Ambivalence as a subversive strategy of identity construction in the translation of Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué

Abstract

Literary translation makes visible multiple cultural and sexual identity constructions, far from monolithic identifications, in a global and intercultural framework, represented in autobiographical or autofictional narrative productions, such as the novel Garçon manqué, by Nina Bouraoui, which is analyzed here. The author portrays the experiences of an adolescent girl, with an Algerian father
and a French mother, who lives between two countries in both of which she feels like a foreigner. This geographic-cultural duality triggers a search for identity in order to distance herself from the indefinable space of otherness. To cultural hybridity is added gender ambivalence, as she rejects the sexual categorization attributed to her. The narrator finds the solution to binary oppositions in a tiers espace, a plural space that eludes the logic of choice and provides the self with a multiple, malléable variant. Plural identity is narrated in terms of ambivalence, a subversive strategy of resistance to cultural, gender or heterosexist hegemony. Because of its translatological character, in this work we have a double objective: First, as a theoretical framework, we determine how geographical, sexual and linguistic ambivalence is constructed in this novel, in order to design and apply, a posteriori, the procedures and techniques required to recreate this subversive strategy in the translation of the text into Spanish that we present.