Martin, Angela F.

Silenced for almost half a century, testimonies of those who lost the Spanish Civil
War are now surfacing and being published. The origin of this dissertation was the
chance discovery that Martín Herrera de Mendoza, a Spanish Civil War exile living in the
United States, was truly a Catalonian anarchist named Antonio Vidal Arabí. This double
identity was a cover for the political activist dedicated to the fight for change in the
anarchist workers’ union CNT (National Confederation of Workers) and the FAI
(Federation of Iberian Anarchists). He founded the FAI chapter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife
and planned a failed assassination attempt on General Franco’s life in an effort to avoid
the military takeover in 1936.
This dissertation is the reconstruction of Antonio Vidal Arabí’s life narrative. It is
based on the texts written during his seventeen-month stay as a refugee in Great Britain.
Copies of his writings were left in a suitcase with a fellow anarchist who he instructed to
have sent to his family upon his death. In 1989, “The English Suitcase” was delivered to his children in Barcelona. Based on his own account, this study follows his service as an
intelligence agent for the Spanish Republic during the War. When it was over, he
attempted to evacuate his family from France, to save them from the threat of the Nazi
invasion and reunite with them in England or America.
The analysis of the letters he wrote to his wife and children in France documents
how he hid from Franco’s spies using his dual identity. In his letters, always signed as
Martín Herrera de Mendoza, he invents a persona in order to help his family. The present
study narrates his transformation into the persona he created and the events that brought
about his translation into his “other.” Antonio Vidal Arabí’s bilinguism and biculturality
is underlined as the main factors in his change into Martín Herrera de Mendoza. His was
a voyage into exile documented by his own words; a story of survival and reinvention.

Since 1970, translation studies have broken the dichotomous mold of the "word for word" or "sense for sense" translation, shifting from a linguistics focus to a new approach that investigates the context and confluence of the social/political factors that form the cultural background of a language. In the light of this "cultural turn," this study comparatively investigates the apparent differences between the two versions of the novella "Maldito amor" and "Sweet Diamond Dust" by the critically acclaimed Puerto Rican Rosario Ferre. To read Ferre's two versions taking into account translation theorist Lawrence Venuti's concepts of "foreignizing" or "domestication" of a text, evidences the need of new theoretical formulations to critically situate these rare cases of authors who "write between languages," and (re)create their work in another language.