Cortázar, Dunlop and Monrós-Stojakovic: Translation as a Form of Relationship

Abstract

Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, both writers who also worked as translators, shared their last years as a couple and together they published their last book Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. In the book Correspondencia, by Alfpha-Decay, readers have access to the letters exchanged between the translator of Rayuela to Serbo-Croatian, Sylvia Monrós-Stojakovic, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop. From letters and postcards initially driven to answer questions about the translation of the book, Monrós-Stojakovic establishes a friendship with Cortázar and, afterwards, with Dunlop, even getting to visit them in Paris. In the rich mail exchanges in this book, the three of them expose their ideas on life, litterature, traduction, secrets, travels and friendship, showing that translation can evolve more than pouring texts from one language to another, but it also allows the human relationship aspect to permeate the process in all its complexity. Monrós-Stojakovic and Dunlop write in a Spanish proper to foreigners trying to express themselves, whilst Cortázar is the only one here who writes in his native argentinian Spanish. The political reality of those times is also approached with reports and reflections about political happenings in Serbia in 1980’s and the travels through a politically charged Latin America taken by the couple living in France. This work aims to show that the mail exchange between author and translator allows a deeper vision of ideologies, intercultural and personal relations established and that translation itself can be a way to relate to the world and to people, getting together those that wouldn’t get to know each other any other way. Presenting the content of the letters in Correspondencia, one can also gain access to Cortázar and Dunlop’s lasts years, something that may concern those who study their work, and here are also revealed some aspects of how they both related to the sickness that lead to their demise.