Who said what? Translated messages and language interpreters in three texts by Javier Marias and Almudena Grandes

摘要

Through the comparison of two short stories and a novel, this article examines the transgression of the deontological code of language interpreters in the fictional realm. The three literary works that will be analysed portray unusual situations in which interpreters show different levels of faithfulness to the source text, producing very different outcomes across the different stories. This article will consider Walter Benjamin's views on the afterlife of the message and Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism in order to examine these transgressions and their implications, exploring, throughout analysis of the fictional texts, notions such as the independence of the target text from the source text and the ownership of messages. Framed within the studies on 'transfiction', this analysis will focus on three Spanish literary texts by two well-established contemporary writers: Javier Marias and Almudena Grandes.