Recovering Anti-Francoist Women's Voices: A Feminist Translation of Maria Teresa León's "Memoria de la melancolia"

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This practice-based project will reinstate the anti-Francoist voice of Maria Teresa León (1903-1988),whose work remains inaccessible in English translation to British readers despite critical acclaim in theUK (see Jones 2020, The Guardian). It will contribute to filling the gaps left in the history of womenauthors during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975) from aTransnational Feminist Translation Studies perspective (Castro and Spoturno 2020; Flotow and Kamal2020). I will translate León's 429-page memoir "Memoria de la melancolia" (1970), described as one ofthe key testimonies from this period (Balló, 2021), and produce a coexisting critical commentary toaddress the overarching research question of which feminist translation strategies ( Flotow, 2019;Massardier-Kenney, 1997) are most fit for the purposes of recovering Spanish lost anti-Francoist women'svoices and presenting the historical context to a new target audience. This project responds to a feministinterest in women's experiences of oppression, dictatorship and exile transcending national and classboundaries (Mendoza, 2002) which, due to its transnational nature, requires translation (Castro andErgun, 2017).This thesis will explore existing translation strategies (see Flotow, 2019:232-36) adopted to "make thefeminine visible" (Massardier-Kenney, 1997:58), such as the use of prefaces to preserve difference whilebringing the source context closer to the reader. Producing this translation within a funded academiccontext is an innovative feminist strategy that will allow me to focus solely on the recovery of a feministauthor who has been excluded from the canon, without being constrained by the limitations ofcommercial literary translation. This project will contribute to the discipline by developing tools which willenrich the ongoing debate regarding the application of context specific feminist translation strategies.My project will overcome the lack of dialogue between the practice and theory of translation(Chesterman and Wagner, 2014) by developing existing theories through my own translation practicewhich will produce an original contribution to the current body of knowledge. It will also improve UKreaders' understanding of women's experiences during the Spanish Civil War and in exile during Franco'sdictatorship by making León's memoir accessible to English-speakers which will result in increasedscholarly interest in León's work.