Journal of Romance Studies

Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio and the work of translation

Between the local and the global

Journal of Romance Studies (2022), 22, (2), 217–235.

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2022.12
Language
English
Pages
19

Abstract

The subject of Alarcón’s English language novels is identified without difficulty in publicity materials as deeply Peruvian and yet the marketing also presents him as a ‘World’ writer. I explore how naming where Alarcón’s writing is ‘from’ and where it is going relates to the place of Latin American culture globally. Working with the idea that literature should have a ‘place’, I examine the politics of (self)translation in Alarcón with reference to the period of armed internal conflict in Peru (1980-2000) to argue that an understanding of (self)translation as a process can contribute to our idea of what World Literature is and what national literatures are from a specifically Latin American perspective. In an interplay between foreign and domestic that differs from the more familiar strategies of codeswitching in Latinx writing, Alarcón both enables and resists the translation of other parts of the world onto Peru/Latin America.

Access Token

FormatOnline article

£25.00
READ THIS ARTICLE
References
Full Text
PDF
If you have private access to this content, please log in with your username and password here

Works cited

Agüero, José Carlos (2015) Los rendidos. Sobre el don de perdonar (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos). Google Scholar

Aixelá, Javier Franco (1996) ‘Culture-specific items in translation’, Translation, power, subversion 8: 52-78. Google Scholar

Alarcón, Daniel (2005) ‘What kind of Latino am I?’ Salon.com, 24 May 2005 >https://www.salon.com/2005/05/24/alarcon/>. Google Scholar

Alarcón, Daniel (2008) Lost City Radio: A Novel (London: Harper Perennial). Google Scholar

Alonso, Carlos J. (2008) The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Google Scholar

Aparicio, F.R. and S. Chávez-Silverman (1997) Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Dartmouth: University Press of New England). Google Scholar

Appiah, Kwame Anthony (1993) ‘Thick Translation’, Callaloo 16.4: 808-819. Google Scholar

Apter, Emily S. (2006) Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Google Scholar

Apter, Emily S. (2013) Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso). Google Scholar

Arana, Marie (2006) ‘Daniel Alarcón’, The Washington Post, 23 July 2006 >https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/2006/07/23/daniel-alarc243/619944ea-e391-4c3b-8c19-b73c504be892/>. Google Scholar

Borges, Jorge Luis (1957) ‘El escritor Argentino y la tradición’, in Discusión (Buenos Aires: Emecé), 151-162. Google Scholar

Cassin, B., Apter, E., Lezra, J., and Wood, M. (eds) (2014) Dictionary of untranslatables: A philosophical lexicon, vol. 35 (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press). Google Scholar

Castillo, Debra A. (2005) Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press). Google Scholar

Céspedes, Diógenes, Silvio Torres-Saillant, and Junot Díaz (2000) ‘Fiction is the Poor Man’s Cinema: An Interview with Junot Díaz’, Callaloo 23.3: 892-907. Google Scholar

Crystal, David (2003) English as a Global Language, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Google Scholar

Das, Amrita, Kathryn Quinn-Sánchez, and Michele Shaul (2018) Contemporary U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish: Straddling Identities (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Google Scholar

Diccionario de la Real Academia Española. Web. Google Scholar

Estrada, Oswaldo (2013) ‘Ciclos De Violencia y Senderos De Otredad: Daniel Alarcón en War by Candlelight’, Chasqui 42.2: 87-98. Google Scholar

Faveron Patriau, Gustavo (2007) ‘La otra guerra del fin del mundo: la narrativa Peruana y los Años de la violencia politica’, Quimera; Revista de Literatura (Barcelona) 281: 66-73. Google Scholar

Franco, Jean, Mary Louise Pratt, and Kathleen Newman (eds) (1999) Critical Passions: Selected Essays (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Google Scholar

Frawley, William (1984) ‘Prolegomenon to a Theory of Translation’, in Translation: Literary, Linguistic, and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. William Frawley (London; Newark: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Presses), 159-175. Google Scholar

García, Cristina (2002) ‘Translation as Restoration’, in Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, ed. Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz (Albany: State University of New York Press), 45-48. Google Scholar

Gellerstam, M. (1986) ‘Translationese in Swedish novels translated from English’, in Translation Studies in Scandinavia, ed. L. Wollin and H. Lindquist (Lund: CWK Gleerup), 88-95. Google Scholar

