Translation as a travel in the work of Márgara Russotto

Abstract

Márgara Russotto’s work is permeated by the experience of travel. Being a poetess, critic, and translator, she migrated to the Venezuelan Caribbean when she was twelve years old; then she travelled to Brazil to pursue a doctorate in Comparative Literature, and, finally, she has remained in the United States for a long time as a university professor. She has been concerned about how the individual transfers his vital and intellectual paths into the literary text. Both in the first phase of her poetic work, for instance from Restos del viaje to Épica mínima, to her translations of Cecília Meireles, Oswald de Andrade, Antonio Candido, Claudio Magris, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Alberto Caramella and Alfonso Gatto, she reveals the tensions of transition from one language into another, from a cultural code to another, and how a change in the text and in who translates becomes evident. In sum, the paper will focus on presenting the different conceptions of Translation that exist in Russotto’s work in a dialogue with what Benjamin (1971) and Glissant (2006) propose, mainly with the one that perceives Translation as a journey, and as an approximation to and from unknown realities.