How to Translate a Survivor of the Nazi Extermination Camps from Cuba in 1977? Tadeusz Borowski (and Ana Ros), Between Socialist Realism in Poland and testimonio revolucionario in Cuba

Abstract

Tadeusz Borowski was one of the first writers in the world to produce a literary work about the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. From his problematic situation as a non-Jewish prisoner survivor, employed as forced labor in the industrial extermination of Jewish people, Borowski articulated a literary work that focused on the grammatical, idiomatic, and psychological effects of internalizing the totalitarian logic of the concentration camps. The Cuban translation and edition of Borowski’s work in 1977, one of the first and most comprehensive in Spanish, has been described as “very deficient” (Freixa 2009: 76). In what sense can Ana Ros’s translation of “Por favor, pasen a la cámara de gas” be considered “very deficient”? What translation strategies did she employ? How did the Polish and Cuban ideological climate of the 1970s influence Ana Ros’s “deficient” translation? We propose to analyze how socialist realism in Poland and revolutionary testimony in Cuba became an obstacle to understanding Borowski’s powerful story, emphasizing the questionable translation of the founding Cuban edition into Spanish, the work of the forgotten Polish translator Ana Ros.