Panel: Producing Lives through Multiple Translations
Copanelists: Olga Aksakalova and Glenn D’Cruz
In January, 2001, Fine Line Features, a well-known American film distributor, released a largely English-language film version of the autobiography of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who had dies of AIDS in 1990. Titled in Spanish Antes que Anochezca, Arenas’s autobiography was first published posthumously in hard cover in 1992 by the Barcelona publisher Editions Tusquets. In 1993, Viking Penguin published Dolores M. Koch’s English translation of the book. In part because of the movie’s success, both Spanish and English books have been reprinted several times in paperback.
In the film, Arenas is played by the Spanish movie star Javier Bardem. His performance, his first role in an English-language film, earned him a 2001 Academy Award nomination for best actor. He was the first Spaniard to be so honored in the history of the Oscars. The movie is largely set in Cuba but was filmed in Mexico, with Mexico City standing in for Havana.
This paper explores the kinds of translations at work as Arenas’s life story made its way into English and then film. As well as the overt acts of translation from the Spanish to English text, and from the English text to mostly English-language film, the paper considers the stages of Arenas’s life as translations—that is, as metamorphoses from one state of being to another: from innocent rural child to wily, persecuted gay Cuban writer to Mariel boatlift refugee to, finally, exiled Cuban writer with AIDS in New York City. I compare and contrast the three representations of Arenas’s life to determine the degree to which the various media in which they appear shape the significations of that life, and to propose that translation—understood as change in state of being as well as in medium of expression—characterizes Arenas’s life across all three representations of it.
Thomas R. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Abington, and has published on the autobiographical writing of Henry Adams, Roland Barthes, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Harriet Martineau, Wyndham Lewis, and William Butler Yeats. He is the founding editor of Lifewriting Annual, published by AMS Press. This annual volume publishes critical essays, creative work combining one lifewriting genre with another genre, and reviews of autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, and collections of essays. It rarely reviews critical, theoretical, or scholarly works on lifewriting. He also serves on the IABA Organizing Committee, and is a current member of the Executive Committee of the MLA Division on Lifewriting. His day job at Penn State Abington is Director of the Advising Center, a position he was persuaded to accept after serving for a year and a half as a Division Head overseeing over ninety faculty in eleven disciplines offering seven different majors.