The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation [1 ed.] 0367689243, 9780367689247

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Delineating a Latin American Approach to Literary Translation
Introduction
Content Overview
Pedagogical Applications
Further Reflections
Works Cited
Part I: In Translation: Linguistic & Cultural Diversity Within the Continent
1 Philology and Translation on the Way to a New World: Andrés Bello, Translator
Introduction
Philological Foundations for a New Order: Transcription and Translatio
Translating for the New World: The London Reviews
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
2 From Romanticism to Modernism: Translating Heine in Spanish America
Introduction: First Translations of Heine in Buenos Aires and Montevideo (1836–1838)
Heine’s Lyrical Self Travels to Spanish America
Translating Heine in the Contact Zone: Spanish American Exile in New York
Ways of Translating Heine
Conclusion: Heine and His Spanish American Translators at the Outset of Modernization
Works Cited
Further Readings
3 Translation and Transculturation: José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, César Vallejo
Introduction
A Tentative Genealogy
Jackson, Martí, Vallejo
Macrotexts
Conclusion: Transculturation
Works Cited
Further Readings
4 José María Arguedas: Decolonizing Translation
Introduction
Methodological Approach
Corpus
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
5 The Woven Threads of Literary Translation in the Greater Caribbean
Introduction: A Colonial Legacy Embodied by Language
Beyond Colonial Monolingualism, a Literature Born in Translation
Beyond National Language
The Voices of Creole and Vernacular Languages Are Heard
The Publishing Market and the Search for Circum-Caribbean Connections
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
6 Translation and Anthropophagy from the Library of Haroldo de Campos
Introduction: The Library of Haroldo de Campos as a Space for Criticism and Creation
The Translation Space and the Worlds of the Library
Networks, Voyages, Textual Galaxies
Toward a Poetics of Translation
Transcreation and Transculturation: Uses of the Library
Translation as a Parodic Space
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
7 Resisting Translation: Spanglish and Multilingual Writing in the Americas
Introduction
Spanglish and Hybrid Languages
Hybridity in Action
The (Un)translatability of Spanglish
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
8 Approaching Literary Self-Translation in the United States and Latin America
Introduction
Self-Writing
Intralingual Translation
Interlingual Translation
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
Part II: In & Out of Latin America: Reception of Translated Literature
9 José Salas Subirat and the First Ulysses in Spanish
Introduction
A Young Man from the Outskirts
The Path to Ulysses
An Adventurous Publisher
The (Hypothetical) Story of a Translation
Critics and Interrupted Revisions
The “Problem of Language”
Conclusion: Crossed Tensions
Works Cited
Further Readings
10 Jorge Luis Borges’s Theory and Practice of Translation
Introduction
Translation as a Creative Art
Borges the Translator
A Case Study: Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames”
Commonalities and Differences
From Parody to Fantastic Literature
Conclusion: “August 25, 1983”
Works Cited
Further Readings
11 The Boom of the Latin American Novel in French Translation
Introduction
Before the Boom
The 1960s: A New World and New Actors in Publishing
The Boom in the Cadre vert Collection of Le Seuil
Two Translators of the Boom: Albert Bensoussan and Laure Bataillon
The Boom in the French Press
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
12 Chinese Translation of Latin American Literature (1950–1999)
Introduction
Beginnings: A Literature of Resistance
Highly Politicized Translation (1950–1970)
Depoliticized Translation (1980s)
Translation Entering the Global Market (1990s)
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
13 Octavio Paz, Thinker of Translation: Versioning Matsuo Bashō and Fernando Pessoa
Introduction
Sendas de Oku Translated by Paz: Diffusing the Haiku in Latin America
Octavio Paz in a Labyrinth of Ideologies and Norms: Modernizing Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
14 “Tequio literario”: Translating Indigenous Literature as Communal Labor
Introduction
From Individual Craft to “Tequio Literario”
Self-Translation and Translingualism in Indigenous Texts
The Politics of Translating into English
Literary Translation as “Tequio Literario”
By the Community, For the Community
Respect for Oral Versions of the Text
Translating Translingually
Publication in Multiple Complementary Versions
Reciprocal Labor
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
15 Killing Bill: Shakespeare in Latin America
Introduction
The Art of Transfiguration
Lear, Ready for Her Close-Up
Into the Woods
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
16 “New Female Gothic”: Latin American Fiction in the Anglophone Markets Through Translation
Introduction: Premises and Objectives
“New Female Boom”
The Importation of the Southern Cone Gothic
The Making of the “Andean Gothic”
Tropical Ghostliness
Against the “Female Gothic”
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
Part III: In Circulation: Publishing & Networks of Translation
17 Translation and Print Culture in Latin America
Introduction
Print Culture and Translation
Translation and Print Culture in Latin America
The Twentieth Century: A Turning Point
The 1960s and 1970s: Politics and Culture
A Look at Publishing Houses: Translation in Fondo de Cultura Económica
A Look at Cultural Magazines: Translation in Revista Casa de las Américas
Latin American Print Culture from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
18 Exile Networks in Spanish- American Publishing Houses: Translation and Adaptations of Translations
Introduction
First Scene: Spaniards in Paris and Translations for the Americas
Second Scene: Challenging the French Hegemony with Hispanic-Argentine Translations
Third Scene: The Republican Spaniards Exiled in Argentina and the Exportation of Translations in Latin America
Fourth Scene: Latin American Translators and Translations in Spain during the Second Cold War
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
19 Manipulation in Translation: The Case of the Modern Woman and the Flirt in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Magazines
Introduction
Flirting in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Magazines: Local Texts and Tips
Flirting in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Magazines: Translations
Manipulating Provins: From the Parisian Belle Époque to Buenos Aires in the 1920s
Manipulating Matilde Serao: Marriage, Passione, and Flirt
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
20 A Laboratory of Texts: The Multilingual Translation Legacies of Haroldo de Campos
Introduction
Political Poetry in Translation: pura or para?
Cartonera as Planetary Literature and the Uncountable Languages of Latin America
Transcreating Haroldo’s gostoso portunhol
Landless Landlocked Labor Movements
Translating a Transcreation: Mayakovsky and Haroldo’s Laboratory of Texts
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
21 The Deep-Sea Diver and the Sculptor: The Translations of José Bento Monteiro Lobato, Brazilian Publisher, Translator, and Children’s Author
Introduction
Lobato on Translation
Translations for Children
Lobato’s Adaptations for Children
Peter Pan (1930)
Prison and Peter Pan Burned and Banned
Translations in Partnership
Conclusion: The Golden Age of Translations in Brazil
Works Cited
Further Readings
22 Author, Reader, Editor, and Translator in the Digital Age: Changing Norms of Production and Reception
Introduction
Questions for the Future of Translation
The New Publishing Environment
COVID-19 and its Impact on Contemporary Brazilian Literature
Three Contemporary Brazilian Writers of the Digital Age
J.P. Cuenca
Noemi Jaffe
Paulo Dutra
Conclusion
Works Cited
Further Readings
Index

Citation preview

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation offers an understanding of translation in Latin America both at a regional and transnational scale. Broad in scope, it is devoted primarily to thinking comprehensively and systematically about the intersection of literary translation and Latin American literature, with a curated selection of original essays that critically engage with translation theories and practices outside of hegemonic Anglo centers. In this introductory volume, through survey and case-study chapters, contributing authors cover literary and cultural translation in the region historically, geographically, and linguistically. From the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the chapters focus on issues ranging from the role of translation in the construction of national identities to the challenges of translation in the current digital age. Areas of interest expand from the United States to the Southern Cone, including the Caribbean and Brazil, as well as the impact of Latin American literature internationally, and paying attention to translation from and to indigenous languages; Portuguese, English, French, German, Chinese, Spanglish, and more. The first of its kind in English, this Handbook will shed light on different translation approaches and invite a rethinking of intercultural and interlingual exchanges from Latin American viewpoints. This is key reading for all scholars, researchers, and students of literary translation studies, Latin American literature, and comparative literature. Delfina Cabrera is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Portugiesisch-Brasilianische Institut of the Universität zu Köln. She is an active literary translator and the author of Las lenguas vivas: Zonas de exilio y traducción en Manuel Puig. Denise Kripper is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College (USA) and the Translation Editor at Latin American Literature Today. She is an active literary translator and the author of Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature.

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies provide comprehensive overviews of the key topics in translation and interpreting studies. All entries for the handbooks are specially commissioned and written by leading scholars in the field. Clear, accessible, and carefully edited, Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies are the ideal resource for both advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media Edited by Esperança Bielsa The Routledge Handbook of Conference Interpreting Edited by Michaela Albl-Mikasa and Elisabet Tiselius The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology Edited by Federico Zanettin and Christopher Rundle The Routledge Handbook of Audio Description Edited by Christopher Taylor and Elisa Perego The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory Edited by Sharon Deane-Cox and Anneleen Spiessens The Routledge Handbook of Sign Language Translation and Interpreting Edited by Christopher Stone, Robert Adam, Ronice Quadros de Müller, and Christian Rathmann The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion Edited by Hephzibah Israel The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Interpreting, and Bilingualism Edited by Aline Ferreira and John W. Schwieter The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation Edited by Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Translation-and-Interpreting-Studies/book-series/RHTI.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation

Edited by Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper

Designed cover image: © Getty Images | dimapf First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cabrera, Delfina, 1984–editor. | Kripper, Denise, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of Latin American literary translation / edited by Delfina Cabrera, Denise Kripper. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge handbooks in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022040257 | ISBN 9780367689247 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367689254 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003139645 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting—Latin America. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PN241.5.L29 R68 2023 | DDC 418/.02098—dc23/eng/20221019 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040257 ISBN: 978-0-367-68924-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68925-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13964-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments xiii Contributors xiv Delineating a Latin American ­Approach to Literary Translation 1 Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper Introduction 1 Content Overview 4 Pedagogical Applications 9 Further Reflections 9 Works Cited 10 PART I

In Translation: Linguistic & Cultural Diversity Within the Continent

11

1 Philology and Translation on the Way to a New World: Andrés Bello, Translator 13 Juan Antonio Ennis Introduction 13 Philological Foundations for a New Order: Transcription and Translatio 16 Translating for the New World: The London Reviews 19 Conclusion 25 Works Cited 26 Further Readings 28

2 From Romanticism to Modernism: Translating Heine in Spanish America 30 Andrea Pagni Introduction: First Translations of Heine in Buenos Aires and Montevideo (1836–1838) 30 Heine’s Lyrical Self Travels to Spanish America 32 Translating Heine in the Contact Zone: Spanish American Exile in New York 34 v

Contents

Ways of Translating Heine 37 Conclusion: Heine and His Spanish American Translators at the Outset of Modernization 42 Works Cited 44 Further Readings 47

3 Translation and Transculturation: José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, César Vallejo 48 Esther Allen Introduction 48 A Tentative Genealogy 49 Jackson, Martí, Vallejo 53 Macrotexts 56 Conclusion: Transculturation 61 Works Cited 63 Further Readings 64

4 José María Arguedas: Decolonizing Translation 65 Fanny Arango-Keeth Introduction 65 Methodological Approach 71 Corpus 72 Conclusion 80 Works Cited 82 Further Readings 83

5 The Woven Threads of L ­ iterary Translation in the Greater Caribbean 84 Mónica María del Valle Idárraga Introduction: A Colonial Legacy Embodied by Language 84 Beyond Colonial Monolingualism, a Literature Born in Translation 86 Beyond National Language 88 The Voices of Creole and Vernacular Languages Are Heard 89 The Publishing Market and the Search for Circum-Caribbean Connections 95 Conclusion 99 Works Cited 99 Further Readings 101

6 Translation and A ­ nthropophagy from the Library of H ­ aroldo de Campos 102 Max Hidalgo Nácher Introduction: The Library of Haroldo de Campos as a Space for Criticism and Creation 102 vi

Contents

The Translation Space and the Worlds of the Library 103 Networks, Voyages, Textual Galaxies 106 Toward a Poetics of Translation 109 Transcreation and Transculturation: Uses of the Library 112 Translation as a Parodic Space 114 Conclusion 115 Works Cited 115 Further Readings 116

7 Resisting Translation: Spanglish and Multilingual Writing in the Americas 118 Sarah Booker Introduction 118 Spanglish and Hybrid Languages 120 Hybridity in Action 124 The (Un)translatability of Spanglish 131 Conclusion 135 Works Cited 136 Further Readings 137

8 Approaching Literary Self-­Translation in the United States and Latin America 138 Marlene Hansen Esplin Introduction 138 Self-Writing 142 Intralingual Translation 145 Interlingual Translation 147 Conclusion 150 Works Cited 152 Further Readings 153 PART II

In & Out of Latin America: Reception of Translated Literature 155 9 José Salas Subirat and the First Ulysses in Spanish 157 Lucas Petersen Introduction 157 A Young Man from the Outskirts 158 The Path to Ulysses 159 An Adventurous Publisher 162 The (Hypothetical) Story of a Translation 165 vii

Contents

Critics and Interrupted Revisions 168 The “Problem of Language” 170 Conclusion: Crossed Tensions 174 Works Cited 175 Further Readings 176

