New Voices 11 Alice Whitmore

New Voices in Translation Studies 11 (2014)
The ‘Permanent Unease’ of Cultural Translation

in the Fiction of Guillermo Fadanelli
Alice Whitmore
Monash University, AUSTRALIA
ABSTRACT
This article examines the work and potential translation of Mexican author Guillermo Fadanelli
through the lens of ‘cultural translation’. Fadanelli’s dirty realist fiction, widely celebrated among
Mexican critics and readerships, is inseparable from the urban space of Mexico City: a setting
brimming with tension, cultural mutation and heteroglossic dialogue. At once beguiling and
repugnant, this ambivalent space is the site of a great unease; caught between traditions, it
occasions the Frankensteinian genesis of new and ‘other’ cultures. Drawing upon the theories of
Homi K. Bhabha, Néstor García Canclini and Gayatri Spivak, this article situates the act and
concept of translation – both ‘cultural’ and literary – within a similar dynamic of multilayered
and constantly re-articulated Otherness. Interlingual translation, itself a play of tensions and
differences, takes place in an equally uneasy space across and between cultures, an interstice
where anxiety gives way to production. Like Fadanelli’s Mexico City, the hybrid site of
translation not only represents Otherness but itself engenders difference, multiplicity and newness.
KEYWORDS: cultural translation, dirty realism, Guillermo Fadanelli, literary translation,

Mexico City, third space
Since its conception, the notion of cultural translation has been inextricable from the political
and ethical realms of postmodern scholarship. As Harish Trivedi (2007) notes, the concept of
cultural translation as it exists within the domain of postcolonial and postmodernist discourse
has little to do with the conventional preoccupations of translation scholars; to borrow
Trivedi’s words, this is “a beast of similar name but very different fur and fibre” (2007: 282).
That said, discussions of interlingual literary translation can (and do) take place within the
discursive framework of cultural translation. Just as translation scholarship has come to
embrace a distinct postcolonial discourse of migration, displacement and hegemony, so the
term ‘translation’ itself has experienced a conceptual shift towards a different field of
meaning, bringing the term closer to the spatial metaphor of its etymological origins
(translatio: to bring across) while simultaneously extending it beyond the narrow realm of
‘translation proper’.1 After mapping some of these shifts across the discursive terrains of
translation and cultural studies, this article will examine the ways in which the broadened
1
I refer here to Roman Jakobson’s notion of interlingual, as opposed to intralingual and intersemiotic, translation
(1992: 145).
25
Alice Whitmore, The ‘Permanent Unease’ of Cultural Translation
in the Fiction of Guillermo Fadanelli, 25-53.
framework of cultural translation illuminates both our readings of Guillermo Fadanelli’s work
and the practice of its interlingual translation into English. The urban, cultural and literary
space of Mexico City will be analyzed as an inherently translated site of tension, “permanent
unease” and production that finds its reflection in the ethical act of interlingual translation.
Drawing predominantly upon the conceptual schemata of Homi K. Bhabha and Néstor García
Canclini and their respective notions of hybridity, translation and third space, as well as on
my own experience as the first translator of Fadanelli’s novel ¿Te veré en el desayuno?
(1999/2009), this article attempts to elucidate the political and poetical possibilities of a
‘cultural’ approach to literary translation.
Cultural translation: shifting discursive spaces
While the political foci of translation theorists are far from uniform, many are concerned with
exposing and defying the dominant cultural traditions which, overtly or covertly, manifest
themselves in literature. With the convergence of translation and cultural studies in the 1990s,
there came an acknowledgment of the contextual, cultural and socio-historical aspects that
define and delimit translation activity. Constituting what Mary Snell-Hornby (1990) terms the
‘cultural turn’ in translation scholarship, this acknowledgment signalled a shift from
translation as text to translation as culture and politics. The situation of translation within its
full cultural, social and political context(s) called for a re-examination of the concept of the
Other – a revolutionary shift in light of the historically ego- (and Euro-) centric perspectives
of traditional translation scholarship – and gave rise to polemic theories of feminist and
postcolonial translation. The objectives of these new theories were overtly political: in the
case of feminist scholars, the vindication and recovery of the voices of women writers “lost in
the patriarchy”; for postcolonialists, “the carnivalesque inversion of power” epitomized
within “the cannibalistic metaphor of antropofagia”2 (Wallace 2002:66). Both the ‘cultural
turn’ and the rise of postcolonial studies formed part of a multifaceted paradigm shift
involving multiple branches of (predominantly Western) scholarship, constituting, in Amaryll
2
The notion of antropofagia (cannibalism) as a literary concept was first proposed in Oswald de Andrade’s
Manifiesto Antropófago (1928) and later revived by the pioneers of Brazilian poesia concreta and tropicalismo.
Applied to translation scholarship by prolific scholar (and practising translator) Haroldo de Campos, the
antropofagia metaphor found its origins in sixteenth-century Brazil when a Tupinamba tribe –probably out of
homage – devoured a Catholic priest, terrifying Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. Appropriated by de Andrade,
de Campos and others as an allegorical representation of the way in which the colonized could shake off their
colonial restraints, “[devouring] techniques of composition in order to produce something new” (Schwartz 2000:
77), antropofagia evolved into a poetics of translation which resonated in postcolonial literature, history, culture
and politics (Wallace 2002: 72).
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Chanady’s words, “una celebración generalizada de la diferencia, bajo las etiquetas de la

hibridez, la transcultura, la multicultura, la traducción […] y el mestizaje cultural [a
generalized celebration of difference, under the labels of hybridity, transculture, multiculture,
translation […] and cultural mestizaje]” (Chanady 1997).3
Framed by postcolonial discourse, and subsequently reincorporated into translation studies

theory within what Pym (2010) has called the cultural translation paradigm, the term
‘translation’ itself experienced a similar transformation. Theorists such as Tejaswini
Niranjana and Gayatri Spivak cast interlingual translation as a domain of cultural activity in
which ideological tensions and power relations were played out, weaving poststructuralist,
postcolonial and feminist discourse into discussions of the translation of social and literary
‘texts’. Translation, indeed, was perceived as one of the key discourses informing “the
hegemonic apparatuses that belong to the ideological structure of colonial rule” (Niranjana
1992: 33). The structures at work here were not those of the Empire, but rather of a persisting
“absentee colonialism” (Niranjana 1992: 2) that perpetuated itself through the circulation of
language, literature and cultural images. Translation, it was argued, both “shapes, and takes
shape within” this asymmetrical power structure that rewrites (and therefore constructs) the
colonial Other (Niranjana 1992: 8). Given the radical reconceptualizations of terms like
‘colonialism’ and ‘hegemony’, the very concept of translation became inherently postcolonial.
As Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi note in the introduction to their collection Post-colonial
Translation: “In current theoretical discourse [...] to speak of postcolonial translation is little
short of tautology” (1999: 13). As a result, the term ‘translation’ was (re)loaded with
connotations of migrancy, exile and diaspora, in a sense returning to its etymological roots.
To quote again from Bassnett and Trivedi, “the word ‘translation’ seems to have come full
circle and reverted from its figurative literary meaning of interlingual transaction to its [...]
physical meaning of locational disrupture; translation seems to have been translated back to
its origins” (1999:13).
At once reinventing and expanding upon the notions of exile and spatial dislocation, Homi K.
Bhabha’s theory of cultural translation provoked another significant shift in translation
scholarship. In Bhabha’s work, the term ‘translation’ was further translated towards a
metaphorized discourse of migration and the ‘transnation’ (cf. Ashcroft 2009), becoming a
3
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations and back translations are my own.
27
kind of “circulating metaphor/metonymy” (Rao 2006: 89) that diverges considerably from its
traditional meanings. In The Location of Culture (1994) Bhabha offers several
characteristically enigmatic interpretations of the concept of translation, one of which states
that:
Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in

