Garafía

The graphic novel Garafía is a translation from Spanish into French published by Rue de l’échiquier in 2023.

In this graphic novel, author and artist Elías Taño tells the story of hir grandparents in a fictionalised form. Gloria and Cencio are a Canarian couple living under Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s. Their story mirrors that of many families whose men had to emigrate to Latin America to escape poverty, while the women were left to look after the land and children under the authority of the army.

This text is deeply rooted in the historical and geographical context of the Canary Islands in the 1960s. The characters use colloquial and regional language, and their accents give them a specific status. Because of this accent and this way of expressing themselves, the Canary Islanders are differentiated from the peninsular military and devalued as migrants to Venezuela. It was therefore important to be able to convey this dual socio-economic and regional analysis in the translation. To do this, I used colloquial expressions and formulations characteristic of the spoken language, while retaining certain Canarian words to keep the text anchored.