Literature in motion: Translating multilingualism across the Americas

Abstract

directionality in spaces of translation of the past, but also for building a decolonial translation praxis into the future. In concluding Chapter Six, she contends that a decolonial understanding of translation first requires scholarly work to de-instrumentalize translation: to theorize it not as message transmission, but as a charged practice that operates in the same political-cultural arenas as print culture projects. In other words, this conclusion bolsters the premise of the book: that translation and print culture find themselves in generative relation. This argument then allows Guzmán Martínez to close by proposing translation “with an attitude” as a liberatory critical position that effectively extends into the future the transgressive spaces of translation of the past. Through Silvio Torres-Saillant’s concept of a reading stance “with an attitude,” alert to the mechanisms of Western discourse and thus able to subvert them, Guzmán Martínez advocates for a similar positionality within spaces of translation – for writers, translators, editors, and scholars – that is critically aware of translation history and potentiality. A necessary precondition for such a translation praxis is a thicker understanding of translation as critique – a motivation traced throughout the monograph – and which is map-like: a form of critique that “frames, rather than assumes, language, circulation, and modes of importation, and that brings to the surface systemic and epistemic directionalities” (117). Guzmán Martínez’s translational cartography brings to the surface these possibilities, both for reassessing the translation itineraries of the past and for rethinking the ones artists and scholars build into the future. For those interested in either task, Mapping spaces is a must-read.