actu (enunciation, positionality) rather than language in situ (énoncé,
propositionality). And the sign of translation continually tells, or ‘tolls’ the
different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative
practices. The ‘time’ of translation consists in that movement of meaning, the
principle and practice of a communication that, in the words of de Man, ‘puts the
original in motion to decanonize it, giving it the movement of fragmentation, a
wandering of errance, a kind of permanent exile’ (1994: 228).
Translation construed as a process of destabilization and negotiation, as an implicitly

subversive process of movement and potentiality, has proven to be an abiding and influential
theme in contemporary translation scholarship. This new and ambivalent understanding of
‘translation’ (which, after Bhabha, I will call cultural translation) itself enacts the fundamental
theories of postcolonial thought. Cultural translation is a performative process of spatial and
temporal ‘negotiation’ within the interstitial postcolonial space; it combines, in Sathya Rao’s
terms, “a process of disjunction (which interrupts the mimetic connivance between the
original and the copy) and a performance of re-enunciation or ‘revaluation’ (which offers to
the copy its full autonomy as a postcolonial and creative subject)” (2006: 89). As an act of
rewriting and rupture, then, as well as an act of appropriation, the process of interlingual
translation can also be seen as a ‘re-articulation’ of the Other’s arbitrary subject position –
arbitrary, indeed, because the site of oscillating hybridity opened up by cultural translation
enables us to perceive the space of the Other (which, in the context of translation proper, is
also the space of the origin or source text) as a vast “multiplicity of incommensurable cultural
locations” (Rao 2006: 89).
Mutants, hybrids and contradictions: readings of Mexico City
This shifted (and shifting) understanding of translation is particularly useful when we begin to
dissect works of literature that are at once products and producers of a postmodern (ir)reality
and whose temporal, spatial and cultural locations are increasingly difficult to pin down. The
fiction of Guillermo Fadanelli, with its chaotic urban settings, polyphonic narratives and
28
layers of contradiction, is representative of such work. Viewed through the optic of cultural
translation, Fadanelli’s writing opens itself to new and provocative readings that, in turn, offer
hybridized readings of Mexico as both a literary entity and a living cultural location.
Fadanelli’s writing is firmly rooted in the inexhaustible metropolis of Mexico City, “esa
cárcel imposible que parece haber salido de la mente de Piranesi [that impossible prison, like
something out of the mind of Piranesi]” (Frías 2008: 67). The city – Fadanelli’s birthplace and
home – is at once the framework and true protagonist of his novels, and the strange or tragic
predicaments of his characters enact the uneasy relationship that persists between the writer
and his milieu. Fadanelli is quick to criticize the intrinsic violence, corruption and
derangement of the Mexican capital. In his numerous interviews and non-fiction pieces,
Fadanelli paints a relentlessly grim portrait of “el caos inabarcable de la Ciudad de México
[the vast chaos of Mexico City]”: the city is a “territorio de guerra [war zone]”; a “metastasis”
(Herrera-Pahl 2010); “una enfermedad que mata al espíritu, pero no al cuerpo [a sickness that
destroys the spirit, but not the body]” (Ramos Martín 2004). In an interview with Guadalajara
newspaper El Informador (14 Mar. 2009), Fadanelli endows the capital with a cruel and
gargantuan persona, portraying it as “una ciudad reptil, saurio, que devora cualquier tipo de
sensibilidad y de entusiasmo [a reptilian, saurian city that devours all sensitivity and
enthusiasm]”. His tone is derisory at times: “Me gusta referirme al Distrito Federal como una
mala broma de Dios”, he writes. “Es una una ciudad que desde un punto de vista razonable no
debería estar en pie [I like to refer to Mexico City as a bad joke played by God. It’s a city that,
from any reasonable point of view, ought not to be standing]” (Ricárdez 2008). This cynicism
tinges Fadanelli’s fictional descriptions of Mexico City and the abhorrent (or abject)
characters that populate it. As a writer whose underground prestige has brought him to the
verge of the mainstream,4 Fadanelli is recognized as somewhat of a dirty prophet of the vile
and vulgar. He is also, in some sense, a ‘translator’ between two subcultures: that of ‘lo culto’
(art, literature and so-called ‘high culture’) and the literal subculture of the base, the
underground, that which lies beneath the plebeian façade of “la cultura masiva” (cf. García
Canclini 1990: 237). Indeed, Fadanelli’s translation of the visual, guttural Mexico City idiom
4
As Carlos Martínez Rentería comments in his book La cresta de la ola: reinvenciones y digresiones de la in
oContracultura en México (2009), counterculture “paradójicamente, sólo cumplirá su sentido de ruptura al
hacerse de nuevo cultura [paradoxically, only fulfils its disruptive objective when it once again becomes
culture]” (2009: 10). Fadanelli’s graduation from little-known, countercultural literary magazines such as La
regla rota (1984-1987) and La pus moderna (1989-1997) to national forums such as El Universal and Letras
Libres, along with his growing readership, demonstrates this point. It could be argued that Fadanelli has already
come full circle, in which case his ‘underground’ status might well be questioned.
29
into the culturally ‘valuable’ discourse of fiction is an art form with which he has come to be
strongly associated. As Valeria Luiselli notes, Fadanelli’s work, despite meeting with general
acclaim in the urbane realm of literary criticism, has become synonymous with the underbelly
of Mexico City:
[L]a obra entera de Fadanelli es indisociable del DF, de sus personajes – reales o
arquetípicos – de sus ergástulos, puteros, cantinas y alcantarillas; y también es
verdad que hay un DF que es ahora indisociable de este escritor – hay lugares y
personas reales que parecen una mala broma de Fadanelli.
[Fadanelli’s body of work is inseparable from Mexico City, from its characters
(real or archetypal), from its ergastuli, whore mongers, cantinas and gutters; it is
also true that there exists a Mexico City that is now inseparable from the author –
there are people and places that seem like a bad joke played by Fadanelli (2011:
88).
Fadanelli’s bleak urban narratives offer manifold representations of a complex “via crucis
mexicano” characterized by “chantaje, corrupción e impunidad [extortion, corruption and
impunity]” (Fadanelli 2003: 35). This rather predictable conjunction of ardent Catholicism,
political ineptitude and deeply entrenched violence is nevertheless a deliberately misleading
one; upon closer analysis, Fadanelli’s writing reveals a much more nuanced representation of
Mexico City and its inhabitants, and despite his disparagement of the capital there is more
than a hint of self-contradiction in Fadanelli’s discourse. In a (perhaps deliberately)
hyperbolic interview with Rosana Ricárdez, for example, he states: “México no es un lugar
habitable, ni remotamente [Mexico is not a liveable place, not even remotely]”. The
motivation to write, to fictionalize the space around him – he affirms – is the product of an
“indispensable” desire to construct “un espacio o [...] un universo alternativo a esa ciudad [an
alternate space, or alternate universe removed from that city]”. Here, Fadanelli echoes the
notion of the supermetropolis as “an unfit place for human existence” (Carlson 2000: 142), a
place where relentless ecocide has reared something like a “cultura del post-apocalipsis [post-
apocalyptic culture]” (Villoro 2009: 10). In light of this, one might expect the creative act to
become something like a form of escapism. And yet, Fadanelli’s writing is far from escapist;
on the contrary, it is at once fearless and deeply compassionate in its portrayals of the
complex realities of Mexican society. Indeed, Fadanelli has been lauded as an important
proponent of Mexican realismo sucio [dirty realism] (González Boixo 2009: 12), a (sub)genre
characterized in both its North and Latin American guises by “seedy settings [...]
uncompromising descriptions of violence, sordid sex, and the dreary hopelessness of its
30
downbeat characters” (Stringer 1996: 171-2). Granta editor Bill Buford’s initial appraisal of
the genre, which arose around the work of North American writers such as Raymond Carver,
Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford, characterized the dirty realist aesthetic as urbane, minimalist
and tragic, defined by its “[u]nderstated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently
compassionate” depictions of the “belly-side of contemporary life” (Hemmingson 2008: 11).
The numerous comparisons between Fadanelli’s writing and that of Raymond Carver and
Charles Bukowski (comparisons also spurred, one imagines, by Fadanelli’s professed love of
these writers) point to a common, unflinching approach to the ‘unliveable’ reality of
postindustrial urban society. With its scathing irony, debauched urban landscapes and latent
pessimism, Fadanelli’s writing certainly conforms to the dirty realist aesthetic. This aesthetic,
as grim as it appears, actively resists facile reductionism in favour of a certain behavioural
and moral complexity. Dirty realist narratives, Tamas Dobozy argues, tend towards
contradiction and hypocrisy as a kind of passive-aggressive reflection of capitalist culture –
Dobozy has gone so far as to posit the existence of a ‘hypocrisy aesthetic’ – which
simultaneously confuses and subverts traditional representations or imaginings of society. The
dirty realist system, in other words, is in fact an antisystem, “a logic of continual and
consistent contradiction” (Dobozy 2001: 51).
In Fadanelli’s work, this logic is most transparent in the short story collections that see a
plurality of anonymous narrators feeding into a confused discourse of dreams, musings, and
truncated dialogues. Early publications such as El día que la vea la voy a matar (1992) and
Terlenka (1995) demonstrate Fadanelli’s unbridled vigour for controversy, and the staccato
narratives (often no more than a page in length) brim with dissonance and inconsistency. The
narrator of “El Mala Muerte”, for example, deliberately befuddles his monologues with
blatant self-contradiction. He recounts:
Apenas ayer salí a la calle y con toda naturalidad violé a una adolescente que tenía
los labios pintados de rojo: la abandoné exhausta en un parque. Después me fui a
emborrachar con mis amigos; durante la juerga tuve que medirme dos veces: la
primera con los puños y la segunda armado de una navaja, en ambas terminé
victorioso. Para celebrarlo salí de la cantina y castré a dos perros y a un viejo que
pasaba por ahí. No es necesario que confiese que he vuelto a mentir, a las cinco
tengo un partido de tenis con el ingeniero Moreno y en la noche tomaré un avión
hacia Londres por lo que tendré que tomar pastillas.
[Just yesterday, as natural as anything, I went out and raped a teenage girl who
wore red lipstick: I left her exhausted in a park. Then I went and got drunk with
31
my friends; twice during the revelries I had to show my mettle, the first time with
my fists, the second armed with a knife, and both times I was victorious. To
celebrate I left the cantina and castrated two dogs and an old man. I need not
confess that I’ve just told another lie; at five I have a tennis match with Moreno
and tonight I’m catching a plane to London, for which I’ll have to take tablets]
(Fadanelli 1992: 99-100).
The above passage exhibits a kind of double-barrelled contradiction: the self-confessed

