Cultural translation and José María Arguedas’ work

Abstract

According to Thaïs Diniz (1999), all translation is a cultural translation. On the other hand, Dora Sales (2002), studying specifically the production of José María Arguedas, say that the author stands as a translator between cultures and undertakes a search for a cultural translation. From this theoretical counterpoint and still with the foundation of Antonio Cornejo Polar (1994), Virgilio Moya (2007) e Antoine Berman (1985), we study this question in two specifics moments of the cultural history of Latin America. The first, in the chronic of Guamán Poma de Ayala about the episode of Cajamarca, Peru, in 1532. In the second, we analyze fragments of the novel Los ríos profundos (1958), in that Arguedas, according Sales (2002), would adopt several procedures of translation to try to fill a misunderstanding that persists in the Latin American subcontinent between orality and writing, promoting what she considers a cultural translation. Through these two moments of Latin American cultural production in the light of Translation Studies theorists, but also of other related areas, we try to expand the reflections on the translation in the subcontinent and more specifically on what can be understood by cultural translation in the work of Arguedas.