A Spanish-English Literary Translation of Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Saint Lucy\u27s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves\u27 Haunting Olivia

This Senior Thesis is a translation project focusing on magical realism Spanish and English literature. Two works were translated – a single chapter of a novel and the entirety of a short story – for this project. I selected to translate the first chapter of Crónica de una muerte anunciada by Gabriel García Márquez into English and the short story “Haunting Olivia” by Karen Russell from her collection St. Lucy’s School for Girls Raised by Wolves. Crónica de una muerte anunciada describes the narrator’s attempts to discover, twenty-seven years later, the events leading up to and on the morning of Santiago Nasar’s death. Written as if by an amateur journalist, the narrator describes his memories of the evening before and the morning his friend, Santiago Nasar, was murdered by the Vicario brothers. He interviews other people in the town, including Santiago Nasar’s mother, his cook and housekeeper, and their friends. The novel is told non-linearly and, while the reader knows from the very beginning the end of the story, develops the plot in a way that the reader is always missing some information. Karen Russell’s “Haunting Olivia” follows the narrator, Timothy, and his brother, Wallow, as they search their island’s shorelines for their sister Olivia’s ghost. Olivia died at sea and her body was never found, leaving her family without closure. When Timothy and Wallow happen upon a pair of goggles that allow them to see ghosts underwater, Wallow immediately starts seriously searching for Olivia’s ghost, dragging Timothy along with him