narrative contradiction (“I’ve just told another lie”) is couched within a latent stylistic
contradiction, evident in the incongruity of an apparently sophisticated, bourgeois narrator
relating tales of rape and castration. In another story of the same collection, “Tan bello, tan
azul, tan claro,” the narrator’s own vivid imagination throws the reality of urban life into stark
relief. After describing (in voluptuous detail) his paradisiacal existence on a Caribbean island,
he admits:
En realidad no vivía allí, sino en el condominio de una vieja unidad habitacional,

en un departamento pequeño cuyas recámaras medían dos metros por dos metros
y en donde se escuchaba perfectamente el ruido de las tuberías transportando la
mierda de los vecinos que habitaban el piso de arriba.
[In reality I didn’t live there, I lived in an old housing complex, in a small
apartment with bedrooms measuring two square metres, where you could hear
with perfect clarity the sound of the plumbing transporting the neighbours’ shit
from the apartment upstairs] (Fadanelli 1992: 103).
Realism here contradicts the utopian imagery that precedes and envelops it (the passage goes
on to muse on the delights of the narrator’s imaginary lover, a twenty-one-year-old movie
star, before again confessing reality, enacting a kind of willed vacillation between fantasy and
truth), enacting a double subversion that at once deprecates reality and sabotages the imagined
utopia. This, too, is a kind of translation: the imperfect translation of intangible dream into
tangible reality, from which neither will emerge unscathed.
Fadanelli’s incoherent antisystem is also at work in the 1999 novel ¿Te veré en el desayuno?,
in which four disparate narratives intertwine to form inevitably grim but ultimately surprising
patterns. Mingling internal dialogue with detached narration, ¿Te veré en el desayuno?
weaves together scattered glimpses of four lives that (as the novel’s epigraph forewarns) “no
merecían haber formado parte de novela alguna [were never worth writing about in any
novel]” (Fadanelli 2009: 7). The varied voices of Fadanelli’s four protagonists – among them
Cristina (a mildly optimistic prostitute), Ulises (a solitary Fonacot employee), Adolfo (an
32
unemployed pseudo-veterinarian) and Olivia (the adolescent daughter of a family of

Jehovah’s witnesses) – paint a painfully unremarkable portrait of the modern urban dystopia;
of its invisible disillusions, of the daily tragedies and anonymities of its inhabitants. The
contradictions within these fragmented spaces lie in Fadanelli’s disturbing juxtapositions of
the archetypal and the aberrant, the pedestrian and the depraved, the traditional and the
postmodern. Thus we find graphic descriptions of Olivia’s rape interjecting swathes of banal
dialogue between her bickering parents (Fadanelli 2009: 89-97); we are privy to the perverse
musings of Ulises as he encourages an unforeseen erection with mundane office banter
(Fadanelli 2009: 25-27); and we witness the compulsive voyeurism of Adolfo who, from his
bedroom window, observes the innocent and mundane activities of his teenage neighbour
(Fadanelli 2009: 38-40).
The urban space framing these disconcerting narratives is continually signalled as an

