When lies become the truth: rewriting the conquest of Mexico in Carlos Fuentes’s novella, The Two Shores - DOI: 10.4025/actascihumansoc.v28i1.176

Abstract

This paper owes its inspiration to Jay’s (1997) article on Carlos Fuentes’s The Two Shores (Las dos Orillas, in the original, and As Duas Margens in the Portuguese version), one of the long short stories in the celebrated M exican author’s collected stories El Naranjo, translated as The Orange Tree and A Laranjeira, in the respective English and Portuguese versions. Jay bases his analysis on a number of authors in Translation Studies 1. Translation and mistranslation is just o ne aspect of this very rich and complex narrative. I argue that Jay’s use of the word “translation” to refer to Fuentes’s novella is too broad to be useful if one takes into account the existence of different types of translation and varied strategies employed by translators to deal with literary, technical, commercial, legal and Biblical texts in their daily work (Sager, 1998).