Moriré en Río de Janeiro. Traducción, exilio y vida en Cae la noche tropical de Manuel Puig

Abstract

In 1988, is published the second novel of Manuel Puig written during his stay in Brazil, whose story, structured by repetitions, is mainly compose by the repetitions between two old argentine ladies in an apartment in Leblon. The aim of this paper is to give an account of the way in which, in this novel, Rio de Janeiro, a space of exile, is configured as a destination in order to affirm life through translation, since in Cae la noche tropical, in the act of conversation itself, an instance of translation is put into play. Everything that happens and it is said in Rio de Janeiro is framed into a foreign language to which the reader can only access when it is already translated —Portuguese—, a language that, nevertheless, never stops announcing its presence. In this way, from the perspectives of Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot for whom translation keeps the distance between the languages at the same time that it tries to suppress it, it is in this difference that the sisters, by implying the translation to repeat what they have heard from others, they manage to point to something unheard of about themselves. To translate is the possibility to turn the exile into a survival destination where it is potential to experience the intensity of life.