irrational and incongruous construction: “¿Quién inventó las ciudades?”, ponders Cristina.
“¿Quién tuvo la idea de poner una casa tras otra? [Who invented cities? Whose idea was it to
put houses one after the other?]” (Fadanelli 2009: 13). The postmodern metropolis is
construed as a complex “mosaico humano [human mosaic]” (Fadanelli 2009: 39) composed
of heterogeneous fragments, sitting uneasily between the third and first worlds.5 It is a space
where the structures of capitalism (a form of neo-colonialism, which might still be considered
within a postcolonial framework) are by turns absorbed and othered by a series of fractured
and plural narrative voices; a place where the tortillería and the Unidad Habitacional coexist
with “el Seven Eleven” and “el Blockbuster de la Avenida Taxqueña” (Fadanelli 2009: 39). In
the short story “La posmodernidad explicada a las putas”, which constructs a revealing
dialogue between two prostitutes, a literature professor and a middle-class yuppy gathered at a
hot dog stand, the hybrid identities of Mexico City are neatly summarized in a playful
microcosm of the postmodern megalopolis. With an elegance and humour that recall the
words of Chicano artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña –“Me estoy desmexicanizando para
mexicomprenderme [I am demexicanizing myself in order to mexicomprehend myself]”
(García Canclini 1990: 302) – Fadanelli superimposes capitalist iconography and snippets of
English terminology (Pepsi, Cartier, hot dogs, “el young professional”) upon a thoroughly
5
This fragmentation is, of course, linguistic as well as cultural. In the words of Juan Villoro: “La gran ciudad
carece de lenguaje estructurado; la energía con que avanza, su exuberante desorden, requiere un mosaico roto
[Large cities lack a structured language; the energy that propels them, their exuberant chaos, requires a broken
mosaic]” (Villoro 2005: 138)
33
Mexican setting and vernacular (“¡Vivan los tacos, hijos de la chingada!”), resulting in a
dynamic that falls somewhere among the interstices of “[p]osmexica, prechicano, panlatino”
culture (García Canclini 1990: 302). The story’s final sentence, scrawled in “salsa catsup”
upon an anonymous city wall, echoes the postmodern maxim underlying much of Fadanelli’s
work: “Todos somo mutantes, no habrá ya juicio final [We are all mutants, there will be no
judgement day]” (Fadanelli 1992: 118).
Comparisons between literature and visual art are, in this instance, rather illuminating. Indeed,
Fadanelli’s literary mosaics (be they in the form of fragmentary short story collections or
polyphonic novels) have much in common with the iconic murals that, somewhat like ‘high
culture’ graffiti, adorn the public spaces of Mexico City. As Néstor García Canclini notes:
Rivera, Siqueiros y Orozco propusieron síntesis iconográficas de la identidad

nacional inspiradas a la vez en las obras de mayas y aztecas, los retablos de
iglesias, las decoraciones de pulquerías, los diseños y colores de la alfarería
poblana, las lacas de Michoacán y los avances experimentales de vanguardias
europeas.
[Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco proposed the iconographic synthesis of national

