Translating for the Translingual Reader: Productive Incongruences Between Three Versions of Tell me how it ends by Valeria Luiselli

Abstract

Los niños perdidos (Un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas) is a self-translation by Valeria Luiselli from 2016. It is an extended version of a text that was originally published in English earlier that year. In 2017, Luiselli released a longer edition of the English text: Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. In this article, the three versions are compared, and the differences between them are seen as characteristic of the poetics of Luiselli’s work, because they, potentially, allow the translingual reader to access an interpretative layer that is not accessible to the monolingual reader. The incongruencies between the different versions can therefore be considered productive, since they reveal alternative narrative orders of a story that, because of its painful topic, is almost impossible to narrate. This way, the translation process reinforces one of the central themes of the work.