Les Belles Infidèles. Archive and Translation in Victoria Ocampo, Clarice Lispector and Margo Glantz

• Applicant: Dr. Delfina Isabel Cabrera, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451460851

This research project will result in the first comparative study of three major Latin American writers and translators: Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979), Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) and Margo Glantz (1930). Based on the method of genetic criticism—more specifically, genetic translation studies—in articulation with translation and literary studies, the project will focus on Ocampo, Lispector and Glantz’s personal archives and on a selection of published works in order to unveil an overlooked yet fundamental trait of their writing: their translation practice. The project aims at offering new insights on the creative process of the three canonized writers, contributing to the emerging field of Latin American translation studies and to the diffusion of the cultural and historical heritage of literary archives. To date, there are no comprehensive studies of Latin American translation archives, and what is even more surprising, none belonging to female translator-writers who have played a key role in the literary translation history of the region. In this sense, despite the notable increase in historical and theoretical attention on translation issues in Latin American studies in recent years, the longstanding unequal representation of female writers in the literary field has resulted in a disregard for the translation work of Ocampo, Lispector and Glantz. Additionally, as most scholarly research has focused on the published texts of Ocampo, Lispector and Glantz rather than on their manuscripts, the specific ways in which translation operates in their creative process remains hitherto an open, unexplored question. A careful look at their archives, nevertheless, reveals a considerable number of translation and self-translation working documents—drafts, typescripts, letters, notes—, a fact that testifies to the importance the three writers accorded to this practice throughout their lives. Hence, this proposal aims at introducing innovative lines of interpreting Ocampo, Lispector and Glantz’s oeuvres by incorporating into the analysis documents that had not been previously considered. Therefore, by building new relationships between the collections and by putting them in context and in contact, the proposal also seeks to foster academic interest in other archives of Latin American writers and translators. Likewise, considering that the questions related to translation respond to an international configuration of intercultural and inter-linguistic networks, this project aims at allowing for a transregional understanding of the transfers between languages, literatures and territories in the second half of 20th century Latin America.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants