A text is owned by the person who created it, which raises the question of whether a translation – a complete change of language, a re-interpretation of the text – should be considered an original work in its own right. A translator has the power to change the tone of a text by their choice of vocabulary, to change its style by altering the syntax, to imbue new feelings into the words and redefine the audience of a text. All of this points to the idea of a translation as an entirely new and different creation.

Magical realism is a literary mode of which Salman Rushdie makes extensive use in his novels, often to convey a political message. It is a technique in which the author presents realistic characters, settings, and events but with elements of the fantastic or mythical which are accepted as a normal part of the world: for example, flying carpets and genies in an otherwise realistic environment. The question I want to address is whether the use of magical realism is actually an effective tool for putting across a political message.

On Tuesday 15th and 22nd of January 1712, Joseph Addison produced two articles in The Spectator magazine on the “Dissection of a Beau’s Brain” and the “Dissection of a Coquette’s Heart”. He took a satirical look at the inner workings of two eighteenth-century stereotypes, and caricatured their natures in terms of how their brain and heart worked. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “Beau” as “a man who gives particular, or excessive, attention to dress, mien, and social etiquette; an exquisite, a fop, a dandy”, and “Coquette” as “a woman (more or less young), who uses arts to gain the admiration and affection of men, merely for the gratification of vanity or from a desire of conquest, and without any intention of responding to the feelings aroused; a woman who habitually trifles with the affections of men; a flirt”.