SOURCE: Murad, Timothy. “Los de Abajo vs. The Underdogs: The Translation of Mariano Azuela's Masterpiece.” Hispania 65, no. 4 (December 1982): 554-61.

In the following essay, Murad compares and contrasts the similarities and differences between the original Las de Abajo and its first English translation, The Underdogs.

El traducir de una lengua en otra … es como quien mira los tapices flamencos por el revés.

Cervantes, Don Quixote, II, 62

Literary translations have played a key role in what can be described as the internationalization of prose fiction (and poetry) which has taken place over the last two decades. As concerns Latin American works, the impact of literary translations is evident in any haphazard and incomplete list of authors who are becoming ever more familiar to a growing reading public in the English-speaking world: Asturias, Borges, Cortázar, Donoso, Fuentes, García Márquez, Rulfo, and Vargas Llosa. While the works of...