Border writing in translation

the Spanish translations of woman hollering creek by the chicana writer Sandra Cisneros

Penelope Johnson

pp. 427-442

in: Jean Boase-Beier, Lina Fisher, Hiroko Furukawa (eds), The Palgrave handbook of literary translation, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

The Chicano borderlands, created as a result of the Mexican/US war in 1846–1848, have produced a rich hybrid literature that deconstructs the idea of homogeneous monolingual nations and cultures. In this case study Johnson focuses on two Spanish translations of Woman Hollering Creek (1991) by the Chicana author Sandra Cisneros carried out by two different translators who chose almost opposite techniques to deal with the multilingualism present in the source text: Érase un hombre, érase una mujer (de Hériz 1992) and El Arroyo de la Llorona (Valenzuela 1996). Using the theories of Bourdieu, Bakhtin and postcolonialism, the study explores the differences between both translations in the construction of the Chicano identity by comparing the techniques used to reflect or disregard this multilingualism.

Cited authors

Bachtin Michajl