identity, at once inspired by Mayan and Aztec works, religious altarpieces, the
images adorning pulquerías, the colours and designs of artisanal pottery, the
lacquer art of Michoacán, and the experimental work of the European avant-
garde] (1990: 78-79).
Just as the “synthesis” proposed by Mexico’s celebrated muralists drew from Mexico’s hybrid
culture a thread of unprecedented creativity and innovation, so does Fadanelli’s writing
suggest new readings of Mexico City as an inherently translated crossroads of histories,
cultures and tongues. In his seminal work Culturas Híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir
de la modernidad (1990), García Canclini foregrounds the notion of hybridity as an intrinsic
characteristic of Mexican (and, more broadly, Latin American) society. “La perspectiva
pluralista”, he writes, “que acepta la fragmentación y las combinaciones múltiples entre
tradición, modernidad y posmodernidad, es indispensable para considerar la coyuntura
latinoamericana de fin de siglo [the pluralist perspective, which accepts fragmentation and
multiple combinations among tradition, modernity and postmodernity, is indispensable for
considering the Latin American conjuncture at the turn of the century]” (García Canclini
1990: 329-330). Mexico City in particular, which is central to García Canclini’s
anthropological and cultural theses, is construed as a site of deeply entrenched historical and
34
social hybridity. Indeed, the city’s irremediably chaotic and remarkably fertile commingling
of cultures, voices and creative styles epitomizes postmodernity itself: “El posmodernismo no
es un estilo sino la copresencia tumultuosa de todos, el lugar donde los capítulos de la historia
del arte y del folclor se cruzan entre sí y con las nuevas tecnologías culturales
[Postmodernism is not a style but the tumultuous co-presence of all styles, the place where the
chapters in the history of art and folklore are crossed with each other and with the new
cultural technologies]” (García Canclini 1990: 307).
The notion of cross-breeding evoked here (one that also recurs with some frequency in
translation discourse) betrays the biological origins of the ‘hybridity’ metaphor, which has
met with considerable debate since its integration into the field of literary and cultural studies.
As Josef Raab and Martin Butler note, the term ‘hybridity’ has long since shucked the burden
of “negative implications and connotations of inferiority, contamination, miscegenation and
perversion” (2008: 2) and has become a familiar metaphor in the conceptualization of cultural
contact, transfer and exchange, especially in the field of postcolonial studies (cf. Zapf 1999:
303). In seeking to describe that “ongoing condition” of transculturation that allows no space
for “zones of purity” and homogeneity (Rosaldo in García Canclini 1995a: xv), the concept of
hybridity stands in direct opposition to essentialist conceptions of culture or identity;
“wherever it emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism” (Young 1995: 27). That
said, the concept of hybridity is itself a hybrid construct. As Robert Young points out, “there
is no single, or correct, concept of hybridity: it changes as it repeats, but it also repeats as it
changes” (1995: 27). The term’s shaky foundations, straddling a number of (often divergent)
theoretical perspectives, thus ensure that the term itself, like the cultural phenomenon it
attempts to name, remains in an ongoing condition of change and contestation. Despite this,
García Canclini’s observations remain pertinent: his evaluation of Latin America as a site of
“echoes” and “contradictions” considers both its “historia híbrida [hybrid history]” (García
Canclini 1990: 69) and its ever-changing cultural hybridity, establishing a base from which a
number of analyses, in diverse areas of knowledge, can be launched. The translatability of
García Canclini’s terminology itself points to the potential fertility of ‘hybridity’ as a cultural
concept. Much like de Andrade’s notion of antropofagia, the process of hybridization
involves a significant degree of interpretation and translation; the way in which a culture
receives and incorporates various elements might even be described as a kind of ‘reading’,
ultimately resulting in the creation of something new and unrepeatable. Indeed, in a hybrid
35
context like Mexico City, to create means “importar, traducir, construir lo propio [to import,
translate, and construct one’s own]” (García Canclini 1990:73).
Mexico City as third space
Fadanelli’s fragmented city of “mutants” and García Canclini’s hybrid sites of Latin
American difference are both translated spaces; both, for this reason, occupy what many
theorists (after Bhabha) have come to call a ‘third space’. This terminology, however, should
again give us pause. The abstract notions behind words like ‘hybrid’, ‘translation’ and ‘space’
diverge significantly, in Bhabha, from conventional scholarly use. As a result, Bhabhian
theory is often misapplied in other branches of scholarship; it is worth keeping in mind Ovidi
Carbonell’s remark that “postcolonial translation studies simplify Bhabha’s concept of a third
space” (2006: 48). In order to approach Bhabha correctly, then, some elucidation is required.
James Clifford’s notion of ‘re-articulation’ proves helpful in this respect. Clifford (2000)
defines social and cultural formations as collective yet contingent constructions, as
“articulated ensembles”. These formations do not come about organically, as terms such as
‘hybrid’ and ‘mutant’ might suggest, but rather are artificially configured and constructed:
“An articulated ensemble is more like a political coalition or, in its ability to conjoin disparate
elements, a cyborg”, Clifford writes (2000: 478). Clifford’s terminology helps to clarify, to
some extent, the murky waters of the in-between. If the elements of interstitial space are
understood as both contingent and constructed, then its inhabitants are agents who navigate
and ‘negotiate’ that space at will, hooking and unhooking parts onto their respective structures
and (re)constructing themselves intermittently. When we think of the in-between state as
‘articulation’, we avoid misleading connotations of passivity, absence and indecision and
approach “the actual contingent and liminal state of all contemporary subjects” (Ashcroft
2009: 150). As Robert Young reminds us, “the third space is above all a site of production,
the production of anxiety, an untimely place of loss, of fading, of appearance and
disappearance [...] of contestation and of negotiation” (2009: 82-3).
36
There are echoes (or, better, presages) of these ideas in the work of García Canclini, whose
contributions to Latin American cultural theory offer a kind of parallel to those of Bhabha.6
Raymundo Mier’s observation in an appendix to Culturas Híbridas brings these connections
to the fore: “Lo híbrido”, he notes,
designa una liminaridad, una materia cuya existencia exhibe la afirmación dual de
una sustancia y su falta de identidad, lo que está en el intersticio, lo que se perfila en
una zona de penumbra, lo que escapa, cuando menos en su surgimiento, a la
repetición
[The hybrid designates a liminality, a material whose existence exhibits the dual
affirmation of a substance and its lack of identity, that which is in the interstices,
which profiles itself in a zone of shadow, which escapes, at least in appearance,
repetition] (García Canclini1990: 361).
The space of cultural translation, then, can be described as an arbitrary, unstable, hybrid
(cyborgian) space situated somewhere in between the Self and the Other. For Bhabha, this in-
between site is inextricably related to his concept of ‘third space’, which is likewise
inseparable from the concept of cultural translation. Bhabha’s descriptions of the third space
as a “split-space of enunciation” are notoriously slippery, but it is clear that he intends
translation to be a “motif or trope” (Bhabha 1998: 210) through which to grasp and discuss
the concept. In a 2009 essay entitled “In the Cave of Making: Thoughts on Third Space”,
Bhabha illuminates this connection through a choral metaphor, describing the moment when,
amidst the movement and multiplicity of voices, a “momentary stillness” emerges as “several
voices hold the same note”. He continues:
The precarious tension involved in holding the thought – or the note – in common,
vibrating beyond the control of any one voice, is the timbre of translation working
its way into our thinking [...] To hold, in common, a concept like third space is to
begin to see that thinking and writing are acts of translation. Third space, for me,
is unthinkable outside the locality of cultural translation (Bhabha 2009: ix).
6
In another instance of the nexus between the many faces of translation, the translation of Latin American
theorists into English in the mid-1990s signalled an important moment in postmodernism; as Román de la
Campa puts it: “la crítica literaria y el mercado de diseminación en lengua inglesa del pensamiento literario-
posmoderno han sido, y siguen siendo, los códigos predominantes del discurso sobre la posmodernidad en
general, y sobre la literatura latinoamericana en particular [literary criticism and the English-language
dissemination of postmodern literary thought have been, and continue to be, the principle codes for the discourse
of postmodernity in general and Latin American literature in particular]” (de la Campa 2001: 22).
37
Within this interstitial site of enunciation, of language in actu, “of splitting and a hurried
stapling together”, the I is displaced, fractured, constantly “refashioned, reconstructed,
stitched together” by the recognition of the Other, for the subject comes into being “only as a
signifier in the field of the Other” (Young 2009: 85-6). This specularity “does not produce a
mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is always the split screen of the self and its
doubling, the hybrid” (Bhabha 1994: 114). As Bhabha himself notes, this process of
