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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Anna Milsom Centre for Research in Translation, Middlesex
University, Great Britain The Cuban writer and artist Lydia Cabrera produced
twenty-two books over a lifetime that spanned most of the twentieth century.
Although she herself consistently denied being a ‘serious’ ethnographer, her
600-page plus volume El monte (subtitled ‘Notes on the religions, magic,
superstitions and folklore of the black Creoles and people of Cuba’)
(Cabrera 1954), has been widely recognized as being of paramount importance
to the study of Afro-Cuban culture. Cabrera also wrote scores of short
stories, inspired by the Afro-Cuban mythology brought to Cuba by successive
generations of African slaves. The four resulting collections of folk tales
were among the first to introduce many in Cuba to their rich oral heritage
of African lore and religion, a heritage which was often denied or
considered unworthy of investigation. Nonetheless, very little of Cabrera’s
work has been translated from Spanish, and only ten of over a hundred short
stories have been translated into English. One of the reasons suggested for
this is that Cabrera’s fiction encompasses ethnography, testimonial
literature, song, story and linguistics, making it hard to fit easily into
generic classifications (Davies 1997:154-3). It is equally true that her
more ‘scientific’ books also fail to fit neatly into any given category,
laced with stories, authorial asides and direct testimony from her
informants. Just as Cabrera’s texts seem to refuse to conform to any one
discipline, they also play between languages, often containing the Yoruba
and Bantu songs and verses in which they were originally performed, and the
Bozal Creole voices of their Cuban tellers. The aim of this paper is to
trace the multiple voices that speak through Cabrera’s texts. Comparisons
will be made between her field notes, her non-fiction works and her stories.
The creative possibilities offered for the representation of these multiple
voices in translation will be explored. Cabrera, Lydia (1954) El Monte: Notas Sobre las
Religiones, la Magia, las Supersticiones y el Folklore de los Negros
Criollos y el Pueblo de Cuba. Colección del Chicherekú. Havana:
Ediciones C.R. Davies, Catherine (1997) A Place in the Sun?:
Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba. London and New Jersey: Zed
Books Ltd.
Panel 6: Translation and Ethnography – Modes of Representation
Tracing the Multiple Voices in the Work of Lydia Cabrera
References:
© IATIS 2003