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Abstract
Acknowledging recent trends in translation studies away from a focus on correlation between source and target texts, the essay explores the possibility of a source-language intertext being recognized in a translation. Here, the references are to José Lezama Lima's works in Eduardo Chirinos's “Desencuentros con Lezama.” Using George Steiner's comments on archaism and Jacques Derrida's insights into dual-language source texts as analogies, the essay cites practical strategies for intertextual translation, with none guaranteeing transparent accessibility to the originals. More important to the English-language translation of “Desencuentros con Lezama” than Goethe's ideal of “perfect identity” between source text and translation is Chirinos's mirroring of Lezama Lima's freeing of linguistic signs from their referential functions. The resulting blurred delineation between the literal and the figurative that may have been a “product of delirium in illness” allows Chirinos's speaker to evade physical decline by remaining safely pendant between reality and verbal play.
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Gregary J. Racz
Gregary J. Racz is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Long Island University Brooklyn, Review Editor for Translation Review, and Past President of the American Literary Translators Association. His translations of Eduardo Chirinos include: Reasons for Writing Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2011), Written in Missoula (University of Montana Press, 2011), The Smoke of Distant Fires (Open Letter Books, 2012), and While the Wolf Is Around (Diálogos Books, forthcoming).