Between “tú” and “vos” there is a “we”: Cayetana translated

Abstract

This paper analyzes Jacinta Escudos´s book Memorias del año de la Cayetana, based on the notion of a poetics of translation, understood as a creative and political process that manifests itself on multiple levels of the narrative. The analysis considers, on the one hand, the articulation between the literary, cinematographic and photographic languages ​​that structure the work, configuring a hybrid and intermedial writing; on the other, it highlights the pronominal change from “tú” to “vos” made in the third edition of the novel (2019), as a gesture of linguistic and symbolic reterritorialization. This operation is not reduced to a stylistic variation, but functions as a translation act of a decolonial nature, repositioning the enunciating subject and its interlocutors within a Central American geopolitics of language. In light of Jacques Derrida’s notion of destinerrancy, which articulates the idea of ​​destiny and wandering as constitutive of every act of communication, translation is here understood as transit — between languages, forms and cultural spaces. The use of “vos” in this context reorients reception and reinscribes the novel in a horizon of localized listening, marking an inflection in the aesthetic project of Escudos. The poetics of translation that permeates the work is not limited to interlanguage, but acts as a practice of cultural reinscription, revealing the displacements and reappropriations that define literature as a field of wandering, creation and resistance.