romance studies, Vol. 27 No.

4, November, 2009, 246–258

The Creative Voice of the Translator

of Latin American Literature
Jeremy Munday
University of Leeds, UK

What do we mean by the creative ‘voice’ in translation, and how does it

relate to forms of creativity in the source? How do creative writers, transla-
tors, and authors view this process? This article seeks to explore some
of the issues related to artistic creativity in translation using examples
drawn from the translation into English of twentieth-century Latin American
literature, which has been the focus of interest of a host of renowned trans-
lators, including Harriet de Onís, Gregory Rabassa, Helen Lane, Margaret
Sayers Peden, Suzanne Jill Levine, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and Edith
Grossman. The article employs a range of theoretical concepts from
creativity theory, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics to investigate this
phenomenon. It also discusses new forms of creativity engendered by hybrid
Spanish-English texts that pose new questions for translators and blur any
rigid divide between source and target texts.

keywords Translation, Creativity, Voice, Latin American literature, Hybridity

From within translation studies, recent interest in the link between translation and
creative writing has begun to address the question of how the processes resemble each
other, at the same time seeking to rectify a long-standing downgrading of translation
as a secondary, minor, creative activity. Of these publications, Perteghella and
Loffredo’s edited volume Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative
Writing and Translation Studies,1 which we shall discuss below, is perhaps the most
widely known but by no means the only contribution. ‘Creativity’ is described
in terms of adding something ‘more or less new’ in the process of translation,2 as
bringing ‘novelty’ (or originality),3 or as ‘re-creation’ and ‘the capacity to make, do
or become something fresh and valuable with respect to others as well as ourselves’.4
What exactly becomes ‘new’ or ‘fresh’ in translation will be the central preoccupation
of this article, to be illustrated specifically by examples from the translation of
modern Latin American literature, a rich site for different forms of creativity and for
the development of the individual translator ‘voice’.
Nevertheless, my first concern is that the broadening of translation studies towards
the creative does not find its correspondence in the theory and pedagogy of creative

© Swansea University 2009 DOI 10.1179/026399009X12523296128795

 THE CREATIVE VOICE OF THE TRANSLATOR 247

writing. For instance, in his recent, and prominent, The Cambridge Introduction
to Creative Writing, David Morley more or less rejects translation as a worthwhile
activity in its own right.5 I shall take some time to discuss Morley’s presentation of
creative writing as a basis for a discussion of some of the possible reasons for his
discarding of translation. Morley begins by describing the creative freedom the author
enjoys as he/she faces an empty page:
[T]here is no constraint, except the honesty of the writer and the scope of the imagination
[. . .] By choosing to act, by writing on that page, we are creating another version of time;
we are playing out a new version of existence, of life even. We are creating an entirely
fresh piece of space-time, and another version of our self.

He then goes on to speak of the ‘process of writing’ and the joys it reveals:
Certainly, the process of writing is often more rewarding than the outcome, although,
when you capture something luminous, that sense of discovery and wonder swims through
the words and leaps in the page. There is pleasure in precision; in solving and resolving
the riddles of your syntax and voice; and in the choices of what to lose and what to allow.
(Morley, 2007: 3)

Such descriptions do resonate with some of the interests of translation studies theorists.
Certainly, the translator6 faces the additional constraint of the existence of the source
text and the need to produce a target text that in some ways bears resemblance
to, stands for, represents or re-performs the source.7 But, despite this additional con-
straint, and perhaps even because of it, the translator too operates with honesty and
uses acute imagination in order to be faithful to an idea or interpretation of the source
text, to what he/she understands was the author’s intent, to the needs of the presumed
readership, to the publisher’s/editor’s desires, and/or to the translator’s own goals and
sensitivities, depending on the desired relationship between the two texts.
Morley’s work reveals an ignorance of these developments in translation studies
and/or an attitude that retains the conventional contemporary Western hierarchy of
‘original’ source and ‘secondary’ or ‘derivative’ translation.8 Furthermore, there is a
contradiction in Morley’s work — generally he considers translation to be slavish
repetition, but he also acknowledges its potentially transformative power when it
detaches itself from the source text. This contradiction initially centres around the
concept of ‘ownership’. Thus, Morley acknowledges the divergence of perspectives of
the participants in what is a shared creative context: ‘For creative writers, translation
shares the continent of writing. For a growing number of professional literary trans-
lators, it is another form of creative writing: after all, they own the process’ (Morley,
2007: 72). This supposed ownership of the process points to a positive and active
role for the translator. The words we read in translation are the translator’s words,
the result of translation choices, even if they may be invisible to many critics and
reviewers.9 Yet Morley approaches the question almost entirely from the perspective
of the ‘creative writer’. Echoing the famous line attributed to Robert Frost, he consid-
ers translation to be nothing more than loss of the author’s original: ‘What gets lost
in translation? — Everything a writer values: the poetry of the author’s inner ear, its
intentions and intuitions’ (Morley, 2007: 73). In this view, translation may share the
continent of creative writing but it is consigned to a distant cultural backwater. Using
248 JEREMY MUNDAY

