Visibility in Mapuche Literary Self-Translation

Abstract

Self-translation, which consists in the practice of rendering one’s own writings into another language, has become a particularly fruitful ground for reinforcing the concept of the translator’s invisibility or, on the contrary, for questioning it. Two strong positions on the matter have been taken in self-translation studies. On the one hand, the very authority of the self-translator allows for privileged access to the original drafts and supposedly even to pre-verbal memories. These particular set of resources would imply that self-translators have a better sense of the purpose of their writings. The translation would then be extremely close to the original and would thus result in an almost absolute invisibility of the translator (Tanqueiro 1999). On the other hand, the agency granted to self-translators seems to provide them with more freedom to (re)create their work in a second language (Grutman and Van Bolderen 2014), which would mean that they are the most visible of translators given the textual marks of cultural reflection on the expressive possibilities of their own translated versions (Hernández 2010). In adherence to this last position, this work delves further into the issue of the visibility of the self-translator when one of the languages involved in their work is a minorised one. Such is the case of contemporary Mapuche literature. This work takes an author-oriented approach to the study of self-translation in the bilingual Mapudungun-Spanish work of a group of three contemporary poets—Elicura Chihuailaf, Rayen Kvyeh and Adriana Paredes Pinda—who have had diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds and language acquisition experiences, in order to uncover the varied strategies they unfold in their texts to make their agency as self-translators a tool for cultural and linguistic visibility.