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The Translated History of "Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin" Natalia Sucre New York City Department of Education, Translation and Interpretation Unit
Since the late fifties Latin American women writers of different generations have been questioning the construction of national history through narratives that often take a testimonial or, at least, an autobiographical form, usually recounted from the perspective of a girl-woman narrator or central female consciousness. Critical reception of their work has tended to align the female perspective with an unofficial history whose voicing challenges the official patriarchal line. While this interpretation articulates the force of these writers’ vision, it also reinforces a rigid polarization along gender lines. Thus, critical insight turns into critical cliché and blocks access to the complexity involved in many of these authors’ explorations of gender and power relations in the writing of national history. One author who has repeatedly examined the interplay between class and gender in the making and writing of national history is Ana Teresa Torres, namely in her first two novels, Exilio del tiempo (1989) and Doña Inés y el olvido (1992). A later novel by Torres, Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin (1999), further complicates any ready-made alignment of female perspective and unofficial history and, thus, provides an ideal opportunity for examining how one recent Latin American woman writer’s treatment of national history and its construction reaches beyond the constraints of fixed gender dichotomies to address issues of power more complexly at a time of national crisis. One of the ways in which Torres complicates the relation between the writing of national history and gender is by placing translation at the center of Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin and linking it to a female character. In this novel, the narrator is male as is the subject/object of his quest, his older bother, whose memoirs of leftist political dissidence dot the novel. However, the character who makes the narrator’s story coalesce and drives it to a conclusion is female, an elusive woman translator. Torres deploys the at once central and marginal figure of the female translator as a means of investigating the relationship between what may be called two phases of constructing national history from a male perspective: a heroic phase (the brother’s) and a non-heroic phase of anomie (the narrator’s). What drives Torres’ inquiry is an attempt to arrive at a useable memory for a present moment. Torres’ use of the translator as a means of interrogating the past and various different modes of history-making/writing resonates in productive ways with two different sets of texts: the different uses of translation as a metaphor for Latin America’s relation to the West in Latin American literary history (i.e.Borges, Fuentes); and, various 20th century theories of translation as a metaphor for writing and reading— from George Steiner’s hermeneutic model to more recent, culturally based studies of translation as shaped by postcolonial and power relations (i.e. Gayatri Spivak, Francine Masiello). In this paper I will examine the critical vision of national memory which Torres achieves in this novel through her application of the multiple valences of translation to the project of constructing national history.
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