Las lenguas vivas. Zonas de exilio y traducción en Manuel Puig

The narrative of the Argentine writer Manuel Puig (1932‐1990) has renewed in the last decades critical interests. However, his plays and film scripts still remain largely unexplored, among other key aspects of his literary production. In fact, even though it has been argued that Puig’s literature exceeds literature itself, most theoretical approaches have not gone beyond traditional literary paradigms. This dissertation addresses Puig’s oeuvre from two issues that have remained in the margins of criticism: translation and exile. Indeed, in spite of the fact that both have had an undeniable presence in Latin American literature and played a significant role in shaping the discourse of Latin American identity, there is almost no research on them. The analysis will focus first on the “translation zone”. Three early scripts that Puig wrote in his first trip abroad will be analyzed: Ball Cancelled (1956), Summer Indoors / Verano entre paredes (1959) and La tajada (1960). These scripts mark the first shift Puig made, from both the legitimate literary genre of the time (the novel) and from the discourse of national language. Then, we will study the “exile zone” in three novels that Puig wrote during his political exile: El beso de la mujer araña (1976), Pubis angelical (1979) and Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas (1980). These texts question the hegemonic representation of exile and, at the same time, they render visible other forms of displacement that were eclipsed by such a discourse of exile in the 70s. In sum, this analysis offers a new reading of Puig’s work through the intersections of translation and exile zones and by doing so, intends to form new theoretical perspectives in the field of contemporary cultural studies in the context of Latin American Literature and beyond.