Cannibal Translation: Roots, Routes and Recipes from Latin American Literary Praxis

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Lecture Humanities

Mon, Apr 22, 2024

12 PM – 1:20 PM EDT (GMT-4)

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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Flyer for Cannibal Translation: Roots, Routes and Recipes from Latin American Literary Praxis

What could literary translation accomplish if practiced as a reciprocal, creative endeavor rather than a unidirectional, faithful homage to an original? The Latin American writer-translators featured in "Cannibal Translation" reject normative, servile translation and instead develop techniques that question, reanimate or improve their source texts. Rooted in the Brazilian avant-garde notion of cannibalism as an indigenous practice of honorably incorporating the other into the self, "Cannibal Translation" animates an alternative ethics of translation norms within Latin American configurations of World Literature. In this talk, Isabel Gomez will trace the routes that concepts of cultural cannibalism took from Brazilian Portuguese into Spanish to become a Latin American praxis of literary translation in a decolonial stance.

Food Provided (Lunch)

Where

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room 144

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Isabel Gomez

Associate Professor

University of Massachusetts, Boston

Isabel C. Gómez is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where her research and teaching focus on translation studies, modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx literatures, multilingualism, and experimental poetics. Her first book Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (Northwestern University Press 2023) received the 2024 Harry Levin Prize awarded annually from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) for the best first book in comparative literature. She co-edited the volume Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice (Routledge 2024), and currently her research focuses on the intersection of climate activism and translingual poetics. She was awarded a 2024-25 National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship for her next monograph titled Divest from English: Eco-Translation and Translingual Repair.

Hosted By

Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications (OWNER), Program in Latin American Studies