the voice-ear metaphor which we shall examine below, Morley goes on to describe
translation as a ‘placebo voice’, which ‘reduce[s] self-expectation, simultaneously
earthing the negative charges of artistic and linguistic inhibition’ (Morley, 2007:
146).
Such a limited and limiting view of translation means that the types of translation
exercises in which the creative writing tutor engages are distortions of what the liter-
ary translator actually does. Thus, Morley (2007: 73) proposes ‘imitation’, ‘version’
and ‘variation’, rather than ‘faithfully translating’, in an effort to ‘own’ the piece of
writing.10 This rejection of the value of what has conventionally been understood by
translation, as well as disparaging the work of literary translators, also flies in the
face of the reality of various forms of and crossovers between creative writing and
translating: co-translation, self-translation, and the role of those authors who are
primarily known for their creative writing but who are also conventional literary
translators. The expansive link between these different forms of creativity will be a
main focus of the remainder of this article.
Before we proceed to the analysis of specific examples, we should emphasize that
attitudes such as Morley’s cannot be explained away as the preferences of an indi-
vidual creative writing theorist. In another recent major handbook of creative writing,
Thelma Field, in a chapter on writing as ‘experimental practice’, includes a brief
section entitled ‘other languages’ but where the only examples of interlingual transla-
tion are the Zukofskys’ idiosyncratic homophonic translation of Catullus.11 In addi-
tion, Field bizarrely recommends the exercise of ‘translating from a language you
don’t know by following what you think is the sense’.12 What accounts for such
misguided attitudes about translation? In part, they may be indicative of a mono-
lingual perspective in which the foreign language retains a mystery, in which the
possibility is rarely acknowledged of understanding the original, appreciating its
cultural difference and striving creatively to represent or re-create that difference in
the target context. The key is in the terms ‘ownership’ and ‘voice’, both of which are
central to Morley’s thesis (see above). So, for him, the source text author is the
creative writer who ‘owns’ the original in a way that inevitably escapes the ‘faithful’
translator, enslaved by the source, and whose only hope is to create a variation or
version. ‘Voice’ is a term constantly raised by writers and critics, bestowing an aura
on their working process that precludes precise investigation. Different from ‘style’,
which to an extent can be learned, practised, or analysed systematically,13 ‘voice’ is
more nebulous, as can be gauged by the difficulty of its definition. Morley gives no
definition, while exhorting the would-be creative writer to have a ‘distinctive’ voice.
Critic and author Al Alvarez, in a volume entitled The Writer’s Voice, also underlines
the importance of distinctiveness but again fails to give a definition, preferring instead
to develop the metaphor to encompass the reception of that voice in the ‘ear’ of the
reader: ‘[I]t is a two-way pact: the writer makes himself heard and the reader listens
in — or, more accurately, the writer works to find or create a voice that will stretch
out to the reader, make him prick his ears and attend’.14
Such is the pervasiveness of this voice/ear metaphor that many literary translators
use it to describe their own work. One of the most eloquent is the renowned
translator of Spanish American fiction, Margaret Sayers Peden:
 THE CREATIVE VOICE OF THE TRANSLATOR 249

By ‘voice’, I mean the way something is communicated: the way the tale is told; the
way the poem is sung. Who is reflecting, narrating, composing, explaining, describing,
transcribing, communicating, obfuscating — telling? Whose voice is creating the
Spanish sounds that in my mind’s ear begin to change into English? (And may we not,
peripherally, have a mind’s ear to correspond to the mind’s eye?)15

Although this is an aural metaphor, the concept of authorial ‘voice’ here is closely
linked to that of narrative voice, to the ‘teller in the tale’. In many cases, of course,
the narrative voice may vary through what, in Bakhtinian terms, are ‘polyphonic’
texts: a notable recent example of this is Ignacio Padilla’s Amphitryon, translated by
Peter Bush and Anne McLean as Shadow Without a Name. Bush and McLean each
translated two narrative sections and then edited each other’s drafts. Apparently,
Padilla ‘was happier with the different voices of the four narrators in the English
translation than in the original’.16
Despite accounts such as McLean’s, there remains a relative absence of detailed
descriptions of the creative process by which the translator reshapes the text to create
a new text in the target language, of the nitty-gritty detail of the whys and wherefores
of textual modification that leads to the finished translation product.17 Peden, for
instance, speaks in general terms, using a conceptual metaphor, that of the ice cube,
to represent the original text, which is ‘melted’ and then ‘reshaped’ by the translator
(Peden, 1987: 9). The ice-cube metaphor is a clever notion which ties in with and gives
body to what were the then prevalent theoretical concepts of the translation process
such as Nida’s analysis-transfer-restructuring model.18 Yet it is also somewhat illu-
sory in positing the possibility, even desirability, of sameness, of an exact form of
equivalence which does not acknowledge the changes in social, cultural and historical
standpoint which underlie any act of translation.
In this scenario, the responsibility for ‘voice’ in translation seems to waver. For
Peden (1987: 9), ‘it is in the reforming state [of the ice cube] — to repeat, the vital
responsibility of the translator — that voice becomes imperious, tyrannical, and most
welcome, once it is heard’. This voice, in this account, takes over the translator and
decides ‘all choices of cadence and tone and lexicon and syntax’. This suggests that
the translator is not an active force but a passive recipient, with ‘voice’ a higher
level, supremely and ethereally deciding lower-level linguistic choices: something
mysterious, untouchable, available only to the few. Passivity, though not mystery,
may also be discerned in the writing of perhaps the most acclaimed of the translators
of twentieth-century Latin American writing, Gregory Rabassa, who translated
the two huge early hits of the 1960s Boom — Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) and
Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967). In his memoir, If This Be
Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents, Rabassa discusses the difficulty of coping
with the range of authors he translated from across Latin America, writing in varie-
ties of Spanish and Portuguese, each possessing their own style and personality. While
he admits the need for what he calls ‘controlled schizophrenia’ in dealing with such
variation, Rabassa’s perhaps self-deprecating description is of an essentially passive
translator: ‘I follow the text, I let it lead me along, and a different and it is to be
hoped proper style will emerge for each author’.19
Notwithstanding Rabassa’s rather negative and deliberately atheoretical picture, it
is Peden’s focus on voice, or ideas, which tallies with the working process as described
250 JEREMY MUNDAY