10 Jorge Luis Borges’s Theory and Practice of Translation 177 Efraín Kristal Introduction 177 Translation as a Creative Art 178 Borges the Translator 179 A Case Study: Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” 183 Commonalities and Differences 185 From Parody to Fantastic Literature 188 Conclusion: “August 25, 1983” 190 Works Cited 191 Further Readings 192

11 The Boom of the Latin American Novel in French Translation 193 Gersende Camenen Introduction 193 Before the Boom 195 The 1960s: A New World and New Actors in Publishing 197 The Boom in the Cadre vert Collection of Le Seuil 198 Two Translators of the Boom: Albert Bensoussan and Laure Bataillon 200 The Boom in the French Press 205 Conclusion 207 Works Cited 208 Further Readings 210

12 Chinese Translation of Latin American Literature (1950–1999) 211 Teng Wei Introduction 211 Beginnings: A Literature of Resistance 212 Highly Politicized Translation (1950–1970) 213 Depoliticized Translation (1980s) 215 Translation Entering the Global Market (1990s) 218 Conclusion 219 Works Cited 220 Further Readings 221

viii

Contents

13 Octavio Paz, Thinker of Translation: Versioning Matsuo Bashō and Fernando Pessoa 222 Christian Elguera and Daisy Saravia Introduction 222 Sendas de Oku Translated by Paz: Diffusing the Haiku in Latin America 224 Octavio Paz in a Labyrinth of Ideologies and Norms: Modernizing Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry 230 Conclusion 238 Works Cited 238 Further Readings 240

14 “Tequio literario”: Translating Indigenous Literature as Communal Labor 241 Paul M. Worley and Ellen Jones Introduction 241 From Individual Craft to “Tequio Literario” 242 Self-Translation and Translingualism in Indigenous Texts 244 The Politics of Translating into English 249 Literary Translation as “Tequio Literario” 251 By the Community, For the Community 251 Respect for Oral Versions of the Text 253 Translating Translingually 254 Publication in Multiple Complementary Versions 255 Reciprocal Labor 256 Conclusion 256 Works Cited 257 Further Readings 259

15 Killing Bill: Shakespeare in Latin America 260 Heather Cleary Introduction 260 The Art of Transfiguration 265 Lear, Ready for Her Close-Up 268 Into the Woods 270 Conclusion 274 Works Cited 275 Further Readings 276

ix

Contents

16 “New Female Gothic”: Latin American Fiction in the Anglophone Markets Through Translation 277 Ilse Logie Introduction: Premises and Objectives 277 “New Female Boom” 281 The Importation of the Southern Cone Gothic 284 The Making of the “Andean Gothic” 290 Tropical Ghostliness 295 Against the “Female Gothic” 298 Conclusion 301 Works Cited 304 Further Readings 306 PART III

In Circulation: Publishing & Networks of Translation

309

17 Translation and Print Culture in Latin America 311 María Constanza Guzmán Introduction 311 Print Culture and Translation 311 Translation and Print Culture in Latin America 312 The Twentieth Century: A Turning Point 314 The 1960s and 1970s: Politics and Culture 316 A Look at Publishing Houses: Translation in Fondo de Cultura Económica 317 A Look at Cultural Magazines: Translation in Revista Casa de las Américas 320 Latin American Print Culture from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century 325 Conclusion 326 Works Cited 327 Further Readings 329

18 Exile Networks in Spanish-­A merican Publishing Houses: Translation and Adaptations of Translations 330 Alejandrina Falcón Introduction 330 First Scene: Spaniards in Paris and Translations for the Americas 330 Second Scene: Challenging the French Hegemony with Hispanic-Argentine Translations 332 Third Scene: The Republican Spaniards Exiled in Argentina and the Exportation of Translations in Latin America 335 x

Contents

Fourth Scene: Latin American Translators and Translations in Spain during the Second Cold War 337 Conclusion 340 Works Cited 341 Further Readings 343

19 Manipulation in Translation: The Case of the Modern Woman and the Flirt in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Magazines 344 Martín Gaspar Introduction 344 Flirting in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Magazines: Local Texts and Tips 345 Flirting in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Magazines: Translations 348 Manipulating Provins: From the Parisian Belle Époque to Buenos Aires in the 1920s 349 Manipulating Matilde Serao: Marriage, Passione, and Flirt 352 Conclusion 357 Works Cited 359 Further Readings 361

