Achmat Dangor (1948-2020) and M.G. Vassanji (1950-): The Reception of Two Afrindian Voices in Spain

Abstract

Dangor (Johannesburg, 1948-2020) and Vassanji (Nairobi, b1950) are two contemporary Indian-African (“Afrindian”) diasporic writers who share a hybrid combination of Indianness and Africanness. Both writers have been translated into Spanish and, in the case of Vassanji, Catalan. The number of translations is rich enough to establish many description-based contrasts, and the proposal of future guidelines for translating Afrindian writers.  The description takes into account the powerful autobiographical overtones typical of African writing, and describes how they have been made available to Spanish readers. A representative sample of exoticizing textual units from the original texts will be compared with their translation solutions in order to explore if exoticizing is the right method for this kind of postcolonial African Indian literature. The results indicate that  exoticizing has been clearly favoured by the translators.