‘Legitimate Language’ and Translation: an Interpretation of Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz’s Los deshabitados and Sebastián Antezana’s La toma del manuscrito

Abstract

This article analyses two novels to reflect on the issues of ‘legitimate language’ and translation: Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz’s Los deshabitados and Sebastián Antezana’s La toma del manuscrito. Two important forces help us to study these texts: an ‘assault’ on legitimate language and the origin of a dispute between Spanish, French and English, three colonial languages that hold a strong symbolism in Bolivian narrative. On the other hand, tensions between translation and crime novel appear in La toma del manuscrito, making the study of ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘translation’ and ‘genre’ categories possible and helping us to think about writing and ‘transtextuality’.