Writing and traslating the Puerto Rican short storyRosario Ferré

Resumen

The short story genre, and particularly the Latin American short story, is one of the most important literary manifestations of the last century. Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré started writing in the 1970s and was deeply influenced by writers such as Borges or Cortázar. Ferré and her contemporaries enthusiastically favored the short narrative genre. Ferré's collections of short stories include Papeles de Pandora and Maldito amor, works that she translated herself into English (The Youngest Doll and Sweet Diamond Dust, respectively). Like Ophelia, the female character in one of her essays on translation, Rosario Ferré is a hybrid author who remains in between two waters, trapped between the constraints of two languages and two cultures, always adrift as she places herself, through her translations, in the spaces in between. Similar to her feminine characters, Ferré puts forth her own life through the artistry of language. As a short story writer, she subverts the masculine world questioning the traditional role of women as passive beings. Likewise, by translating her own works, she rewrites her short stories making use of subversive elements and accommodates them to the target language and culture. Ferré's collections of short stories in Spanish, as well as her self-translations into English, exhibit all her inventiveness and richness of language, and can be considered early proof of her stature among contemporary Latin American authors.