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Translating the poems of Blanca Varela: creative practice as knowledge production
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Date
2025-12-31
Authors
O'Connor, Eileen Mary
Journal Title
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Volume Title
Publisher
University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
This thesis presents new English translations of the first four poetry collections of Peruvian writer Blanca Varela (1926–2009)—Ese puerto existe (1959), Luz de día (1963), Valses y otras falsas confesiones (1971), and Canto villano (1978)—and argues for translation as a creative practice that serves simultaneously as critical reading and scholarly research. My theoretical framework combines ecofeminism and phenomenology to analyze Varela’s negotiation of diverse physical spaces, materials, and perceptual registers. These lenses illuminate how her work engages with embodiment, memory, and environment, while also guiding my own practice as translator. Parallel to this theoretical engagement, I adopt creative methodologies in stages alongside each collection: autofictional writing, through which I enter Varela’s poems as another “I” and interlocutor; somatic movement, used to inhabit the gestures and spatial dynamics evoked by her texts; and sound-based practices that attune me to the aural textures of her poetics.
Through these methods, this thesis generates new insights into Varela’s manipulation of gaze, her construction of the poem as a three-dimensional space, her recurrent use of setting as a site of memory, and the plurivocal and intertextual voices that inhabit her work. More broadly, it demonstrates how translation, when combined with other creative practices, can be understood as an embodied, iterative mode of generating knowledge. By linking practice-based translation with critical interpretation, this thesis highlights the potential of creative-critical research methods while advancing a deeper understanding of Varela’s early poetry—contributing new insights to ongoing conversations in translation studies, poetics, and Latin American literary criticism.
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Controlled Access
Keywords
Blanca Varela , Literary translation , Peruvian poetry , Translation as research , Creative practice , Embodiment
Citation
O'Connor, E. M. 2025. Translating the poems of Blanca Varela: creative practice as knowledge production. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.