Professor Gomez’s book Cannibal Translation received an Honorable Mention for the MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures.
The selection committee citation, pasted below, describes her work with an interesting take on its timeliness.
“Isabel C. Gómez’s Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America theorizes original concepts of interpretation and translation, articulating precisely how literary interpretation manifests skill, creativity, and art. It poses keen questions about cultural reciprocity and the productive nonassimilation of texts. At a moment when some sociocultural forces seem all too prepared to allow artificial intelligence to define the act of rendering or rerendering text, Gómez makes clear the importance of craft, personal will, and politics for the elaboration of authentic interpretive literary work. Gómez’s study is a confident, innovative dive into the act and field of translation as a rapacious, re-creative endeavor. Building on well-established Latin American articulations of anthropophagia and translation, Gómez’s framework blends intellectual, aesthetic, and literary histories with practice. With particular attention to translations emerging from the Americas, Gómez thoughtfully engages with contemporary preoccupations about the roles of transmission, content generators, cultural legitimacy, and the metaphorical hunger that drives the creation and exchange of culture.” (Citation from MLA selection committee).