Literature, mobility, and the archive

notes towards the definition of a poetics of translatedness in Valeria Luiselli’s oeuvre.

Abstract

In 2019 Mexican-born Valeria Luiselli penned Lost Children Archive, which inaugurates her writing in English, and tells the interwoven stories of a blended family, as they take a road trip across America, and of the hardships of children travelling on foot to the US border.

The narrative is a poetic representation of lives in transit, and mobility informs it semantically and structurally: it is organized in four parts, each divided up in small sections, and includes manifold documents. In the narrative, the notion and the experience of the archive are of great importance, emerging out of multiple displacements. This being-in-transit conjures up a literal – it discusses the movement of people –, and figurative – it embraces multiple entanglements, renouncing completeness – translatedness.

While Lost Children Archive is a tour the force, and adds a layer of complexity her writing, Luiselli’s oeuvre, in Spanish and English, has always been characterized by an interpenetration of languages, texts, places, people – a close-knit interweaving of trajectories and memories. This results in an understanding of literature as assemblage, a ground in which to tentatively document existence. As such, it lends itself to an examination of the ways translation shapes the literary in a post-colonial, global(ized) world.