Birth Certificate

This thesis, Birth Certificate, is my translation of Virginia Cosin’s Partida de Nacimiento (originally published by Editorial Entropía in 2011). Birth Certificate is a hybrid novel in diary format featuring chapters of prose, poetry, and drama that help to record the daily life of a recently divorced, single mother. The novel uses a fragmented style that accentuates the piecemeal nature of the quotidian as it amalgamates into a story, and the hybrid nature of the text works in many ways to challenge traditional conceptions of genre and form. Birth Certificate also works thematically to undermine stable formulations of motherhood and present a dynamic mother character who engages flexibly with her own gender roles and the expectations placed on women and mothers. In response to this iconoclastic presentation of motherhood, I approach the translation of the text from a feminist viewpoint, examining how collaborative frameworks might offer a more ethical strategy of translation.