“Why was it?” Rethinking the nationalization of the crime fiction in the “Laurenzi saga” by Rodolfo Walsh from the translation

Abstract

The recovery of Rodolfo Walsh’s crime fiction stories that make up the “Commissioner Laurenzi Saga” was accompanied, since the late 1980s, by a predominant critical elaboration that understood them as part of a process of “nationalization” of the crime fiction genre in Argentina. At the same time, these studies established a division of Walsh’s crime fiction work between a stage governed by translation and imitation of the English model and a freer stage, with stories with specifically national characteristics. This critical perspective dismissed Walsh’s translation task as a kind of submission to imported models that would have been surpassed in Commissioner Laurenzi’s saga with more credible stories anchored in national reality. On the contrary, in this work we show how Walsh proposed, with the saga of Commissioner Laurenzi, to consciously update his production taking into account the evolution of the genre in the Anglo-Saxon publishing market. In this task, both his translation profession and the receiving, disseminating and criticizing the innovative tendencies of traditional English crime fiction that were incorporated into the local repertoire thanks to prominent agents such as J. L. Borges played a fundamental role.