“identification” is often theorized “through a psychoanalytic analogy” (1998: 211); terms like
‘anxiety’ and ‘tension’ thus emerge as fundamental states of the hybrid subject. Michael
Cronin interprets this tension in kinetic terms as a “continuous oscillation”, one which
maintains the interstitial space of translation in a state of perpetual motion. The gap of the
“entre-deux”, he writes, “should be conceived of less as a space, a reified entity tending
towards stasis, than as a constant movement backwards and forward in which there is no
fixated identification with either of the poles” (Cronin 2000: 166). As these passages indicate,
hybridity is not a reconciliatory term capable of resolving, “in a dialectical play of
‘recognition’” (Bhabha 2004: 14), the tension between two cultures; on the contrary, it is an
inherently uneasy term immersed in a space of cross-contamination and instability.
Both the megalopolis and the postmodern work of fiction, with their respective cacophonies
of voices and images, are apt and well-worn symbols of the multiplicity and anxiety of
cultural spaces. Viewed through the lens of cultural translation, then, a place like Mexico City
(and particularly its fictionalized manifestation in the work of Fadanelli) can be analysed not
only as an interstitial space of oscillation and anxiety but as a site of great productivity and
creative potential. In her illuminating work Cities in Translation (2012), Sherry Simon
examines the postmodern metropolis as a site of friction and transformation, a place
composed of incoherent parts (and languages) threaded together by “simultaneous, parallel
conversations taking place across urban terrain” (Simon 2012: 2). Drawing upon the
theoretical work of Catalan architect Manuel de Solà-Morales, Simon cites the notion of the
“esquina urbana” [street corner] as the “single most salient feature of the urban landscape”
(Simon 2012: 2). For de Solà-Morales, indeed, the city is “el lugar de mezcla e intercambio,
lugar plural y contradictorio por excelencia [a place of mixing and exchange, plural and
contradictory par excellence]”, a place defined by “la diferencia y la fricción, del acuerdo
forzado o fortuito, de tensión y conflicto permanente [difference and friction, forced or
fortuitous agreement, tension and permanent conflict]” (de Solà-Morales 2004: 131). This is
the dynamic that palpitates in Fadanelli’s Mexico City: an inherently contradictory space
38
fraught with underlying (and often all too visible) tensions. The city’s fictional incarnation
reflects Fadanelli’s own uneasy relationship with his place of birth. As he admits to Ricárdez,
the “caos constante [constant chaos]” of the capital at once seduces and repels him, producing
a kind of “vértigo necrológico [morbid vertigo]”, “una tensión que transgrede las fronteras de
lo estético [a tension that transgresses the limits of aesthetics]”. This ambivalence echoes the
distinctly self-contradictory logic to which Fadanelli is given; as noted earlier, his portrayals
of Mexico City tend to veer between that of an “unliveable” post-apocalyptic wasteland and
that of a complex and poignant human reality. There is no doubt something unpleasant –
“irrational”, even– about living in a city of such disorienting dimensions. And yet, Fadanelli
comments: “Me atrae la idea de habitar una locura, y vivir en permanente desasosiego [I am
attracted to the idea of inhabiting madness, of living in permanent unease]”. This “permanent
unease” is a condition of tension and anxiety, a constant wavering and motion that belongs
most fully to sites of transition, cultural contact and, indeed “translation” (Pratt 1991: 6). The
merciless compassion of Fadanelli’s writing and the dirty realist “aesthetic of contradiction”
that it epitomizes is again a form of cultural liminality. Tension, unease, translation, anxiety,
hybridity: these states define Fadanelli’s Mexico City as a postmodern interstice, a
“metrópolis sin límites ni centro precisos [metropolis with no precise limits and no precise
centre]” (Luiselli 2011: 88), a space that does not lie between borders, in any essentializing or
spatial sense, but dissolves the binary suppositions that impose such borders.
This notion is central if we are to comprehend the potential of translation (both ‘cultural’ and
interlingual) as it applies to the work of Fadanelli. Simon notes that “[a]ccents, code-
switching and translation are to be valued for the ways in which they draw attention to the
complexities of difference, for the ways in which they interrupt the self-sufficiencies of
‘mono’ cultures” (2012: 1). For her, the multiplicity of voices and the movement between
them implies an unease or “friction” that has positive repercussions for culture (if what we
perceive as positive is heterogeneity over homogeneity, ‘multi’ over ‘mono’). This concept of
disruptive, translatorial friction applies to Fadanelli’s writing on several levels: both
internally, through the heteroglossic nature of his fiction, and externally, through the proposed
translation of that fiction into other languages. As their etymological origins suggest,
‘heteroglossia’ (different tongues) and ‘polyphony’ (many sounds) are useful concepts when
it comes to the convergence of literature and language. Of particular importance is Bakhtin’s
theoretical enrichment of these terms, in which literary analysis – especially of the novel, “the
genre that most favours […] polyphony” (Todorov 1984: x) – plays an important role. For
39
Bakhtin, the variation and stratification within literary language means that words are set or
“scattered” on different planes, implying the existence of “internal contradictions” as well as a
kind of social heteroglossia: a “Tower of Babel confusion of languages” (Bakhtin 1976: 300).
For the writer of prose, then, the discursive object is “a condensation of heterological voices
among which his [the writer’s] own voice must resound” (Bakhtin 1981: 91-92). Analysed
from this perspective, Fadanelli’s writing is undoubtedly heteroglossic, giving place to a
multiplicity of social voices. The fractured dialogues of ¿Te veré en desayuno?, discussed
earlier, illustrate this well: within the first few pages of the novel, five distinct tongues have
already differentiated themselves,7 all speaking from within the sphere of Cristina’s
experience (which, come chapter two, is juxtaposed to those of the other three protagonists,
adding layer upon layer). If this polyphony houses the internal ‘friction’ of Fadanelli’s
writing, then the external friction is a result of its contact with the Other: in this case, with
non-Mexican (and, in particular, Anglophone) readers of Fadanelli. If Simon is correct in her
assertion that “the friction of languages […] is a good thing” (Simon 2012: 1), then the
notoriously ‘mono’-lithic Anglophone culture has everything to gain from embracing
Fadanelli’s abrasive, unsettling, translated literature.
7
Several voices coexist in the first chapter of the novel: the erudite voice of the narrator, Cristina’s unspoken
voice (or internal dialogue), and the colloquial spoken exchanges between characters, each of whom displays a
distinct vocabulary or ‘accent’; here we find Cristina, her criminal brother Alfil, the policía, and a pious viejita
who, comically, insists that Cristina read the Bible between clients. At one point we hear several of these tongues
vying for space in a single paragraph, the dialogue between Cristina and Alfil less a conversation than a case of
two voices ‘talking past’ one another:
Encima de la cajuela, árida y fría como el aire de la noche, Cristina colocó su polvera y a un lado
el maltratado y esbelto tubito de gas lacrimógeno que escondía en el bolso; no porque creyera que
lo necesitaría alguna vez, “como si no pudiera defenderme con mis propias uñas”, sino por tratarse
de un regalo del Alfil, su hermano menor.
– Tómalo, las armas nunca están de más, siempre hay un hijo de la chingada que te quiere joder.
– Te ves muy delgado, tienes que cuidarte, Alfil.
– Apuntas a los ojos y aprietas aquí.
– ¿Cuántas veces comes al día?
[On top of the cold, arid trunk of the car Cristina arranged her powder compact and beside it the
slim, battered tube of pepper spray she kept hidden in her handbag, not because she thought she’d
ever need it, “as if I couldn’t defend myself with my own two hands”, but because it had been a
gift from her younger brother, Alfil.
–Take it, you need a weapon, there’s always some motherfucking hijo de la chingada trying to
fuck you over.
–You look thin, Alfil, you have to look after yourself.
–Aim at the eyes and squeeze, right here.
–How many meals do you eat a day?]
(Fadanelli 1999: 11)
40
“A love song to our mongrel selves”: translation and other spaces
De Solà-Morales points out that, if cultural diversity is to be comprehended, then the city
must be imagined not as a “mosaico de exotismos [mosaic of exoticisms]” but rather as a
place that breaks away from the usual “reducciones demasiado simplistas o sistemáticas
[overly simplistic or systematic reductions]” (de Solà-Morales 2004: 131). As a writer who
openly declares his antiestablishment leanings,8 Fadanelli might well agree. His work, in any
case, certainly suggests a rejection of facile exoticism in favour of the gritty yet nuanced
realism he has come to exemplify. As noted earlier, the heteroglossic and contradictory nature
of Fadanelli’s fiction allows him to capture the complex and multiple realities of Mexico City
without lapsing into the tropes of stereotypical or moralizing discourse. Trite questions of
Mexican identity or Zeitgeister are replaced by ones of tension, crisis and becoming. In the
words of Bernardo Sagastume:
La mexicanidad de los retratos que pinta Fadanelli toma distancia del culturalismo
y de cualquier obsesión por determinar una identidad del mexicano. Se limita a
ver la vida de la gran capital como el destino no deseado de un país que aún está
por ser.
[The Mexicanness of the portraits Fadanelli paints distances itself from

