Multilingualism And Translation As Depositories Of Memory In Ilan Stavans

MARIA LAURA SPOTURNO

Hispanismos e outras questões de línguas

Editora Pontes

Lugar: Campinas, São Paulo; Año: 2025; p. 1 - 21

This chapter aims at pursuing a line of inquiry that has been relatively unexplored in the existing scholarship on Stavans. I intend to examine the ways in which language and translation become a depository of memory, particularly in relation to the author’s travels, experiences and reflections relating to Argentina (Stavans, 1994, 2013, 2016a, 2019; Brodsky and Stavans, 2010, 2016). Acknowledged as a fourth home, after Mexico, Israel and the United States, Argentina remains a powerful influence in the intricate interplay of languages, cultures and traditions shaping the author’s identity. The subject of language as a depository of memory is addressed in this chapter from two distinct but complementary angles. A Bakhtinian perspective, which pervades all of Stavans’ work, underscores the importance of carefully considering the diverse linguistic mechanisms employed in the author’s highly polyphonic and heteroglossic discourse. In my analysis of Stavans’ use of language, translation and memory, I examine his travel chronicles though Argentina, specifically focusing on the role of food and the recognition and resignification of space. Following Barthes (1961), food is understood as a productive semiotic system. With this regard, I will argue that the presentation of food, often subjected to multiple translation processes, is instrumental in interweaving past and present across space, acting as a repository for the preservation of collective memory and identity. Another meaningful layer of perspective surfaces in Stavans’ work as he explores space and the theme of Memory, particularly in connection to practices and signs designed to honor and remember the victims and survivors of genocidal regimes and terrorist attacks. By bridging the past and the present, spanning different times and spaces, these symbols take on profound meaning in Stavans’ contemplations of memorial sites associated with the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) and the 1994 terrorist attack to the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA). The exploration of symbols and traditions contributes to establish dynamic textual spaces, enabling the performance of a perpetually incomplete, translated identity. As it will become evident, the formula used by Kellman regarding the presence of a double consciousness throughout Stavans’ work reflects in the writings selected, in which the author offers the view of both an insider and an outsider.