Monterroso and Translation: A Translator-creator in Search of a Poetics of Translation

This article analyses Augusto Monterroso's main ideas on translation as expressed in essays, interviews, diary fragments and works of fiction. Like Borges, Monterroso seems to place literary translation on a higher level than the original work. We organize all these comments according to the source language and also examine his comments on translations from Spanish into other languages. Monterroso seems to have been ahead of his time regarding translation studies because of the depth of his reflections however contradictory they may be. He develops several well-known topics: the ambiguous concepts of originality and fidelity, the untranslatable, the place of the translator in the publishing world, the lack of translations of important works, the history of translations and translation errors. Monterroso refers to the "dangers" of the translator's profession, but with humour and irony, he perceives translation as a game which allows him to make unexpected associations between multiple literary texts.