The Translator's (In)visibility in Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris”

Abstract

Julio Cortázar’s “Letter to a Young Woman in Paris” (1951), a short story written in the form of a letter that the narrator, a translator, leaves for Andrea, the owner of the apartment he has moved into while she is in Paris, is a commentary on the in(visibility) of the translator. The protagonist of the story, a nameless translator (signifying the marginalized role of translators), relinquishes control over the apartment / text that he temporally inhabits. The translator expresses his anxiety over his unsettling visibility in the apartment/text, where he anticipates staying for a maximum of four months, “perhaps with luck three” (43), the estimated time, arguably, required to finish his translation project. Arrojo points out that the story reveals “the translator’s gripping narrative of his failure to protect the author’s textual space from his agency and relentless creativity” (7). The story, we contend, is a metaphor for translation, a word mentioned twice in the story (46-47) pondering the translator’s impossibility to shield the absent author’s textual space from his inevitable manipulation and destructive creativity.