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Home > Journals > PAHA > Vol. 12 (2022) > Numbers 1 & 2

 

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia

Abstract

This is an account of the translation process that went into the English translation of the story “La doncella que vivió tres vidas” (1943) by Adelina Gurrea, a writer of Spanish and Filipino descent. Gurrea’s Cuentos de Juana, from which the story is taken, occupies a liminal space in the literary history of the Philippines, as it was published in Spain for a Spanish-reading audience, yet it is borne of her childhood in Negros, in the Philippines. The story illustrates Maria Tymoczko’s observation that postcolonial writing and interlingual translation are similar. Both are acts of representing the “foreign,” a linguistic artifact, in one case, and the “metatext of culture” embedded in that linguistic artifact, on the other. Gurrea uses Spanish to translate aspects of a non-Spanish culture. The story has as narrator one who is retelling tales that her nanny had told her, for an audience who is presumably unfamiliar with Negros culture. When Gurrea describes elements of Negros culture, she highlights their difference from European practices or belief systems, but she also asserts their validity indepedent of European norms. For example, panarapo is irreducible to mopping, though both are housecleaning practices. In denying a presumed hierarchy between the European and the colonial, Gurrea’s story is shown to be an instance of intercultural translation and even of postcolonial assertion. The translation into English of her story foregrounds these qualities by oscillating between what Lawrence Venuti calls the foreignizing and domesticating poles of translation. The choice to retain, that is, leave untranslated, words like panarapo foregrounds the postcoloniality of Gurrea’s story.

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