By Norah Walsh

Faculty Mentor: Maria Laura Bocaz

Abstract

In 1970, four years after its release in the original Spanish, Hallie Deering Taylor, a master’s student at the University of Colorado, completed a translation to English and analysis of José Donoso’s El Lugar Sin Límites. Through examining primary and secondary sources, we can trace the translation’s genealogy through Taylor to a partial translation by Suzanne Jill Levine in which both translators were challenged by the linguistic differences in gender between Spanish and English as well as Donoso’s varying pronouns for La Manuela—a transgender woman living in the small town of El Olivo. By identifying the uses of gender in Spanish relating to La Manuela and comparing them to the two English translations, I will explain how the narrative voice Donoso develops through many perspectives can help guide translators to a more accurate translation of the text. As a result, I propose that the novel be retranslated in order to align with a more developed conception of gender that accepts La Manuela as a transgender woman who is also informed by Donoso’s purposeful fluctuation of her gender.