by other modern translators of Spanish American fiction. So, John Felstiner, translat-
ing Neruda’s Macchu Picchu, also sees the need to capture ‘voice’, and makes a dis-
tinction between the voice of the poet and the voice of the translator, thus according
a separate identity to the latter:
To get from the poet’s voice into another language and into a translator’s own voice is
the business of translation. It depends on a moment-by-moment shuttle between voices,
for what translating comes down to is listening — listening now to what the poet’s voice
said, now to one’s own voice as it finds what to say.20

In this description, the translator’s voice is externalized and it functions apparently

independently of the translator in seeking for itself a means of expression. Yet the
‘shuttling’ between voices, comparing source to target, demonstrates that it is an
active process. Most importantly, Felstiner himself sees a strong link between ‘the
primary act of writing’ and that of translating:
Translating a poem often feels essentially like the primary act of writing, of carrying some
preverbal sensation or emotion or thought over into words. Anyone who has slowly
shaped an original sentence knows what it feels like to edge toward a word or phrase and
then toward a more apt one — one that suddenly touches off a new thought. The same
experience holds for poets, generating a line of verse, who find that the right rhyme
or image when it comes can trigger an unlooked-for and now indispensable meaning.
(Felstiner, 1980: 32)

Here, the very act of expression, the selection of linguistic means to express ideas, is
crucial. This may generate new, unexpected meanings, and the act of translation may
raise and respond to crucial questions that are only latent in the source. Hence,
Felstiner discusses in some depth the difficulty of translating a description of Macchu
Picchu as inmóvil catarata de turquesa. Specifically, the problem revolves around the
word inmóvil: options discussed by Felstiner include motionless, still, unmoving,
stilled, and immobile, and the final selection is determined by the translator’s inter-
pretation of the image, whether Macchu Picchu is considered still alive or dead,
whether the image of the ruins as a cataract/waterfall reflects a permanent absence of
movement, a stopping of its life source, or whether the potential for movement still
exists within it (Felstiner, 1980: 33).
Felstiner’s way of listening to the voice of the original poem gives a new twist to
the notion of the creative voice: in the preparation for the translation he traced the
history of Neruda and the poem, visiting Macchu Picchu itself following Neruda’s
footsteps, and listening to recordings of Neruda’s reading of the poem, therefore
literally attuning himself to the voice of its originator.
The creative voice does not, however, exist unbounded. It is countered or exagger-
ated by the concept of constraints — the greater the constraint, the greater the
potential creativity demanded of the translator.21 In this respect, the existence of a
source text presents an imposing and sometimes overriding constraint against which
the translator must struggle, a form of ‘pre-text’ or ‘intertext’ in ‘an ongoing textual
activity consisting of a host of complex transactions in which texts are assimilated,
borrowed and rewritten’ (Perteghella and Loffredo, 2006: 4). Those authors see a
‘creative turn’ in translation studies but, in my view, this may be more usefully
construed in subtler terms that lead to a more sophisticated conception of the creative
 THE CREATIVE VOICE OF THE TRANSLATOR 251

force which the translator brings to the task. The creativity action theory of sociolo-
gist Hans Joas, for example, proposes a threefold classification of creativity: (1)
‘primary creativity’, related to the freeing of the ‘primary processes’ of the mind, (2)
‘secondary creativity’, which involves rational problem-solving; and (3) ‘integrated
creativity’, where the freedom for self-expression in society is checked by the need for
self-control.22 An albeit cursory transposition of this model to the field of translation
should avoid simplistically matching authorship to (1) and ‘translatorship’ to (2).
While the translator is certainly faced with ‘problem-solution’ questions, translation
is more than just rational problem-solving. It is also a form of integrated creativity
(3), transformative of form and voice both of the source text (by creating a new or
parallel text in the target culture) and of the target language. Indeed, Peter Bush,
perhaps the most prominent of British translators of Spanish and Latin American
writing and formerly director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, sees the
creative process in the translator’s reading as well as writing. His description, abstract
and tantalizing and once again resorting to conceptual metaphors (of both a
volcanic eruption and of horse-riding!), nevertheless parallels Joas’s integrated
creativity without evoking or necessarily being aware of it:
Translators’ readings of literature provoke the otherness within the subject of the transla-
tor, work at a level not entirely under the control of the rationalizing discourse of the
mind, release ingredients from the subconscious magma of language and experience,
shoot off in many directions, provoked by the necessity of the creation of new writing. A
professional translator is one who is aware of this process, gives it full rein, and is able
to hold it in check as one lateral level for meaning and a source for potential language.
(Bush, 2006: 25)

