Verónica Jaffé’s Hölderlin: appropriation and metaphor of translation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the poetics of appropriation through translation in the work of Verónica Jaffé. In this sense, Jaffé begins with her poetry collections El largo viaje a casa (1994) and La versión de Ismena (2000), whose translingual aesthetic will lead to later books where visual art, translation, and poetry merge, such as Sobre traducciones: poemas 2000-2008 (2010), and the translation Friedrich Hölderlin: cantos hespericos según la edición histórico-crítica de D.E. Sattler / traducción y versiones libres (en lienzo y poemas) (2015), which is reviewed in greater detail in this article. Through Hölderlin, Jaffé proposes a form of appropriation where the German poet is dislocated, provoking a montage in which authorship and originality are questioned through a series of “free versions”; simultaneously, this exploration involves a mapping process where collage, photography, and translation merge into an “appropriative atlas” of foreignness, which gives dimension to an unclassifiable work within 21st-century Venezuelan poetry.