Handicap: Impedir o compensar. Dos traducciones de “Harrison Bergeron”

Abstract

“Harrison Bergeron” is one of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s most famous short stories. It has sometimes been reduced to a story with an easy to understand moral that can be used as an ideological tool. Two translations of “Harrison Bergeron” — which present distinct differences between them— were published in Mexico in the 1970s. The following paper conducts a contrasting analysis of the two translations using the concept of deforming forces or tendencies that Antoine Berman proposed in his article “The analytic of translation and the system of deformation”. Berman believes that no translation is free of these forces; since they act in the translator in an unconscious manner and skew the translation from its pure objective. The purpose of this analysis is to show the areas where these forces act in the texts and to observe how they influence the reading of these translations.