Here the translator releases a massive creative force which he/she then has to control
and direct in the target text. It is the resultant novelty in the translated language that
intrigues me most. In the introduction to their volume, Porteghella and Loffredo
(2006: 12) suggest that the interest in translation and creative writing represents
a ‘shift of focus from ideology to idiolectology, from culturality to cognition and
consciousness, from text to textuality’. Idiolectology, cognition, and textuality centre
on the forms of language which are used and the processes by which translations are
formed linguistically from pre-existing texts. Applied linguistics and sociolinguistics
can assist us to understand how this works. For example, crucial in the selection of
new lexical configurations is what Michael Hoey has termed ‘lexical priming’, which
is in part individual and based on our own individual experience with language.
So, as we encounter words in our daily lives, we subconsciously build up a mental
picture or ‘concordance’ of how those words are used and this constructs a basis of
knowledge that informs the way we use those words ourselves.23 I am particularly
interested in the concept of lexical priming for the translator’s language and the
possibility that it may at least in part explain the individual translator’s orientation
towards specific lower-level elements of the text, such as a preference for certain
lexical collocations, or idiolectal, dialectal, sociolectal, or genre-specific lexical
choices (the use of an appropriate learned, legal or academic register, for example).
Although lexical primings are to a greater or lesser extent harmonized throughout a
society by factors such as education, the media and literary, religious and other
systems in which the text operates, there is an inherent individuality of the primings
252 JEREMY MUNDAY

due to each individual’s different background experiences with language (Hoey, 2005:
180–83).
These experiences help to form what Jan Blommaert has called ‘repertoires’ of
language forms for realizing communicative goals, accumulated by individuals through
encounters with language varieties (e.g. dialects, sociolects), styles, genres, and so on.
These different repertoires which we learn and acquire are then linked to a range of
identities.24 Of course, the repertoire and primings of the translator may struggle to
deal with certain texts. Thus, Gregory Rabassa ruefully acknowledges difficulties
of translating modern writers such as the Colombian, Jorge Franco: ‘Aspects and
outlooks have both changed over my years and I still feel quite anchored in my own
time, which is long gone’ (Rabassa, 2005: 175).25
How do such lexical priming and repertoires work out in practice, and what is their
link to the creative process and the construction of voice in translation? One point to
note about translations of Latin American literature is the cumulative influence of
translators over the years, from the likes of Samuel Putnam and Harriet de Onís’s
work for Alfred Knopf publishers from the 1930s onwards, through Gregory
Rabassa’s translations of the major Boom novelists of the 1960s and 1970s and includ-
ing others who have written prominently about their translations, such as Suzanne
Jill Levine and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. This has allowed the development
and influence of different translation strategies at different historical points and
circumstances.26 Onís, for example, was a pioneer of Latin American writing from
her first translation in 1930, working for Alfred Knopf as scout (for new writing),
reader (of proposed projects) and translator. In these multiple roles she exerted great
influence over the selection and translation of a whole generation of Latin American
writers in both Spanish and Portuguese.27 She tended to adopt a rather formal,
literary style that exoticized the foreign setting. An analysis of her influential 1950s
translations of the novels of Cuban Alejo Carpentier, for instance, reveals two
particularly salient features of her translation: the richness and idomaticity of her
lexis, and rhythm and sound.28 The following is a mere sample of verb-forms that
are much more literary in the target text, in this case, Carpentier’s El reino de este
mundo (1949) and Los pasos perdidos (1953):29
[LS = Lost Steps; KW = Kingdom of This World]
se atorbellinaban las nubes (LS ST 82)
the clouds scudded by (LS TT 71)

la selva se está llenando de noche (LS ST 115)

night was sifting through the jungle (LS TT 116)

me quita toda fuerza moral (LS ST 258)

sapped my moral strength (LS TT 231)

buscando la resquemante verdad a través de palabras (LS ST 273)

winnowing the bitter truth from words (LS TT 243)

amargado por sus meditaciones (KW ST 48)

weary of chewing the bitter cud of his reflections (KW TT 52).

These verbs are active processes translated by more formal, more metaphorical and
more dynamic verbs in the target text in a strategy of lexical enrichment even if this
 THE CREATIVE VOICE OF THE TRANSLATOR 253

means a distancing from the source text lexical structure as in night was sifting
through the jungle (instead of ‘the jungle was filling with night’). In all these
examples, the relatively more common ST word is translated by a less common but
more idiomatic TT phrase. This is most notable in the last two examples (winnowing
the bitter truth and chewing the bitter cud), where there is a clear preference for a
literary idiom based on the pattern of ‘present participle + the bitter + noun’ which
imparts a rhythm to the target text.
Indeed, Onís’s work also reinforces the idiom and collocation levels with poetic
rhythm, especially of descriptions of the landscape or of natural phenomena. All three
examples below introduce alliteration absent in the ST:
los riscosos perfiles de Morne Ridge (KW ST 43)
the rocky ridges of Morne Ridge (KW TT 47)

la constante presencia del aguacero (KW ST 43)

the pervading presence of the rain (KW TT 47)

El mar era verdecido por extrañas fosforencias (KW ST 63)

The sea glowed green with strange phosphorescence (KW TT 69).

