The Spanish Translation of Southern Rural Voices: A Childhood, by Harry Crews.

Abstract

This paper discusses the Spanish translation of A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Published in 1978, Harry Crews’s autobiography was not translated into Spanish until 2014, when Acuarela & A. Machado press published Javier Lucini’s rendering. A Childhood can be ascribed to the subgenre of Grit Lit, since it chronicles the lives of poor whites in Georgia in the late 1930s, featuring the “freaks” commonly associated with the Other in canonical American literature. Crews’s book gives voice to this Otherness and depicts the non-standard linguistic variety they speak. This paper observes the features of Southern American English that are recreated in A Childhood as a literary dialect, as a translational challenge. Both the source and target contexts are described, focusing on the book’s reception and its paratexts. The strategies used by Lucini to render A Childhood’s literary dialect into Spanish are analyzed, showing how he recreates the interplay of Southern voices by introducing certain marked non-standard passages and a series of footnotes, which emphasize the Us vs. Alterity narrative in the target text.