibalism has been a provocative metaphor for translation, especially in Isabel C. Gómez’s fascinating study. Through her close readings, Gómez analyzes the vital function of mutual translations or transcreations among great poets and translators in Spanish, Portuguese, and English as a gift, or an act of literary reciprocity.” - Suzanne Jill Levine, author of
The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American FictionTable of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Thirteen Theses on Cannibal Translation
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Unrequited Gifts and Perilous Translations
- Chapter 2: Belated Encounters between Latin American Translators
- Chapter 3: Intersectional Translation, Gendered Authority, and Biographical Positionality
- Chapter 4: Translingual Editing for a Latin American Canon at Biblioteca Ayacucho
- Chapter 5: Approximation, Untranslation, and World Literature as Heteronym
- Conclusion: Cannibal Translation Futures
- Bibliography
- Notes
