Assembling memory from the language of exile. Writing and translation in El azul de las abejas by Laura Alcoba and La resistencia by Julián Fuks.

Abstract

In this article we look at the production processes of two novels that were originally written in the language of exile. We refer to Laura Alcoba's third novel El azul de las abejas (2018), whose original language of publication is French, and to La resistencia (2018), which was written in Portuguese by Julián Fuks, the son of Argentines born in exile in São Paulo, Brazil. We work with the works translated into Spanish in order to problematise how the children of authors and narrators weave memory from the translated language. We highlight the fact that we are dealing with entrepreneurial sons and daughters of memory (Jelin, 2021) and storytellers (Nofal 2022, 2023) who resort to different uses of language to narrate not only from personal testimony, but also from the fictional configuration that they enable from the intimate. Taking into account the work of the sons and daughters of a second generation (Basile, 2019) we seek to distinguish how literature shapes a narrative memory that prevails in contemporaneity in order to understand the struggles of the past. Literary aesthetics is observed in the crossover between mother tongue and language of exile. The mother tongue is presented through the work of translation.

Therefore, the language of exile, in the chosen works, constitutes a narrative memory that prevails and allows these children to expand the testimony of the terrorism that has triggered and wounded the mother tongue.