CON OJOS DE NIÑA: EL ARTE DE LA TRADUCCIÓN, DE LA MEMORIA Y DE LA FICCIÓN EN LAS NOVELAS DE LAURA ALCOBA Y JENNY ERPENBECK

In light of the most recent Argentinian novels published on the theme of post-dictatorial historical memory, two writers, accounting for past and present experiences of violence, coincide in the narrative elaboration of the world as seen through the eyes of a child. Laura Alcoba does this in The Rabbit House (2008) and The Blue of the Bees (2014), and Jenny Erpenbeck, in The Book of Words (2007). Since both authors originally wrote in a foreign language, the experiences pass through an additional filter for an Argentinian readership: the mediation of the Spanish language.Thus, in principle, these texts raise the issue of memory, but more specifically that of language, not only in its ability to name things but also and especially in its semantic movement—a displacement that allows something to be said without naming it openly. Such a space therefore acquires a fundamentally living and psychological dimension in the process of a therapeutic encounter with the past for anyone having grown up in an environment of violence.The goal of this work is to reflect on the artistic representations of childhood experiences that take on special importance in redefining the imperatives of duty pertaining to memory in the current socio-historical perspective.