Surviving Translation. Prolongations of a Drift of Deconstruction in Latin America

Abstract

Translation is a problem that particularly concerns the Latin American ethos. Its problematization, on the part of a certain deconstructive tradition in Chile, embodied in the notion of 'place-in-between', reveals its relevance and scope. This essay, first, develops a reading of the appropriative function of the 'hegemonic missive'; second, it focuses on two treatments of the problem of translating within the examined tradition, both associated with Walter Benjamin's The Translator's Task and the interpretations surrounding the distinction between Fortleben and Überleben. While deconstructing the set of dominant presuppositions of translation, they manage to nurture a legibility that sees in the 'post' and in the 'over' of both terms the inscription of a plus of life that resignifies that condition of finitude expressed in languages as the very possibility of translation.