The Stripped Fish: Translation and Culture in Mario Bellatin's Japanese Novellas

Abstract

"In order to grasp the importance of translation and the way it functions in this dialectic between the local and the global levels, I will look at two of Bellatin’s “‘Japanese’ stories,” El jardín de la señora Murakami (Mrs. Murakami’s Garden, 2000, not yet translated into English), and Nagaoka Shiki: una nariz de ficción (Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, 2001, translated by David Shook, 2012). They may be read as contemporary rewritings of Borges’s famous essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición.” This essay proposes the idea that one can contribute more to one’s own cultural identity by taking otherness, not the couleur locale, as a starting point for that which is one’s own; or, in other words, by radically deterritorializing that which is one’s own."