The Translator's Visibility

Reviews / Votes

[I]nsightful and deeply researched ... In addition to her thoughtful readings and radical reconsideration of the relationship between text and author, the value of Cleary's project is that it opens a doorway for further dialogue about the implications of translation and its fictional representation. * Hispania * Cleary's study provides fascinating new insights into the phenomenon of transfiction and astutely illustrates that what can be gained from studying scenes of translation goes far beyond conclusions about the practice and practitioners and the notions that underpin them. Furthermore, the fact that Cleary's monograph makes the particularly rich creative engagement of Latin American authors with translation visible to an English speaking readership is very welcome, while Hispanists not normally involved in translation studies will certainly find much food for thought in this framing of translation scenes as key to the contemporary works under investigation. * Translation Studies * [The Translator's Visibility's] overarching argument complements the burgeoning studies on translation by examining the heralded richness of contemporary Latin American fiction available in English. * World Literature Today * The history of Latin America is bound with the histories, philosophies, and practices of translation that have taken shape across the continent-in and into distinct academic, economic, social, cultural configurations. The Translator's Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction, Heather Cleary's lucid, illuminating and strikingly original study, shows how contemporary novelists in Latin America have shaped their fictions around this complex and differentiated history, producing not only some of our time's most compelling narratives, but also nuanced and far-reaching accounts of translation's sometimes violent and always disruptive expression in the global cultural and economic market. It will be a model for critics in years to come. * Jacques Lezra, Professor and Chair, Hispanic Studies, University of California, Riverside, USA * In her up-to-the-minute investigation of translation as it is foregrounded in recent Latin American fictions, Heather Cleary, herself a remarkable translator, apprehends a rather savage array of louche conducts, among them the dismantlement of the author, the disruption, interruption, corruption, and rupture of systems of intellectual property, the resistance to intelligibility, and the parasitic undermining of legitimacy. Obviously very much at home in this seditious underworld, Cleary provides a lucid and celebratory guide to its denizens, the unreliable narrators and translators, pseudo-originals, pseudo-translations, marginalia, prefaces, afterwords, and (especially) footnotes that conspire to overturn the world literary order in general, and in particular the weary tenets that translation is separate from writing, and fiction is separate from theory. * Esther Allen, Professor, Modern Languages and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, USA * The margins in my copy of The Translator's Invisibility are full of scribbled praise for Cleary's sparkling sentences and the ideas they unfold-about how translation, as both practice and trope, upends the demands of property and propriety nested in the concept of propriedad intelectual, and about how fictional texts featuring translator-protagonists can help shape new understandings of the always collaborative, sometimes contested activity that authorship always is. Cleary's readings of the novels she examines are brilliant; her reworking of the concept of untranslatability-which moves it away from the 'economy of equivalence'-extremely welcome; and her writing full of humor and panache. The Translator's Visibility is a book I'll be recommending, returning to, and teaching with for years to come. * Karen Emmerich, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, USA * Heather Cleary's contribution to the Fictional Turn in translation studies pushes the conversation on Latin America's critical and creative engagement with translation to new and exciting extremes, with a socioeconomically grounded focus on 'the asymmetries of discursive authority, the conditions under which cultural goods circulate, and the persistent dichotomy between the so-called "creative" traditions of the metropolis and derivative "translating" cultures at the periphery.' Transformative scholarship; highly recommended. * Douglas Robinson, Professor of Translating and Interpreting, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen *