México en el tiempo de la rabia. Arte y literatura de la guerra, el dolor y la violencia (2006-2018)
Editors: Alejandro Zamora, Gustavo Ogarrio
Publisher: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos
Cuernavaca, 2020
The six articles and introduction contained in this book explore two important aspects of contemporary Mexico: on one hand, they consider the art, literature, documentary films and narrative journalism produced during and in response to the so-called “war on organized crime” (2006-2018); and on the other, they analyze some of the historical and cultural conditions in which that “war” has occurred, and which, at the same time, have been generated by it.
“They [Mexicans] are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” – Donald Trump, candidacy speech, June 16,2015
Signs Preceding the End of the World
So here you are, sloughing off the cold in the warmth of this sidewalk cafe where great bar radiators blaze like fires from on high, in each upper corner, the heat raging, insane, flushing the stiff flesh of your face red, and your fingers, too stiff to clasp onto anything, as if millions of years of evolution have been undone, and here you are, Neanderthal Man, or something earlier, some creature without opposable thumbs, without the ability to grasp, prodding awkwardly at the coins in the palm of your hand…
On September 15, Mexicans all over the world will be celebrating the independence of their native land once again. Both in towns all over Mexico and in Toronto and other cities of the world where there is a significant Mexican population, Mexicans come out to the public squares every year to commemorate the night in 1810 when the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla called upon the parishioners of the town of Dolores, in the state of Guanajuato, to take up arms against the Spanish. This celebration is so firmly ingrained in the national collective imagination that sometimes its most basic features are obscured or forgotten.
In recent decades, many theorists of literary translation have stressed the importance of foregrounding the source culture of the translated text, to avoid what Lawrence Venuti describes as the inherent tendency of translation towards domestication, whereby the translation becomes “imprinted by the target culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies” (2008: 18). As mediators for the source culture, translators have an ethical duty to convey that culture effectively to target culture readers, resisting the assimilative undertow of the translation process while at the same avoiding the temptation of easy exoticism, falling back on cultural tropes and stereotypes which, instead of enlightening and challenging target culture readers to better understand the rich complexities of the source culture, only serve to reinforce their preconceived ideas about that culture.
Conference, seminar and concert