It is worth pointing out that these are far from being original alliterations, as is shown
by a simple Google search that records thousands of instances of each collocation.
An interesting point to debate therefore is how far such translation preferences may
be considered creative since they are based on a pre-existing phraseology. There seem
to be two contrary tendencies at work in the above examples, indicative of the two
aspects of lexical priming. One is the trend towards TL-preferred primings of alli-
teration. The other, evidenced by the preference for quite complex literary idioms, is
towards what may be translator-specific primings arising from individual experiences
(education, reading, etc.) and repertoires. While this would be difficult to prove, what
can certainly be argued is that the selections represent a high degree of integrated
(i.e. controlled) creativity in view of their distance from a more straightforward
literal processing of the source text that, it may be presupposed, would entail less
arduous and innovative cognitive processing. This is also a reason to discount any
simplistic association of such choices with an overall strategy of domestication. They
may correspond to what Onís perceived to be target language literary norms for this
genre, but they are also translation equivalents which stand out for their novelty and
force.30
In certain, rare, cases, a new priming is produced by a translator which then enters
the general primings of the language as a primary creative force. Perhaps the best-
known example is translation of the title of García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte
anunciada (1981) as Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) by Gregory Rabassa, who
had been a student of Onís at Columbia in the 1950s.31 The new priming Chronicle
of a ______ Foretold is now relatively common, particularly in headlines or titles,
demonstrating in passing the genre-specific nature of many primings. Two random
examples may suffice to suggest the pattern, including the play on the sound death
and dearth:
Chronicle of a pandemic foretold32
Chronicle of a dearth foretold.33
254 JEREMY MUNDAY

In the latter part of the twentieth century, new creative challenges faced literary trans-
lators of Latin American writing with the growing trend towards ‘hybrid’ texts. This
was of course not entirely new: the work of José María Arguedas was renowned
for its mix of Spanish and Quechua and Rabassa himself had had to deal with a mix
of Spanish and French in Cortázar’s Rayuela, which he resolved mainly by simply
maintaining the French. However, potentially more complex are those texts that mix
Spanish and English since the hierarchy of voices is reversed or disappears when
translated into the other language. Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres is perhaps the
classic example, made so because of the unusually creative form of the translation, a
collaboration between the author and translator, Suzanne Jill Levine. What becomes
clear in Levine’s discussion of the process is that the book poses unusual problems,
ranging from the tongue-twister title to the bilingual address of the cabaret compère
to the pervasive wordplays and puns.34 These are resolved most interestingly in a
form of both integrated and primary creativity, for example, in the transformation
and addition of wordplays and lists of funny book titles creating a target text that is
some ten percent longer than the ST. Despite Levine’s assertion (1991: 181) that for
her the translation of this machista work necessarily entailed an attempted subversion
of what was to her ‘distasteful’ discourse, we might posit that the transformations
made to the text were only permissible given the source text author’s participation
and approval. Without that approval, such changes would not normally be risked to
a living author’s work.
Since Tres tristes tigres there has of course been a huge growth in ‘hybrid’ texts
produced by a new generation of Latino/a writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Oscar
Hijuelos and Junot Díaz and ‘frontera’ writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa and
Guillermo Gómez Peña.35 As well as producing new texts that blur the distinction
between source and target languages, this is creating new translation scenarios as
many of these works are being translated for a Spanish-speaking audience in the
United States that did not exist before.36 Here is the crux of the issue: while, in
the words of Dominican-US writer Junot Díaz, the authors themselves occupy a
‘multiplicity of identity sites’ according to their linguistic, geographic, and cultural
communities,37 the Spanish language publishers have tended to prefer standardized
Castilian Spanish translations. This maximizes sales and minimizes the costs
associated with producing localized translations which has, however, led to some
dissatisfaction amongst Latino/a writers (Morales, 2002). Yet Junot Díaz does not
agree that ‘loss’ is caused by the translation process per se:
So many writers take the position that with translation you lose a lot. But really, how
much do you lose? Do you lose more than when you speak any language? Isn’t language
already an act of compromise with reality? In the end everything is a translation but you
do lose some of the aural energy, you lose some of the violence that languages inflict on
each other. Spanish can be very violent inside of English the same way that English was
a very violent language onto my Spanish when I first arrived in the United States. (Díaz,
2002: 42–43)

Here, the point that comes across is the aurality and violence of the juxtaposition and
co-existence of the two languages, which is a colossal creative force in the hybrid text
and which amplifies, interrogates and staccatos the ‘voice’ of the author in ways that
 THE CREATIVE VOICE OF THE TRANSLATOR 255

generally escape creative writing theorists. Here ‘voice’ is not a smooth creative sound
but a raw clash of language hierarchies and indexicalities.
The problem with ‘standard’ Spanish translations (even those by well-known
authors such as Liliana Valenzuela and Elena Poniatowska who have translated
Sandra Cisneros’s novels) is that the indexicalities of the voices merge into one, negat-
ing the violence of the hybrid. This potentially generates a power struggle between
‘author’ and ‘translator’, as can be seen in Junot Díaz’s reaction to translations of his
own work:
The next time I want very strict controls over the Spanish translation. I want to make
sure to resist the kind of Spanish people think will facilitate the reading, but rather to
foster the kind that will facilitate the book. An edgier Spanish would have been better, a
more mean-natured and expansive Spanish [. . .] My translator did a clean and clear but
somehow also a sterile job. When the Spanish from the English texts gets translated, it’s
like throwing water on water. You lose the dissonance. (Díaz, 2002: 42)

