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Article published In:
Translating Creolization
Edited by Desrine Bogle, Ian Craig and Jason F. Siegel
[Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts 2:2] 2016
► pp. 258–276

Creolizing translation

Derek Walcott’s trans(creoliz)ations of El burlador de Sevilla and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

| Université d'Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse / Università di Roma, La Sapienza

This article is a study of the proximity between the processes of creolization and translation, which share the opportunity of bringing our languages, our cultures and our literatures to a creative encounter. After a discussion of all the meanings these terms carry, the article will focus on two works by Derek Walcott: his rewriting of Tirso De Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla, and his unpublished translation of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to understand what directions these works have taken through Walcott’s intervention. Looking at these two different kinds of adaptation, I will try to reach a new understanding of creolized and creolizing translation. This kind of translations could in fact serve as maps to allow readers to orientate in the original text, and to bring it further, to unpredictable destinations, rather than simply reproducing a copy of the original in another language.

Keywords: rewriting, The Joker of Seville, Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal, Caribbean languages, Caribbean literatures, translation, creolization, transcreolization, Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire, adaptation, Tirso de Molina
Published online: 31 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttmc.2.2.05sof
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