Translating Libertella

Abstract

Héctor Libertella is regarded by specialized critics as the pioneer of the “critical fiction” genre, thanks to his significant contributions to literary theory and practice, his research into reading-writing and reception, and his reflections on the relationship between aesthetics and the publishing market. Taking El árbol de Saussure (Saussure’s Tree, 2000) as a starting point, we will retrace Libertella’s “hermetic network”, a journey of continuous rewriting of a single work, intertwining keywords and quotations where writing “always somewhat resists interpretation”. The responsibility accompanying the privilege of translating Libertella for the first time, both in Italy and overall, mandated a particularly careful approach, as impersonal as possible. This approach coincided, both for textual analysis and translation, with a structural setup, grounded in Torop’s Semiotics of Culture applied to translation, Fontanille’s Semiotics of the Text, and above all, Eco’s interpretative Semiotics. Therefore, the considerations on Libertella’s writing will also offer a series of insights for a Semiotics of Translation aiming to present to Libertella’s “Any Reader”, which is every reader, an interpretation that potentially encompasses all possible ones, emphasizing especially the preservation of the original texts’ cultural aspects without resorting to an exoticized reworking. This article’s approach to the author from a Translation Studies perspective characterizes this contribution, while also leveraging theoretical-linguistic reflection to offer potential readers a glimpse into the author’s poetics through direct quotations from his works.