Gordon, Helen (2008) Interview with Daniel Alarcón, Granta online, 25 November 2008 >https://granta.com/interview-daniel-alarcon/>. Google Scholar

Guthmann, Edward (2005) Interview with Daniel Alarcón, SFGate, 12 April 2005 >http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/For-Peruvian-American-novelist-Daniel-Alarcon-2680437.php>. Google Scholar

Hay Festival (2008) >https://www.hayfestival.com/bogota39/en-what-papers-say.aspx?skinid=7>. Google Scholar

Hill, Jane H. (1995) ‘Junk Spanish, Covert Racism, and the (Leaky) Boundary between Public and Private Spheres’, Pragmatics 5.2: 197-212. Google Scholar

Kapuściński, Ryszard (1978) The Emperor (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Google Scholar

Kosick, Rebecca (2020) ‘“El Milk Del Translate”: Poetic Undifference in Cecilia Vicuña’s Instan’, MLN 135.2: 473-499. Google Scholar

Levine, Suzanne Jill and Katie Lateef-Jan (eds) (2018) Untranslatability Goes Global (New York: Routledge). Google Scholar

Milton, Cynthia E. (2014) Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth Telling in Post Shining Path Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Google Scholar

Mitchell, Tamara L. (2019) ‘Geopoetics, Geopolitics, and Violence: (Un)Mapping Daniel Alarcón’s Lost City Radio’, Latin American Perspectives 46.5: 186-201, doi:10.1177/0094582X19856877. Google Scholar

Molloy, Sylvia (2002) ‘Can we Talk? Introduction’, Profession: 4-6. Google Scholar

Montes-Alcalá, Cecilia (2015) ‘Code-Switching in US Latino Literature: The Role of Biculturalism’, Language and Literature 24: 264-281. Google Scholar

Moreiras, Alberto (2001) ‘A Storm Blowing from Paradise: Negative Globality and Critical Regionalism’, in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodriguez, María Milagros López, and María Milagros López (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 81-110. Google Scholar

Moreno, Marisel, Thomas F. Anderson, and Daniel Alarcón (2014) ‘I Am an American Writer: An Interview with Daniel Alarcón’, MELUS 39.4: 186-206. Google Scholar

Orwell, George (1968) ‘Politics and the English Language’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg), 127-140. Google Scholar

Oxford English Dictionary. Web. Google Scholar

Politkovskaya, Anna (2003) A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Radio Ambulante >http://radioambulante.org/en/>. Google Scholar

Ricoeur, Paul (2006) On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan; with an Introduction by Richard Kearney (New York: Routledge). Google Scholar

Roncagiolo, Santiago (2006) Abril Rojo (Madrid: Alfaguara). Google Scholar

Sacco, Joe (1996) Palestine: A Nation Occupied (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books). Google Scholar

Sacco, Joe (2017) Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-25 (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books). Google Scholar

Sanchez, Marta E. (2019) A Translational Turn: Latinx Literature into the Mainstream, 1st edn, Latinx and Latin American Profiles Ser. Web. Google Scholar

Sarlo, Beatriz (2007) Borges, un escritor en las orillas (Madrid: Siglo XXI). Google Scholar

Sommer, Doris (2001) ‘Slaps and Embraces: A Rhetoric of Particularism’, in The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodriguez, María Milagros López, and María Milagros López (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 175-190. Google Scholar

Strowe, Anna (2020) ‘Radical Cultural Specificity in Translation’, Translation and Interpreting Studies 16.1: 41-60. Google Scholar

Turner, Leo (2007) ‘“Not Quite Peru” Review of Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcón’, London Review of Books 29.14: 18-19. Google Scholar

Urban Age Project, London School of Economics >https://lsecities.net/ua/>. Google Scholar

US Office of Management and Budget >https://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic-origin/about.html>. Google Scholar

Vargas Llosa, Mario (1993) Lituma en los Andes (Madrid: Planeta). Google Scholar

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. (2001) ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds’, ELH 68.4: 1049-1076. Google Scholar

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. (2013) ‘Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing’, Modern Language Quarterly 74.2: 171-195. Google Scholar

If you have private access to this content, please log in with your username and password here

Details

Author details

Tudela, Elisa Sampson Vera