Retranslating the Spanish conquest : fictional accounts of real interpreters in (post)colonial literature

This article analyzes the thematization of the role of colonial interpreters in two contemporary short stories as a narrative resource for the discursive (re)writing and (re)reading of History. Juan José Saer’s “El intérprete” (1976) and Carlos Fuentes’s “Las dos orillas” (1993) offer fictional accounts of the lives of two real interpreters during the Spanish Conquest. Their representation of language mediators challenges traditional renderings of translation in a Hispanic colonial setting and foregrounds the importance of otherwise historically disregarded interpreters.