“Transito, ergo sum”. Trajectories of narrative identity in Paloma Vidal's self-translation Más al Sur

Abstract

In Mais ao sul (2008), the Argentinian-Brazilian writer Paloma Vidal collects short stories which evolve around displacement, based upon her own experience of being exiled with her Argentinian parents in Brazil at the age of two. In 2011, she self-translated these stories from Portuguese into Spanish, resulting in Más al sur. In the preface of Más al sur, Vidal underscores that it is not a re-writing, but a translation, hereby reducing her work as a creating author. However, by translating herself, she delved into her trajectory as a migrant and multilingual individual. Taking the concept of narrative identity developed by Paul Ricoeur as a starting point, in this article we aim to investigate how self-translation functions as another phase in the project of morphing of the self which was initiated when writing the original work.