Continuity of Texts: Metafiction in a Cortazar Short Story and its Swedish Translation

Abstract

This article analyzes the Swedish translation of the short story Continuidad de los parques, written by the Argentine author Julio Cortázar and translated into Swedish by the translator Jan Sjögren. This short story is an excellent piece of metafiction as it plays with the re­lationship between a fictional reader and the real reader. By creating an aesthetic illusion, Cor­tázar leaves the reader in a tense state with a number of unanswered questions during the rea­ding of the text. The analysis shows that this state of tension is weakened and works differently in the Swedish version of the story. By changing the title and other minor, but substantial, parts of the text, the translator transfers his interpretation of the text onto the Swedish trans­lation. The narrative structure is altered and, as a result, the reader of the Swedish version does not have access to the sa­me multiple interpretations afforded by Cortázar’s Spanish text.