The 'permanent unease' of cultural translation in the fiction of Guillermo Fadanelli

This article examines the work and potential translation of Mexican author Guillermo Fadanelli through the lens of cultural translation . Fadanelli s dirty realist fiction, widely celebrated among Mexican critics and readerships, is inseparable from the urban space of Mexico City: a setting brimming with tension, cultural mutation and heteroglossic dialogue. At once beguiling and repugnant, this ambivalent space is the site of a great unease; caught between traditions, it occasions the Frankensteinian genesis of new and other cultures. Drawing upon the theories of Homi K. Bhabha, Nestor Garcia Canclini and Gayatri Spivak, this article situates the act and concept of translation - both cultural and literary - within a similar dynamic of multilayered and constantly re-articulated Otherness. Interlingual translation, itself a play of tensions and differences, takes place in an equally uneasy space across and between cultures, an interstice where anxiety gives way to production. Like Fadanelli s Mexico City, the hybrid site of translation not only represents Otherness but itself engenders difference, multiplicity and newness