From national to global: Writing and translating the Aotearoa New Zealand short story

Abstract

In today’s global literary marketplace, the short story from Aotearoa New Zealand reaches out to international and national reading publics thanks to the flourishing local literary scene which has boosted the genre’s status and reach, and the global orientation of many writers. This article compares 20th-century short stories with contemporary developments in the genre that present a global, diasporic imaginary rather than a national imaginary. It refers to the translation into Spanish of stories anthologized in Un país de cuento: Veinte relatos de Nueva Zelanda (A fairy tale land: Twenty stories from New Zealand), that represent the country’s early cultural nationalism by stressing location and identity. In recent writing, these preoccupations reappear as expansions and reworkings that overflow this earlier canon through an exploration of different spaces; these deterritorialize the national, and refocus the local, creating the impression of cultural fragmentation.