Malinche no espelho das traduções de Xicoténcatl (1826): [1999 – 2013]

Abstract

This study shows the first literary portray of Malinche and makes a comparison between the original image in Xicoténcatl (1826) and those present in the only two known translations of the earliest Latin-American Historical Novel up to this moment: the American (1999) and the Brazilian one (2013). The Latin-American Historical Novel’s first manifestation and the Literary Translation Field limit this research. In the corpus, we look at the study of the portrayal of historical characters integrated in the narrative. Our aim is to study more specifically the fictional configuration of the historical character Malinche, who was first fictionalized in the anonymous novel of 1826. We pretend to verify if such images contributed or not to the reputation acquired by this Native American on the collective memory of the Mexican people. We take Malinche’s first image as the basis for this study, and make a comparison between the ones present in the above mentioned translations: in English by Guillermo Castillo-Feliú (1999), and, in Portuguese by Anthoni Cley Sobierai and Gilmei Francisco Fleck (2013). Thus we intend to show the first literary configuration given to this character that is also considered the Mexican nation’s symbolic mother. This first image given in Literature differs significantly from the one given to her by the Mexican Indigenous movement (MARTIN, 2007) of early 1900’s. The methodology used in the study counts with a bibliographic review on the Historical Novel – with focus on the Traditional Historical Novel genre, according to studies of Lukács (1966) Uslar Pietri (1990), Márquez Rodríguez (1996), Ureña (1994), Grillo (2004), Fleck (2005, 2008, 2014a). This is to analyze Malinche’s images integrated in the anonymous novel’s outcome context, corpus of the research. In these terms, we present our considerations about the relations between Literature, History and Memory, according to Ricoeur (2014), Candau (2016), Albuquerque and Fleck (2015) and their effects in the Historical Novel from the readings of Xicoténcatl and its translations. Therefore, we isolated the existing images of Malinche in the original. Thus, we bring together 15 emblematic excerpts in which this character is mentioned in the narrative. These passages are analyzed, also, under the perspective of the Translation Theory, in which we call the attention to studies by Rodrigues (1999), Pagano (2000), Bassnett (2003) and Arrojo (2007), in order to compare if the essence of the first literary configuration given to the fictional character of Malinche in Xicoténcatl (1826) appears in its two translations known up to the moment, and if the relations between these images mirrored by its translations corroborate with Historiography, according to Castro Leal (1964), Herren (1993), Grillo (2011), Pulido Herráez (2011), and the Mexican collective imagination, according to researches of Karttunen (1997), González (2002), Townsend (2006), Martin (2007) and Wood (2007).