Cortazar Translation

Víctor Sanchez

Translation 

Julio Cortázar, is an Argentine novelist and short-story writer who combined existential questioning with experimental writing techniques in his works. Many of Cortázar's short stories are representations of a surreal world that came up by his imagination. In these works, he often expressed a conflict between unreal and real events by allowing the fantastic to take control of the lives of his characters.

Style is the essential characteristic of every piece of writing, the outcome of the writer´s personality and his emotions at the moment; a single paragraph can´t be put together without revealing to some degree the personality of the author. Every writer has a literary style and his style is reflected in his writing. Translation should reflect the style of the original text.

In translation, everything changes. Every word or phrase; every syllable, for that matter, will be different from the original text. This means there will be additions, of course, but it will also draw attention to certain things in the original.

Every translation is an interpretative act, as well as a creative one. Translators read the original piece and try to work out what it’s doing, what’s important that’s going on. They are constantly making choices about which elements of a text to preserve and foreground, and which to sacrifice.

The writing style of Cortazar is really complicated for the readers to understand. First the Spanish language it´s one of the most difficult languages for someone to learn because a single word can be used in many different ways and has a lot of meanings. 

 The job of any translator that wants to do something with Cortazar’s works is not something easy to do. They have to get inside his head and completely see thing the way he does, or used to do. And then adapt it to the language they are going to translate it, obviously there are a lot of things that are going to change, the purpose it´s to maintain the essence. His kind of writing is so creative it makes it harder for the translator to transmit the same original idea.