Stories of the (Translated) Archive: the disappearance of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as narrated in a database of translated declassified documents

ESCOBAR AGUIAR, MARÍA LAURA

Vic

Conferencia; VI International Conference ? Storytelling Revisited: Narrating within the Cultural Industries: Platforms, Stories and Narratives; 2023

Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya

After years of negotiation, the US government released in 2019 a collection of declassified documents issued by US intelligence agencies and departments (e.g. CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, among others). These documents, consisting of 49,000 pages, were linked to the last military dictatorship of Argentina (1976-1983). This is the largest government-to-government declassification release in US history.Understanding that declassification is a key step but also acknowledging the need to go further in the construction of memories, three Argentinian human rights NGOs (CELS, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and Memoria Abierta) launched an ambitious project of their own: the joint creation of an open-access database that systematises the information collected from these declassified documents. These NGOs have taken it upon themselves to guarantee one of the most important human rights of our era: their project aims at granting access to information by facilitating the navigation through and the reading of this exceptionally large amount of documents. Within this project, a group of volunteer translators render the declassified documents into Spanish providing a critical interpretation of the texts by following a feminist and human right agenda.Storytelling as a sense-making activity has the potential of subverting established power relations and hegemonies and it allows societies to interpret their past and build their collective memory (Stocchetti, 2016). The redemptive power of storytelling (Benhabib, 1990) is particularly relevant in communities which have undergone dictatorial and genocidal periods. This presentation draws from my research as a doctoral student at Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya and examines the role played by translation in social storytelling to make sense of a traumatic past. Understanding this open-access database as a platform that includes several instances of selection and (re)translation, this presentation explores a series of declassified documents to analyse how the disappearance of three Mothers of Plaza de Mayo is narrated in the archive. We will then examine the partial translations into Spanish to determine how translation in a platform environment (i.e., the database) affects the narration of these disappearances. We ultimately seek to understand an instance of platformatised narrative that contributes to the building of a microhistory (Levi, 1991; Munday, 2014) of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and of memories of Argentina’s recent past.We part from the assumption that the stories featured in an archive are fragmented and disperse and that it is the translators’ task to make a coherent narrative out of it. As a provisional hypothesis, we argue that, because of the various collaborative processes of institutional (re)translation that take place within the construction of the database, the narrative of the Mothers’ disappearance in the translated discourse constitutes a refracted representation of the story. In other words, the selected fragments translated into Spanish are metonymically constituted in the database of Proyecto Desclasificados following the virtual environment requirements and the project’s and the translators’ militant agenda (Escobar-Aguiar, forthcoming).