But this still leaves open the question as to what alternatives are on offer to the trans-
lator, how exactly to recreate this dissonance. Even the most exceptional attempt to
exert control over translation, self-translation, does not necessarily achieve this. The
most prominent example of self-translation is Ariel Dorfman. Born in Argentina, the
son of Russian émigrés, as a small child he moved to New York, where he refused to
speak Spanish, an attitude that was reversed when the family had to move to Chile
in Dorfman’s teenage years, ending with his exile to the United States at the age of
thirty-one after the Pinochet coup. Dorfman has generally written his fiction in
Spanish and his non-fiction in English, translating the latter in the case of his
memoirs, Heading South, Looking North.38 Dorfman’s case seems to challenge
Blommaert’s contention that ‘hybridity’ is produced by the ‘(artefactualized) textual-
ity’ of translation (Blommaert, 2006: 171), for ‘[h]istory has taught me the need to be
a hybrid, which I never wanted to be’ (Dorfman, 1998: 55).
In addition, this hybrid existence does not after all necessarily lead to a creative
translation strategy at the lexical level. What does happen, however, are higher-level
shifts that affect the reception of the text in the target culture. Thus, Heading South,
Looking North is presented as a personal, ‘bilingual journey’ in the English but a
‘romance en dos lenguas’ in the Spanish sub-title. This shift to a standard Spanish
genre is reinforced but also somewhat confused by the cover of the Planeta edition
which emphasizes that this is ‘un testimonio intenso y angustiante sobre el derrocami-
ento de Salvador Allende’. Thus, the Spanish presents itself as a documentary
eyewitness account of a significant political event, not just a memoir but a piece of
testimonial literature, a genre well-known in Latin American writing. What such
a strategy does is to insert the text within a standard generic format in the TL,
reducing its potential for hybridity that was generated by the primary creativity of
the English text. The motivation for such change may come principally from the
publisher, keen to maximize the attraction of the TT for the new audience. Significant
publisher intervention has happened to Dorfman’s works before. He came to literary
and political prominence with Widows, a play based on his novel Viudas (1981), itself
a parable about life under a totalitarian regime, set in German-occupied Greece
during the Second World War, purportedly written by a Dane but relating to the
256 JEREMY MUNDAY

dictatorship in Chile. In the preface to the play, Dorfman describes his original plan
for the book:
My plan was that we would first bring the book out in Danish or German or French, and
then have it ‘translated’ into Spanish. Several prominent writer friends were ready to
offer support by writing introductions or lending their names as ‘translators’, so that my
child might grow up where it belonged, in its true land, among its own.39

The proposed pseudo-translation (a text that falsely presents itself as a translation)

might be placed at the high end of primary creativity, using ‘translation’ as a mask
to circumvent censorship and escape possible retribution in Chile. Yet this did not
initially work out as expected, since the publishers, who had expressed an interest at
an early stage, withdrew after submission of the manuscript because of what they
considered to be an overly critical portrayal of the military characters. Dorfman’s
account and experience therefore highlights the limits to creativity imposed by actors
beyond the control of author and translator.40

