‘White ink’ or invisible ink?: Galician maternities in the English translation of an autofictional novel

Exploring the Galician feminist backdrop, this article examines the English translation of Berta Dávila’s Os seres queridos (2022) and the translator’s attempts to amplify the writer’s voice. This autofictional novel brings to the fore the author-narrator-protagonist’s triple marginalisation as a Galician, a woman and a mother. Through this polyphonic voice, the narrative depicts heterogeneous maternity experiences as well as the underrepresented and silenced realities of Galician women and mothers in history. An extratextual and intratextual analysis of the English translation The Dear Ones (2024, trans. Jacob Rogers), published by Scottish small press 3TimesRebel, reveals that, despite the publisher’s express feminist motivations, the nature of the source text and the translator’s collaboration with the author, the translation does not fulfil the proposed function to promote the work of women authors writing in minority languages. Besides failing to comment on or visibly adopt feminist sensibilities, the translator opts for textual strategies that obscure Dávila’s situational subjectivity. Hence, the article contends that, for a translation to be feminist, a rigorous and manifest feminist consciousness is required. In the case of translating women writers from minority cultures, English translations must also reflect feminism’s pluralities to avoid perpetuating universalising discourses.