Belén Bistué completed her undergraduate program in Spanish and Classics at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, in Argentina, and she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis. She worked for ten years as Tenured Researcher for the Argentine Research Council (CONICET) at the Comparative Literature Center of Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, where she also taught English and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on collaborative and multilingual translation techniques used in Europe during the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. She pays special attention to the difficulties that these inter-subjective practices created for Renaissance translation theory. She is also interested in the parodic uses of translation strategies in early modern fictional works. In her courses, she often explores this topic in texts from different periods and literary traditions.
She is the author of Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2013; Routledge, 2016) and co-editor of the collections Disobedient Practices: Textual Multiplicity in Medieval and Golden Age Spain (Juan de la Cuesta, 2015) and Literary Self-Translation in Hispanophone Contexts: Europe and the Americas (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). Her essay “The Task(s) of the Translator(s): Multiplicity as Problem in Renaissance European Thought” (Comparative Literature Studies 48.2) was awarded the 2010 A. Owen Aldridge Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. She has also published work on the history of Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s work.
On collaborative and multilingual translation:
Book:
Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013; London: Routledge, 2016.
Articles and Book Chapters:
-“Traveling Epistemologies: Scientific Translations and Multilocal Knowledge.” A Cultural History of Translation, ed. by Lieven D’Hulst, vol. 3: A Cultural History of Translation in an Age of CrossCultural Interaction (11th-16th C. CE), ed. by Michelle Bolduc and Marie-Alice Bell. London: Bloomsbury (accepted).
-“Traductio. The Redefinition of Translation as an Individual Task.” Logomotives: Words that Change the Premodern World, ed. by Marjorie Rubright and Stephen Spiess. Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming).
- “Apuntes para una historia de la traducción multilingüe.” Planteamientos historiográficos sobre la traducción en el ámbito hispánico,” ed. By Francisco Lafarga and Luis Pegenaute, 37-54. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2023.
-“Collaborative Translation as a Model for Multilingual Printing in Early Renaissance Editions of Aesop’s Fables.” Multilingual Texts and Practices in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Auger and Sheldon Brammall, 109-126. London: Routledge, 2023.
-“La traducción colaborativa como modelo conceptual en el escritorio Alfonsí. Boletín de Literatura Comparada 45.2 (2020): 113-128.
-“Multi-Version Texts and Translators’ Anxieties: Imagined Readers in John Florio’s Bilingual Dialogs.” In Trust and Proof: Translators in Early Modern Print Culture, ed. by Andrea Rizzi, 85-111. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
-“On the Incorrect Way to Translate: The Absence of Collaborative Translation from Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta.” In Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age, ed. by Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning, 33-48. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
-“Of First and Second Authors: Reading Don Quixote in the Context of Collaborative Translation Practices.” In Disobedient Practices: Textual Multiplicity in Medieval and Golden Age Spain, ed. by Anne Roberts and Belén Bistué, 165-182. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2015.
-“Traducciones Multilingües en Hispanoamérica colonial: Un primer intento bibliográfico.” Boletín de Literatura Comparada 39 (2014): 107–127.
-“Traducción multilingüe en Hispanoamérica colonial: un posible contexto para el estudio de Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.” Boletín de Literatura Comparada 37 (2012): 51–68.
-“The Task(s) of the Translator(s): Multiplicity as Problem in Renaissance European Thought.” Comparative Literature Studies 48.2 (2011): 139–164.
-“Translation as Collaborative Authorship: Margaret Tyler’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood,” co-authored with Deborah Uman. Comparative Literature Studies 44.3 (2007): 298–323.
On Spanish translations of Shakespeare:
-“Recovering Linguistic Multiplicity in Nicanor Parra’s ‘Antipoetic’ Translation of King Lear.” Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 19, ed. by Tom Bishop and Alexa Alice Joubin, 154-171. New York: Routledge, 2022.
-“Estrategias multilingües en algunas traducciones de Shakespeare al castellano.” Boletín de Literatura Comparada 42 (2017): 67-82.
-“The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Translations.” In The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare. Vol. 2 “The World’s Shakespeare, 1660 to the Present,” ed. by Bruce R. Smith, 1405-1410. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
-“Negotiating the Universal: Translations of Shakespeare’s Poems in-between Spain and Spanish America.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. by Jonathan Post, 689-707. London: Oxford University Press, 2013. 689-707.