Notes
1
Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative
Writing and Translation Studies ed. by Manuela
Perteghella and Eugenia Loffredo (London and New
5
York: Continuum, 2006).
2
Paul Kussmaul gives an all-encompassing but not
necessarily very useful definition of ‘creative transla-
6
tion’ in functionalist terms as ‘based on an obliga-
tory altering of the source text, [. . .] it represents
something more or less new, which at a certain time
and in an expert (sub-)culture [. . .] is accepted as
more or less appropriate for a certain purpose’ (my
translation); Paul Kussmaul Kreatives Übersetzen
[Creative translation] (Tübingen: Stauffenberg,
2000), p. 31.
3
Susanne Göpferich, ‘Modelling Translation Compe-
tence and its Acquisition: the Longitudinal Study
“TransComp”’, paper presented at the IATIS con-
ference, Melbourne, 9 July 2009. Göpferich uses
7
the seminal work on creativity of psychologist J. P.
Gilford who defined creativity as a mental process
leading to the production of new ideas or relations
between ideas; J. P. Gilford, ‘Creativity’, American
Psychologist, 5 (1950), 444–54. Göpferich discusses
creativity in terms of novelty, acceptability, and
flexibility.
4
Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History, Practice
(London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. xvi.
This ‘provisional’ definition is used by Meilan Zou
in an unpublished article on creativity in translation
theory and its potential application to the teaching
of translation theory in China; Meilan Zou, ‘West-
ern Translation Theory and Creativity: A Case for
8
China’s Translation Teaching’. Note the evident
link with the definition (creativity = ‘the liberation
of the capacity for new actions’) proposed by Hans
Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. by Jeremy
Gaines and Paul Keast (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1993), p. 133.
David Morley, The Cambridge Introduction
to Creative Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. 1.
Here, we shall focus on the literary translator as a
counterpart to the creative writer of literature,
whilst acknowledging that there is often overlap
between aspects of literary and non-literary
translation. See, for example, Mary Snell-Hornby,
Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach
(Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
1988/1995); Basil Hatim and Ian Mason, Discourse
and the Translator (London and New York:
Longman, 1990); Basil Hatim and Ian Mason, The
Translator as Communicator (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997).
Space prohibits a detailed discussion of the develop-
ment of translation theory over the past decades, in
which the concept of static equivalence between
source and target has been proposed, rejected,
refined, or replaced according to operable para-
meters such as readership, skopos (purpose) and
function, relevance, etc. — see, amongst others:
Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies:
Theories and Applications, 2nd edn (London and
New York: Routledge, 2008); Lawrence Venuti, The
Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn (London and
New York: Routledge, 2004); Maria Tymoczko,
Enlarging Translators, Empowering Translation
(Manchester: St Jerome, 2007).
For an opening of translation to non-Western
concepts, see Maria Tymoczko, ‘Reconceptualizing
Western Translation Theory’, in Translating
 THE CREATIVE VOICE OF THE TRANSLATOR
Others, ed. by Theo Hermans (Manchester: St
Jerome, 2006), pp. 13–22.
9 20
See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility:
A History of Translation (London and New York:
Routledge, 1995).
10
Interestingly, ‘adaptation studies’ have become a
point of increasing debate within translation
studies, and the importance of the terms used is
that they set explicit or implicit criteria for how
the quality of the new text is to be determined —
‘version’, for instance, would suggest a looser
resemblance to the source than ‘translation’; John
Milton, ‘Adaptation Studies and Translation
Studies’, in Translation Research Projects 2, ed.
by Anthony Pym and Alexander Perekretenko
(Tarragona: Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 2009), <isg.
urv.es/publicity/isg/publications/trp_2_2009/chapters/
milton.pdf>.
11
Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Catullus (New York:
Grossman, 1969).
12
Thelma Field, ‘Writing as Experimental Practice’, in
The Handbook of Creative Writing, ed. by Steven
Earnshaw (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), pp. 305–11 (p. 309).
13
Morley, 2007: 143; see also Geoffrey Leech and
Michael Short, Style in Fiction (London: Longman,
1981).
14
Al Alvarez, The Writer’s Voice (London:
Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 16.
15
Margaret Sayers Peden, ‘Telling Others’ Tales’,
Translation Review, 24–25 (1987), 9–12, p. 9.
16
Anne McLean, in Vicky Baker, ‘The Success of a
Literary Translator Who Never Studied Languages’,
The Linguist, 43.4 (2004), 110.
17
One exception is Peter Bush’s discussion of several
drafts of his work. Peter Bush, ‘The Writer of
Translations’, in The Translator as Writer, ed. by
Susan Bassnett and Peter Bush (London and New
York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 23–32. However, the
revisions he discusses are carried out on a draft that
still closely resembles the final published text. How
that earlier draft is formed would be of particular
interest in understanding the creative process at
work.
18
Eugene Nida, Toward a Science of Translation
(Leiden: Brill, 1964).
19
Gregory Rabassa, Translation and Its Dyscontents
(New York: New Directions, 2005), p. 49. Rabassa
makes similar comments in a 1978 interview with
Thomas Hoeksema. He says he is ‘led along’ by
the author, even to the extent of reproducing
‘un-English’ forms of punctuation. However, he
makes a distinction between what he sees as the
effort needed to ensure accuracy in the target text
and style, which is instinctive: ‘accuracy, indeed,
must be sought consciously, while flow is left to
instinct’. Thomas Hoeksema, ‘The Translator’s
257
Voice: An Interview with Gregory Rabassa’,
Translation Review, 1 (1978), 5–18.
John Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to
Macchu Picchu (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1980), p. 151.
21
‘[T]he exercise of one’s own creativity turns out to
be directly proportional to the constraints to which
one is subject; in other words, the more one is
constrained, the more one is creative’. Jean Boase-
Beier and Michael Holman, ‘Introduction’, in Jean
Boase-Beier and Michael Holman (eds), The
Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and
Creativity (Manchester: St Jerome, 1999), p. 7.
22
Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy
Gaines and Paul Keast (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1993).
23
