Identidades “reescritas”: autotraducción y retraducción en la poesía mapuche contemporánea

Abstract

Mapuche authors have been self-translating their literary work extensively for the last three decades. Among the different motivations for this practice, the repossession of the Indigenous language as an element of identity-affirmation features prominently. This essay analyzes self-translation as a space where the identity of each author is rewritten or edited, as well as the links this practice shares with retranslation, both the author's own and allograph retranslation. The analysis will first focus on Mapuche writer Elicura Chihuailaf's reediting of a series of bilingual poems throughout his career. Additionally, the criteria of untranslatability between languages and cultures espoused by poet Liliana Ancalao will be contrasted with the allograph retranslations of her work into Mapudungun carried out by Víctor Cifuentes. The differences examined across self-translations and retranslations tend to respond to changes in the author's ideological positioning as well as to the emendation of semantic calques and instances of linguistic incommensurability.