Review of Dora Sales Salvador, 'Puentes sobre el mundo'
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ABSTRACT:
'Don't be afraid of what you have to tell': REVIEW of:
Dora Sales Salvador, Puentes sobre el mundo: Cultura, traducción y forma literaria en las narrativas de transculturación de José María Arguedas y Vikram Chandra
(Bridges over the world: Culture, translation and literary form in the narratives of transculturation of José María Arguedas and Vikram Chandra)
Details: Berne, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2004; Series: 'Perspectivas hispánicas', No 21; soft covers, 677 pp.; ISBN 3-03910-359-8
Review by Christopher Rollason
(NB; full text is at URL indicated above)
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ABSTRACT
Spanish-American literature and Indian writing in English are both often evoked as key instances of third-world or postcolonial writing. However, comparative critical studies have been thin on the ground. A major contribution to filling that gap is now offered, from the Spanish-speaking side, by Dora Sales Salvador's book, whose title reads in English: Bridges over the world: Culture, translation and literary form in the narratives of transculturation of José María Arguedas and Vikram Chandra. Dora Sales Salvador, who teaches at the Universidad Jaume I de Castellón (Valencia region, Spain) and originally submitted this work as her doctoral thesis, weaves a dense and convincing comparative analysis of two texts from those two literatures, successfully integrating her discussion within a multidisciplinary theoretical framework.
The novels analysed are Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers, 1958), by the Peruvian José María Arguedas, and Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), by the Indian Vikram Chandra. Dora Sales powerfully illuminates these texts with the aid of an elegant five-branched candelabrum, deploying theoretical perspectives embracing the following disciplines: literary theory (especially postcolonial); comparative literature; anthropology; translation studies; and cultural studies. She places a salutary emphasis on non-Western theoretical currents: Latin American anthropology, notably Fernando Ortiz's concept of transculturation; and the Sanskrit literary model of the rasas (emotions), as an alternative aesthetic to Aristotelian orthodoxy. She further offers a close account of the language aspects of both novels (integration of elements from Quechua and Indian languages) and their textual interface between elite and folk cultures (incorporation of Quechua song; imprint of Indian storytelling).
The study is of great stylistic elegance: Dora Sales' Spanish is enormously cultivated and highly expressive, and her prose burns with emotional commitment to the texts and writers. The reader is led to share an experience that recalls Edward Said in affirming, in Dora Sales' words, the 'willingness to assume as one's own, not what is single but what is diverse'. The vital cause of intercultural communication is most excellently advanced by this fine volume, which serves as an eloquent testimony to the power of literature - and especially postcolonial or transcultural writing - to construct, in a phrase taken by the author from Arguedas' novel, bridges over the world.
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