Edited By Esther Gimeno Ugalde, Marta Pacheco Pinto and Ângela Fernandes. Liverpool University Press, 2021.

Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers a reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on relevant theoretical perspectives and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity.

In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions.

The chapters, written by renown scholars and emergent academics, are grouped around three main sections:

  • 1. Iberian and Translation Studies: Theoretical Contact Zones;
  • 2. Fluid Contact Zones: Indirect Translation, Self-Translation, Intersemiotic Translation;
  • 3. Iberian Contact Zones: Crossing Times and Genres.

See Table of Contents.

Contributors: Isabel Araújo Branco, Ana Belén Cao Míguez, Pere Comellas Casanova, Maria Dasca Batalla, Ângela Fernandes, Enric Gallén, Miquel M. Gibert, Esther Gimeno Ugalde, Isaac Lourido, Rita Bueno Maia, Elizabete Manterola, Andresa Fresta Marques, Miguel Filipe Mochila, Robert Patrick Newcomb, Ariadne Nunes, Marta Pacheco Pinto, Antonio Sáez Delgado, José Pedro Sousa, Sara Rodrigues de Sousa