Argentine exiles in Spain: Translation as a practice of solidarity

Abstract

As part of its solidarity activities with Chilean, Uruguayan, and Argentine exiles in Catalonia, the NGO Agermanament led by Father Josep Ribera and the Lliga dels Drets dels Pobles published a register of exiles organized according to their professional activity in the magazine Agermanamentin 1979. The categories included in the list were “visual artists, doctors/psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, musicians, actors and singers, publicists, jurists, architects, and photographers”. Translatorswere not included in the list, even thoughtheirprofessional status had been recognized by the UNESCO in 1976 and thousands of Latin American exiles who had fled dictatorships and arrived in Spain without refugee status were working as translators. Due to the toll on the publishing sector, heavily damaged by political and cultural repression, numerous exiled Latin American intellectuals and writers entered the Catalan publishing industryas translators, proofreaders, and editors. Thisarticle aims to shed light on the quantitative and qualitative importance of translation as a practice of solidarity within the publishing sector during the Spanish transition to democracy. I want to show that members of the Latin American diaspora contributed to the constitution of a transnational publishing space, which was possible thanks to the solidarity of local publishers and exiles who created a labor network through the commission of translations.Keywords: Argentine exile, 1970s,translation, solidarity,Ibero-American publishing.IntroductionIn order to understand the phenomenon of Argentine exile in the 1970s, we must understand the political and cultural dynamics of each receiving country as well as the factors that were common to all the Argentine diaspora. These include the creation of exile groups, together with their publications and distribution channels, transnational activities of solidarity, and reporting on human rights violations (Jensen, 2010). The notion of ‘solidarity’has a long tradition in the political left. Historically, it refers to a way of understanding international support based on ideological affinity. According to Marina Franco (2011), “the Latin American exiles of the 1960s to 1980s are a good example of new and complex forms of solidarity that articulate traditional ideological parameters with new humanitarian ones, which are no less political” (2011, p.91). At the methodological level, and following Franco’s reasoning, this paper considers the notion of ‘solidarity’as a native category, meaning that it was circumscribed to the actors of the time, whose proper contextualization reveals a diversity of historically situated empiricalsituations.