Figurations of the writer-translator: Jorge Luis Borges, Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz, Juan Villoro e Fabio Morábito

• Grant number: 15/03799-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: June 01, 2015
• End date: May 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Agreement: Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES)
• Principal Investigator: Ana Cecilia Arias Olmos
• Grantee: Livia Fernanda de Paula Grotto
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The objective of this project is to explore metadiscourses about translation produced by Spanish American writers who also acted as translators: Alfonso Reyes, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Juan Villoro and Fabio Morábito. They all wrote essays on literary translation in which directly or indirectly they require for themselves the figure of a translator. Borges and Morábito, furthermore, elaborated short-stories in which translators are main characters. Among the questions that guide this research we might include: which are the relationships between creative writing and translation and how they develop? The emergence of metadiscourse on translation is consubstantial to the effacement of the boundaries of literary genre in modernity? Is there any model that inspires the writing regarding the translation or that helps writers to compose the figurations of themselves as writers-translators? To what extent the topoi appearing in these discussions on translation are retaken, noting continuities and discontinuities in relation to tradition? Those questions are anchored, above all, in the evolution of the value assigned to the translator's figure, which has passed in recent times from invisibility to protagonism of novels and short stories, becoming, equally, the main theme of essays. (AU)