culturalism or any kind of obsession with Mexican identity. It limits itself to
looking at life in the capital as the undesirable destiny of a country that is still on
the brink of being] (2008: 102).
This resistance to the politics of cultural identity is reaffirmed by the socio-literary context in
which Fadanelli’s writing emerged.9 In Latin America in the mid-1990s there arose two
significant (albeit self-appointed) literary movements: the transatlantic ‘McOndo’ movement
and the Mexican ‘generación del Crack’. The former defined itself in opposition to the
reductive, exoticizing norms of magical realism; the latter in opposition to the superficial,
mainstream pabulum of so-called ‘literatura light’ (Carbajal 2005: 123). In 1996, Chilean
novelist Alberto Fuguet pioneered the McOndo movement with the publication of a short
8
A candid example: inside the front cover of Fadanelli’s second novel, Para ella todo suena a Franck Pourcel
(published in 1999 by Fadanelli’s own subversive publishing house, Editorial Moho), there appears the
following affirmation: “Tienes en las manos la novela que [...] otras editoriales se negaron a publicar al
considerarla una obra frívola y poco correcta. En Moho nos arriesgamos a publicarla debido a que estamos
interesados estrictamente sólo en aquello que no tiene future. [You have in your hands the novel that other
editors refused to publish on the grounds that it is a frivolous and politically incorrect piece of writing. At Moho
we have taken the risk of publishing it as we are strictly interested in books that have no future.]”
9
Fadanelli published his first short story collection (Cuentos Mejicanos) in 1991, and his first novel (La Otra
Cara de Rock Hudson) in 1997.
41
story anthology of new Latin American literature, simply entitled McOndo. Deriving its name
from a capitalist perversion of García Márquez’s ‘Macondo’ (the fictional setting of his novel
Cien años de soledad), the McOndo movement distanced itself from the fanciful, rural tropes
of magical realist literature. Latin American literature and society, its proponents argued, had
progressed beyond the banana republic and the dictator novel. In a 2001 article entitled
“Magical Neoliberalism”, Fuguet reasserts this point: “Latin America is quite literary, yes,
almost a work of fiction”, he writes, “but it’s not a folk tale [...] More than magical, this place
is weird. Magical realism reduces a much too complex situation and just makes it cute. Latin
America is not cute” (2001: 69). McOndo literature considered itself representative of a
distinctly postmodern reality: one in which Latin America was not reduced to the symbolic
essentialisms of the Other, but rather was revealed as a culturally, ethnographically and
demographically diverse landscape. It was also an increasingly urban landscape, defined less
by the spectre of Spanish colonialism than by the cultural (and moral) saturation of capitalist
and consumerist values. The contribution of Crack originators Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla,
Eloy Urroz et al.10 had a less defiant objective, but was nonetheless significant in redefining
the Mexican literary context.11 In their Manifiesto Crack, also published in 1996, they did not
propose a radical new avant-garde aesthetic, nor a rupture with past literary traditions –on the
contrary, they declared a return to the stylistic and thematic sophistication of the Boom-era
‘novela profunda’– but rather reconfigured the literary landscape to reflect the “realidad
dislocada [dislocated reality]”, social multiplicity and “polifonía narrativa [narrative
polyphony]” of contemporary Mexico. The spaciotemporal realm of the Crack writers was an
unmistakably postmodern one: “No espacio, ni lugar. Todos los espacios y lugares [Not
space, not place. All spaces and all places]” (Castillo Pérez 2006: 84).
As Alberto Castillo Pérez argues, the very appellation of the Crack generation “señala ya un
afán de internacionalización, si no de anglofilia [signals a certain internationalist, if not
anglophilic, zeal]” (2006: 83). Certainly, Crack writers took a decidedly non-introspective,
antinationalist approach to literature – the Manifiesto’s “first commandment” declares:
“Amarás a Proust sobre todos los otros [Thou shalt love Proust above all others]”– and the
10
The five authors whose work was published in the Manifiesto Crack (1996), and who contributed to the
manifesto itself, are considered the founding members of the generation. All born in the 1960s, they are: Jorge
Volpi (1968); Ignacio Padilla (1968); Eloy Urroz (1967); Pedro Ángel Palou (1966); and Ricardo Chávez
Castañeda (1961).
11
Despite proclaiming itself a distinct literary generation, ‘la generación del Crack’ never professed to be a
literary movement at all; as Padilla himself observes, “si algo está ocurriendo con las novelas del Crack, no es un
movimiento literario, sino simple y llanamente una actitud [if there is something happening with Crack novels, it
is not a literary movement but, quite simply, an attitude]” (Carbajal 2005: 124).
42
postmodern perspectives of both the McOndo and Crack movements encompassed a broad
range of literary and social influences. Fadanelli dismisses the suggestion that he is himself a
Crack-generation writer; as he comments to Ricárdez: “El crack es pasta de coca con
queroseno y ácido sulfúrico, y me ha hecho mucho daño [Crack is coca paste mixed with
kerosene and sulphuric acid, and it has done me a lot of damage]”. Nevertheless, his writing
clearly demonstrates a common international heritage when it comes to the absorption of
imported literature and culture. This goes further than his close acquaintance with the work of
Fante, Carver, Roth and Pessoa. As mentioned above, Fadanelli’s unsettling portrait of
Mexico City as a postmodern urban space “on the brink of being” challenges the repetitive or
exoticizing representations that have come to define Mexico as a literary entity. Fusing the
traditional and the contemporary, Fadanelli writes “una visión de Anáhuac12 contemporánea:
una ciudad cosmopolita, hermosa y monstruosa por partes iguales [a visión of contemporary
Anáhuac: a city as beautiful and cosmopolitan as it is monstrous]” (Luiselli 2011: 89). It is a
literary space in which two traditions converge: the foreign tradition, predominantly North
American but also broadly Iberoamerican, and the national tradition, “cuyo mito fundacional
ha cambiado de nombres pero no de esencia [whose foundational myth has changed in name
but not in essence]” (Luiselli 2011: 89).
Urban space in Fadanelli, then, is a space of negotiation, in the Bhabhian sense of the word; it
is the hybrid and heteroglossic site of a clash of traditions, where culture and identity are
constantly unsettled, interbred, re-produced and re-articulated. This space, oppugning the
separation of Self and Other into binaries and archetypes, is a breeding site for innovation and
creation. Indeed, Fadanelli suggests that such restlessness is an essential element of the arts:
“La idea de las fronteras físicas suele ser demasiado primitive”, he comments. “Las ideas, el
arte o la literatura cruzan las paredes a su antojo [The idea of physical frontiers is usually too
primitive. Ideas, art and literature cross borders as they please]” (cited in Ricárdez 2008).
Such notions lie at the centre of contemporary translation ethics. There is little doubt that the
contemporary institutions housing translation shun the unconventional, the complex and the
foreign (but not, one notes, the exotic). Theorists like Andrew Chesterman (1997) have
claimed that, at least within the modern Western context, translation theory and practice tend
to favour target-oriented norms that facilitate communication and understanding, rather than
innovation and complexity. Descriptive translation theories thus reveal an unmistakable
12
Anáhuac is a Nahuatl placename for the ancient Aztec area roughly coterminous with modern-day Mexico.
43
normative trend towards conformity and conservatism (cf. Toury 1995), particularly in
Anglophone literary systems (cf. Venuti 1995/2008). Antoine Berman (1984), one of the first
to critique the deforming, homogenizing tendencies of ‘naturalizing’ translation strategies,
argued that translators too often allow their work to diverge from its “properly ethical aim”:
that of allowing readers to receive the foreign as foreign, the Other as Other (Berman
1984/2000: 241). “The essence of translation”, Berman insisted, “is to be an opening, a
dialogue, a cross-breeding, a decentering” (Berman 1984/1992: 4).
The notion of cross-breeding and dialogue as ethical guides is essential when we consider the
interlingual translation of a distinctly postmodern writer like Fadanelli. In my own efforts to
translate the already manifoldly translated space of Fadanelli’s fiction, I have attempted to
engage in the same subversive process that Fadanelli himself epitomizes: intermingling
traditions, multiplying voices, strewing the text with contradiction and irony. Rather than
cloning Frankensteinian Fadanelli’s monstrous, mutant fiction, I aim to dismember it and
create a new monster in its place. Returning to Bhabha, we see that this notion of re-creation
is in fact central to his theses of third space and cultural translation. “The importance of
hybridity”, he writes, “is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third
emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge”
(Bhabha 1998: 211). The kernel of insight to be extracted here is that the anxiety and
uncertainty implicit in the third space – that is, in the uneasy space of Fadanelli’s fiction –
does not inhibit but in fact enables acts of subversion and creation. The “other positions” that
Bhabha mentions find their parallel in the perspectives (themselves both subversive and
creative) opened up by interlingual translation. If the meanings and symbols of culture are
never fixed, always hybrid, then acts of cross-cultural communication can no longer be
considered as the mere relaying of a unitary and immutable reality. Rather, they become
processes of Bhabhian ‘negotiation’. As Sherry Simon observes: “Instead of serving as a
bridge between already given cultural entities, translation becomes an activity of cultural
creation. The bridge, in other words, brings into being the realities which it links” (1996:
143). Simon’s ‘bridge’, a rather too spatial metaphor that still relies on images of binary
opposition (two opposing shores), might perhaps be replaced with Bhabha’s ‘boundary’;
unlike bridges, which must be burnt, boundaries can be blurred, blended, or erased altogether.
Metaphorical terminology aside, however, this ambivalent border space is the site of
important innovations: “The boundary becomes the place from which something begins its
presencing” (Bhabha 1994: 5). Echoing Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator”
44
(1923), Bhabha argues that something as arbitrary and hybridized as culture cannot be
captured – nor indeed translated – via mimesis. “The specificity of signification”, he writes,
“cannot be reproduced in an imitative sense; it can only be re-presented as an iterative, re-
initiation that awakens the sign (as mode of intention) to another, analogical linguistic life”
(Bhabha 2009: xi). As Benjamin put it: the “original” (culture, text, signification) “can only
be raised anew and at other points of time” (1968/1992: 77).
The concept of raising ‘anew’ is a recurring theme in Bhabha’s work, and one that is explored
most exhaustively in a chapter of The Location of Culture entitled “How Newness Enters the
World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times and the Trials of Cultural Translation”. The
chapter involves a discussion of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, and it is from
Rushdie himself that Bhabha borrows the phrase “How Newness Enters the World”. A brief
glance at the words’ original context reveals a clear correspondence with Bhabha’s favoured
themes of hybridity and migration:
The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the

transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas [...] It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the
Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the
world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have
tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-
conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves (Rushdie 1992: 394).
Fadanelli’s writing is perhaps closer to a burlesque than a love song, but it certainly revels in
its own mongrel spirit, assaulting readers with “new and unexpected combinations” of people,
place and culture. Among the cultural and discursive “hotchpotch” of Mexico City,
Fadanelli’s characters are continually thrown into cruel, bizarre and often repulsive scenarios.
Fadanelli combines the erotic and the appalling without batting an eyelid, and constantly
defies the expectations of his readers. His early short story collections, in particular, are rife
with nasty surprises: “Las hijas de Pedro [Pedro’s daughters]” concludes with an
interminable, graphic sex scene between a male character and two mentally disabled
adolescents in his care; in “Suicidio en las calles de Tacuba [Suicide in the streets of
Tacuba]”, a disgruntled office employee about to throw himself off a building is persuaded
out of suicide not by some reassuring, life-affirming encounter but by the jeers and insults of
impatient onlookers. Fadanelli, like the Mexico City he evokes, so thoroughly transgresses the
limits of aesthetics that any attempt to confine his writing within conventional boundaries is,
45
at best, ethically questionable; at worst, it is doomed to inadequacy. As a translator of

Fadanelli, I therefore seek to commit a new act of transgression and “violence” (to borrow
Spivak and Derrida’s term), a new act of “change-by-fusion” and change-by-confusion,
deliberately violating target language norms and expectations just as Fadanelli violates those
of his own culture.
Gayatri Spivak is one of the most influential theorists to propose an ethics of translation along
these lines. In her 1993 essay “The Politics of Translation,” Spivak foregrounds the
“specificity of language” as a condition of tension and interplay – in her terms, a “jagged
relationship” – that pertains between logic and rhetoric in every language. Working “in the
silence between and around words” (that is, in an interstitial space), she argues that rhetoric
disrupts the “logical systematicity” of language; the translator’s responsibility, then, is not to
take the “safe” path of the logical (at the expense of the rhetorical) but rather to take risks, to
brave the possibility of “violence to the translating medium” (Spivak 1994: 180). Drawing
upon Derrida’s notion of dissemination, she writes:
[L]anguage is not everything. It is only a vital clue to where the self loses its
boundaries. The ways in which rhetoric or figuration disrupt logic themselves
point at the possibility of random contingency, beside language, around language.
Such a dissemination cannot be under our control. Yet in translation, where
meaning hops into the spacy emptiness between two named historical languages,
we get perilously close to it. By juggling the disruptive rhetoricity that breaks the
surface in not necessarily connected ways, we feel the selvedges of the language-
textile give way, fray into frayages or facilitations (Spivak 1994: 180).
Translation, in other words, is a special act of reading capable of “fraying” the contained
(logical) edges of language and meaning. Spivak’s “frayages” and “facilitations” are French
and English translations, respectively, of the Freudian term Bachnung – also discussed by
Derrida – which is perhaps better translated as ‘breaching’ or ‘path-breaking’. For Freud, the
term related to the forging of new neurological pathways in the brain when neurone resistance
was finally overcome; for Derrida, “breaching, the tracing of a trail, opens up a conducting
path, which presupposes a certain violence and a certain resistance to effraction. The path is
broken, cracked, fracta, breached” (Derrida 1978: 200). These images help visualize what
Spivak means when she refers to the “fraying” of the language-textile: translation strategies
that engage with the rhetoricity of a text, that are willing to explore the “spacy emptiness” of
its silences and alterity, are capable of disturbing the smooth, established patterns of target-
46
language poetics and thus engender new ways of perceiving and reading the world; to return
to Rushdie’s phrase, they bring “newness” into the world.
In an echo of Spivak’s textile metaphor, Bhabha reminds us that the generative potential of
the “in-between” lies in the very instability of the interstice, in the unease of the postmodern
text-space; it consists in
the ‘foreign’ element that reveals the interstitial; insists in the textile superfluity of
folds and wrinkles; and becomes the ‘unstable element of linkage’, the
indeterminate temporality of the in-between, that has to be engaged in creating the
conditions through which ‘newness comes into the world’ (Bhabha 1994: 227).
Representing the “Other as Other”, then, is a matter of exposing the tensions involved in the
(translatory) interplay with the foreign; tensions that are brimming with productivity,
creativity, potentiality. In order to take part in this violent and innovatory process, which
mirrors the transgressive yet compassionately productive aesthetic of the dirty realist, the
translator facilitates dialogue and cross-contamination between texts – the “opening” that
Berman mentions – and descends into the hybrid site of the interstice, “a space that is
ruptured and imaginatively transformed” by its subjects (Gopinath 2005: 79). The interlingual
translator, in other words, also engages with the motifs of cultural translation: she, too,
inhabits that anxious third space, thus suspending herself within another kind of permanent
unease.
Conclusions
The remarkable translatability of the term ‘translation’, and the interesting ways in which its
various incarnations connect across multiple fields of inquiry, reinforces just why translation
studies belongs at the forefront of probing, interdisciplinary thought. The framework of
cultural translation, itself a ‘translated’ concept that crosses the borders of cultural studies,
literary studies and anthropology, provides a useful vantage point from which to observe and
analyze both the context and potentiality of Fadanelli’s fictional worlds. Fadanelli is at once a
product and producer of that most postmodern of spaces: the infinitely translatable City, the
city as fiction and dialogue, the multiplicity of places and voices that exemplifies and
occupies the ungraspable space of cultural translation. Examined from this perspective,
Fadanelli’s writing invites novel readings of Mexico City and of urban space in general; it
47
allows us to imagines the city as a fractured third space of great potential, where creativity is
born of chaos. When this already translated space is translated across languages, the
underlying concepts are the same: from cultural translation to interlingual translation, the
process is one of cross-breeding and constant, incalculable transformation, one that occurs
among the interstices and suspended points of language and culture. Entwined in this process,
the “permanent unease” of the translator is itself translated: into innovation, transgression,
production. By harnessing the creative potential of the anxious act, the interlingual translator
also becomes a cultural translator, sowing seeds of ‘newness’ in the cracks of the mosaic.
Alice Whitmore
[email protected]
44 Nelson St Warrnambool
3280 Victoria, Australia
Ph: +61 4 2683 8682
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New Voices in Translation Studies 11 (2014)

The ‘Permanent Unease’ of Cultural Translation

KEYWORDS: cultural translation, dirty realism, Guillermo Fadanelli, literary translation,

Cultural translation: shifting discursive spaces

Chanady’s words, “una celebración generalizada de la diferencia, bajo las etiquetas de la

Framed by postcolonial discourse, and subsequently reincorporated into translation studies

Translation is the performative nature of cultural communication. It is language in

Translation construed as a process of destabilization and negotiation, as an implicitly

Mutants, hybrids and contradictions: readings of Mexico City

The above passage exhibits a kind of double-barrelled contradiction: the self-confessed

En realidad no vivía allí, sino en el condominio de una vieja unidad habitacional,

unemployed pseudo-veterinarian) and Olivia (the adolescent daughter of a family of

The urban space framing these disconcerting narratives is continually signalled as an

Rivera, Siqueiros y Orozco propusieron síntesis iconográficas de la identidad

[Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco proposed the iconographic synthesis of national

Mexico City as third space

“A love song to our mongrel selves”: translation and other spaces

[The Mexicanness of the portraits Fadanelli paints distances itself from

The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the

at best, ethically questionable; at worst, it is doomed to inadequacy. As a translator of

Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, Albany:

Herrera-Pahl, Cristina (2010) ‘Mexico City is a Metastasis, Says Author Guillermo

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