The Reinvention of the Original

This work examines the literary self-translations of María Luisa Bombal and Rosario Ferré, two authors who have translated a substantial part of their own writing, either from Spanish into English or vice versa. Numerous critics have managed Bombal s and Ferré s literary output by deciding that one version of a text is better or more beautiful or less consumerist than the other. They have thus effectively circumvented the problems raised by the existence of two imperfectly matched versions. However, both versions are, this study contends, equally valid and equally worthy of attention. This poses a serious problem for teachers and students of literature, a problem that cannot be ignored, and much less solved, by dismissing one version as consumerist while elevating the other as art, which there has been a tendency to do in the literature on Bombal and Ferré. This study is critical of the general tendency in the scholarship on these two authors. It defends the view that any historical or scholarly discussion of the oeuvre of Bombal and Ferré that neglects or minimizes the importance of their self-translations and foreign-language texts is inevitably flawed in some way.