Article,
Voces pol\'ıglotas, yoes h\'ıbridos e identidades ajenas: la traducción como paradigma del pensamiento para el modernismo
Polyglot Voices, Hybrid Selves and Foreign Identities: Translation as a Paradigm of Thought for Modernism, (2008)
Abstract
Modernism is generally defined as a major revolt against prevalent aesthetic traditions of the Western world and is usually associated with the cultural and social context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, when all forms of expression were coming under investigation and the relation of language to logic and reality became a central theme. Taking as a point of departure the notion of linguistic experiment as an essential element of literary modernism, this article proposes to re-evaluate the ideological implications of modernism s experimental poetics in the light of the modernist writers engagement with translation as mode of literary composition. Drawing from contemporary translation theories, the notion of translation is developed as a self-conscious interrogation of the nature and function of communication; accordingly, it is argued that this notion informs modernist epistemology. Through an examination of representative authors and texts, the essay demonstrates that a large number of modernist writers (many of them also translators) were foreigners who sought to express the articulation of alternative identities through a radically new language. Ultimately, the article explores the different ways in which translation may be used as an enlightening paradigm of thought for modernism. (A.)
