(Self-)translation and migration: The political exile of Spanish scientists and scholars after the Civil War

Assumpta Camps
University of Barcelona
Abstract

Since the 1970s, the circumstances of the twentieth-century migration of exiled intellectuals and scientists from Franco-era Spain to Mexico have aroused major interest in both Spain and Mexico (Fagen 1973; Abellán 1976–1978; VV.AA. 1982; VV.AA. 1987). The resulting studies shed light on the lives and careers of exiled Spanish scientists, many of whom went unnoticed by researchers within Spain for decades because of censorship under Franco’s regime. This article focuses on one highly representative example of an exiled Spanish scholar, Pere Bosch Gimpera (1891–1974), in order to illustrate not only the importance of scientific migration and exile in this particular context, but also the role of inter- and intralingual translation for these exiled scientists.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 12 September 2022

Date accepted: 11 December 2023

Published online: 24 January 2025

Table of contents

As has been well noted, “migrants […] are always simultaneously influencing and being influenced by others” (Inghilleri 2017, 1). This article addresses this situation of migrants in relation to cultural translation, analysing the position of the migrant as both agent and object of translation, as well as (self-)translation. This analysis is informed by notions of identity, community, and belonging, and by the ways in which these notions relate to one another and interact with institutions (whether political or academic) in a given migratory context. Broadly speaking, this approach places the migrant in a place close to cultural mediation. In particular, it posits an idea of translation as practice in such a way that it is necessarily much broader than the purely linguistic (Bauman 1987; Bhabha 1994a; Fuchs 2009; Polezzi 2012). Viewed from this perspective, (self-)translation should be studied not simply as a strategy for migrant assimilation and accommodation, but also as a means for migrants to manage their plural identities, with one foot in each country and culture. I am also interested, and no less so, in analysing the constant back-and-forth between the active subject and the object of translation that occurs within migrants in most cases. In short, one of the key concerns is studying the characteristics of the migrant’s agency at the intersection of translation and migration, as Cronin (2006, 45) has suggested. The term ‘self-translation’ is used here in a broad sense. In line with the above, it does not refer (only) to the version of a given text in another language, produced by the same author, but to the need to express, explain, and ‘translate’ oneself into another language and culture, a phenomenon that becomes even more complex in situations of diglossia, as examined in this article. The examples that follow, taken mainly from Bosch Gimpera’s correspondence, demonstrate, in practice and in argument, this profound need (first in relation to English, and then to Spanish when he emigrated to Latin America) and the problems that it causes.

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