A proposal of an ethnographic translation for MALINCHE: Describing Mesoamerican deities

Abstract

This work consists on commenting the translation-description experience of the deities worshipped by pre-Hispanic peoples of Mesoamerican before the Castilian encroachment in the sixteenth century. The Mesoamerican deities mentioned are present in MALINCHE (2006), a novel by the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel. All the commentaries are founded on the ethnographic and descriptive perspective of François Laplantine, in which the translating task is tackled not as a mechanism of substitutions and correspondences between words, but as an opportune space for a meeting and interaction of cultures and languages. Thus, it was necessary to reflect on the transformations that the translator’s view into himself must undergo for the purpose of not seeing the other as deviation or astonishment. The task requires from the translation of the literary work an intention that is able to look at how pre-Hispanic spiritual values will be shaped in the language of translation in order to situate the “other” belonging to a distinct cultural locus. In this sense, it is proposed to present the description as a valid means of translation since it promotes the mutual looks between different cultures. Descriptive translation becomes the object of observation of observation, showing the limits and also the great extensions that allow a translator to reach in its performative character.