Michael Hoey, Lexical Priming: A New Theory
of Language (London and New York: Routledge),
p. 12.
24
Jan Blommaert, ‘How Legitimate is my Voice? A
Rejoinder’, Target, 18.1 (2006), 163–76 (p. 168). For
example, an academic who has learned to work
in academic genres presents him/herself on an
academic and not usually a personal level.
25
For reasons of space, we shall not pursue further
here the question of the translator’s background and
experience (increasingly examined in translation
studies in terms of Bourdieusian ‘habitus’) beyond
the stress on the individuality of the choices made
by the translator and the way that these may be
indicative of ideological orientation, i.e. that the
translator, consciously or unconsciously, draws on
a repertoire of language (and primings) that reflect
the translator’s education and sociocultural and his-
torical/temporal location, but non-deterministically,
since allowance must always be made for variation
between translators on the creative and other planes.
We should also emphasize that, just as for a source-
text author, personal experience of an event is not
a pre-requisite to translate it either. As the New
York-based translator Edith Grossman observes,
‘the fact that I have not been in a Colombian jungle
did not make it impossible for me to translate the
novels of Alvaro Mutis, for example, who has the
most astonishing descriptions of Colombian land-
scapes’. See Ed Morales, ‘The Fine Art of Transla-
tion: Overcoming the Pitfalls of Bringing Books
from English into Spanish’, Críticas Magazine, 1
April 2002, <www.criticasmagazine.com/article/
CA201139.html> [accessed 21 July 2009]. An inter-
esting question that must remain to be investigated
is whether personal experience might lead to a
different (if not better) translation.
26
Amongst these influences must also be counted
original English works set in Latin America,
such as the now mostly forgotten novels of the
British naturalist W. H. Hudson. Hudson’s Green
Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forests, a
258 JEREMY MUNDAY
1916 re-edition of a 1904 original, was a major
early bestseller for Knopf and helped to construct
the pseudo-romantic view of Latin America
(particularly the Caribbean rainforest) as an exotic,
natural world peopled by uncivilized ‘savages’ living
close to nature, and the encounter with the ‘civi-
lized’ white man living under a more developed but
nevertheless chaotic form of governance. Its impact
is explicitly recalled by Gregory Rabassa (2005: 76)
and can be seen, amongst others, in Harriet de
Onís’s translations.
27
For José Donoso, she was ‘quien manejaba las
esclusas de la difusión de la literatura latinoameri-
cana en Estados Unidos y, a través de Estados
Unidos, en todo el mundo’; José Donoso, Historia
personal del Boom (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1982),
p. 71.
28
A more detailed analysis of these and other
examples can be found in Jeremy Munday, Style
and Ideology in Translation: Latin American
Writing in English (New York: Routledge, 2007).
29
Source-text page numbers refer to Alejo Carpentier,
El reino de este mundo (Havana: Bolsilibros, 1964)
and Los pasos perdidos (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1979);
target text page numbers are from Alejo Carpentier,
The Kingdom of this World, trans. by Harriet de
Onís (London: Gollancz, 1967) and The Lost
Steps, trans. by Harriet de Onís (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968).
30
Note that this dualism, that a translation should
read like an original but at the same time should
also encapsulate and perform a creative voice, is
expressed by Borges’s collaborator and translator,
Norman Thomas di Giovanni, using yet another
conceptual metaphor: ‘A good translation, like good
vodka, should leave you breathless in at least two of
the word’s many senses. Aspiring to inconspicuous-
ness, invisibility, it should bear no telltale trace of
the original. A translation should also be bracing.
Since it will have all the qualities of good native
work, a good translation into English should —
I cannot express it more strongly — read like
English’. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, The Lesson
of the Master: On Borges and His Work (New York
and London: Continuum, 2003), p. 186.
31
For Onís’s influence on Rabassa, see Trudy Balch,
‘Pioneer on the Bridge of Language’, Americas,
November-December 1998, pp. 47–51 (p. 48).
Note on Contributor
Correspondence to: Jeremy Munday, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and
Latin American Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. Email:
j.munday@leeds.ac.uk
Rabassa discusses the case of Chronicle . . . in
Rabassa, 2005: 103–04.
32
<papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=
1398445> [accessed 21 July 2009].
33
<www.guardian.co.uk/business/2003/mar/19/
politics.politicalcolumnists> [accessed 21 July
2009].
34
Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Trans-
lating Latin American Fiction (St Paul, Minnesota:
Graywolf Press, 1991).
35
For the influence of these writers on culture studies
and translation studies, see Homi Bhabha, The
Location of Culture, 2nd edn (London and New
York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 9–10 and 313–14, and
Edwin Gentzler, Translation and Identity in the
Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006),
pp. 157–65.
36
Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘The Latin American Novel
in English’, in Efrián Kristal (ed.), Cambridge
Companion to the Latin American Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 297–317.
37
Junot Díaz, ‘Language, Violence and Resistance’, in
Daniel Balderston and Marcy Schwartz (eds), Voice-
overs: Translation and Latin American Literature
(New York: State University of New York Press,
2002), pp. 42–44 (p. 44).
38
Ariel Dorfman, Heading South, Looking North: A
Bilingual Journey (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1998), translated as Ariel Dorfman, Rumbo al sur,
deseando el norte: Un romance en dos lenguas
(Barcelona: Planeta, 1998).
39
Ariel Dorfman, Widows (London: Abacus Books,
1983), p. xvi.
40
A seemingly extreme and well-known modern
example of control is that of the Borges estate’s
alleged decisions over the publication of new trans-
lations, authorizing Andrew Hurley’s translation
of Collected Fictions (New York: Viking, 1998)
while at the same time allowing Norman Thomas di
Giovanni’s earlier translations to go out of print (see
di Giovanni’s website, <www.digiovanni.co.uk/
borges.htm> [accessed 8 October 2009]). French
publishers Gallimard are also said to be prevented
from reissuing or updating their Pléiade critical
edition of the French translations of Borges
(Pierre Assouline, ‘Le scandale Borges’, Le Nouvel
Observateur, 10 August 2006, <bibliobs.nouvelobs.
com/2008/05/14/le-scandale-borges>).
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