Flight to Canada And Kindred: Similarities and Discrepancies in Two Neo-Slave Narratives Translated into Spanish
Keywords:
Octavia E. Butler, African-American Literature, Black English, Ishmael Reed, Literary Translation, Slave NarrativesAbstract
The aim of this paper is to study the Spanish translations of Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, two neo-slave narratives that were published in the 1970s. It examines how Black English, the lexicon of slavery, and proper nouns have been recreated in the Spanish target texts. The linguistic variety spoken by the secondary characters in Flight to Canada and by the slaves in Kindred makes readers aware of the language of the dispossessed Other. Butler’s and Reed’s novels were published simultaneously in Spain in 2018 and translated by Amelia Pérez de Villar and Inga Pellisa, respectively. This paper observes how translators’ choices play a key role in the portrayal of alterity in literary texts.
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