Teresa Caneda-Cabrera

A portrait of the translator as an alienated artist: Memories of Joyce’s Portrait in Desnoes’ Memories of Underdevelopment.

Five years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and one year before the publication of his own emblematic novel Memories of Underdevelopment (1965), the Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes translated James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). This paper claims that Desnoes’ engagement with Joyce’s novel should be interpreted in relation to the intense debate concerning the role of the artist advanced by the Revolution. It examines the complex interrelationship between Desnoes’ task as a translator of Joyce’s artistic concerns and his own anxieties as an alienated artist coping with “revolutionary” poetics. As the paper demonstrates, the personal and artistic dilemmas that Joyce exposes in his own fictional portrait seem to haunt the work of his Cuban translator, a young writer equally divided between his search for artistic freedom and his anxiety about political commitment.

Keywords: Desnoes, Joyce, translation, politics, dissidence

Biography

Teresa Caneda-Cabrera is an Associate Professor of English in the Faculty of Philology and Translation at the University of Vigo. She is a member of the editorial board of VICEVERSA (Journal of the Association of Galician Translators) and Coordinator of the University of Vigo Research Group NeTeC (Textual and Cultural Negotiations). Her research explores translation and post-colonial encounters as well as the translational poetics in the work of James Joyce in, for example, La estética modernista como práctica de resistencia en “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”(2002) and Vigorous Joyce: Atlantic Readings of James Joyce (2010).