Through the Eyes of a Girl: The Art of Translation, Memory and Fiction in Novels by Laura Alcoba and Jenny Erpenbeck Cover Image

Con ojos de niña: el arte de la traducción, de la memoria y de la ficción en las novelas de Laura Alcoba y Jenny Erpenbeck
Through the Eyes of a Girl: The Art of Translation, Memory and Fiction in Novels by Laura Alcoba and Jenny Erpenbeck

Author(s): Emilia I. Deffis de Calvo
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: UNIVERSITATEA »ȘTEFAN CEL MARE« SUCEAVA
Keywords: historical memory; novel; childhood; biographical fiction;language

Summary/Abstract: In light of the most recent Argentinian novels published on the theme of postdictatorial historical memory, two writers, accounting for past and presentexperiences of violence, coincide in the narrative elaboration of the world asseen through the eyes of a child. Laura Alcoba does this in The Rabbit House(2008) and The Blue of the Bees (2014), and Jenny Erpenbeck, in The Book ofWords (2007). Since both authors originally wrote in a foreign language, theexperiences pass through an additional filter for an Argentinian readership: themediation of the Spanish language.Thus, in principle, these texts raise the issueof memory, but more specifically that of language, not only in its ability toname things but also and especially in its semantic movement—a displacementthat allows something to be said without naming it openly. Such a spacetherefore acquires a fundamentally living and psychological dimension in theprocess of a therapeutic encounter with the past for anyone having grown up inan environment of violence.The goal of this work is to reflect on the artisticrepresentations of childhood experiences that take on special importance inredefining the imperatives of duty pertaining to memory in the current sociohistorical perspective.