20 A Laboratory of Texts: The Multilingual Translation Legacies of Haroldo de Campos 362 Isabel C. Gómez Introduction 362 Political Poetry in Translation: pura or para? 364 Cartonera as Planetary Literature and the Uncountable Languages of Latin America 367 Transcreating Haroldo’s gostoso portunhol 370 Landless Landlocked Labor Movements 374 Translating a Transcreation: Mayakovsky and Haroldo’s Laboratory of Texts 377 Conclusion 380 Works Cited 381 Further Readings 382

21 The Deep-Sea Diver and the Sculptor: The Translations of José Bento Monteiro Lobato, Brazilian Publisher, Translator, and Children’s Author 383 John Milton and Taís Diniz Martins Introduction 383 Lobato on Translation 385 Translations for Children 386

xi

Contents

Lobato’s Adaptations for Children 388 Peter Pan (1930) 388 Prison and Peter Pan Burned and Banned 389 Translations in Partnership 390 Conclusion: The Golden Age of Translations in Brazil 391 Works Cited 393 Further Readings 394

22 Author, Reader, Editor, and Translator in the Digital Age: Changing Norms of Production and Reception 395 Elizabeth Lowe Introduction 395 Questions for the Future of Translation 395 The New Publishing Environment 397 COVID-19 and its Impact on Contemporary Brazilian Literature 399 Three Contemporary Brazilian Writers of the Digital Age 399 J.P. Cuenca 400 Noemi Jaffe 404 Paulo Dutra 406 Conclusion 409 Works Cited 409 Further Readings 410

Index 411

xii

Acknowledgments

As the editors of The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation, we are grateful for a network of colleagues and students who helped throughout the process of putting this book together. A special thank you goes to our assistant editors Fiona Maloney-McCrystle and Michelle Mirabella, who were instrumental in this project. Thank you as well to Juan Décima, Christopher Lord, Fiona Maloney-McCrystle, Michelle Mirabella, Will Morningstar, and Eric Winter, who have translated chapters for this volume. We also wish to thank the Routledge team, especially Louisa Semlyen, Eleni Steck, and Talitha Duncan-Todd, for their trust in our vision, our peer reviewers for their invaluable insight, and Lake Forest College and Patrick Hersant’s research team “Multilinguisme, traduction, création” at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM) for their support. Thank you to our contributors for being a part of this handbook.

xiii

Contributors

Esther Allen received the 2017 National Translation Award for her translation of A ­ ntonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel Zama. Her translation of the two subsequent works in Di ­Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation was supported by a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship; the second work in the trilogy, The Silentiary, came out in 2022. Co-founder of the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, she is a professor at City University of New York. In 2006, the French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. Her essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, and other publications. She is currently writing a biography of José Martí. Fanny Arango-Keeth  is a full professor of Spanish, Spanish Translation, and Latin ­A merican Studies at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of academic interest that lie within the field of translation include corpora-based translation instruction, literary translation, postcolonial translation studies, translation assessment, and translation and intercultural literacy. Sarah Booker  received her PhD in Hispanic Literature from UNC Chapel Hill and is currently an instructor of Spanish at the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Morganton, NC. She is also a literary translator and has worked with Cristina Rivera Garza and Mónica Ojeda, among others. Delfina Cabrera is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Portugiesisch-Brasilianische Institut of the Universität zu Köln. She is an active literary translator and the author of Las lenguas vivas. Zonas de exilio y traducción en Manuel Puig. Gersende Camenen  is an Assistant Professor at the Université Gustave-Eiffel. She has published Roberto Arlt, écrire au temps de l’image (PUR, 2012) and coedited Scènes de la traduction France-Argentine (Editions rue d’Ulm, 2020) with Roland Béhar and La literatura latinoamericana en versión francesa (De Gruyter, 2021) with Gustavo Guerrero. She is also a translator. Heather Cleary’s  monograph, The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Bloomsbury 2021), explores the potential of translation narratives to challenge held notions of originality and intellectual property. Her translations of prose and poetry have been supported or recognized by the National Book Foundation, PEN America, and the Best Translated Book Award, among others; she is a founding member of the translation collective Cedilla & Co. and was a founding editor of the digital, bilingual Buenos Aires xiv

Contributors

Review. She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Juan Décima (translator) is a freelance bilingual translator based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His translations in the fields of Sociology, Architecture, Literary Studies, and Science have been published by universities and publishing houses in the United States and ­A rgentina, such as Harvard University, The Monacelli Press, Current Opinion in Ophthalmology, Editores Siglo XXI Argentina, Ediciones Infinito, Revista PLOT, and Revista Summa+. For this volume, he translated Alejandrina Falcón’s chapter “Exile Networks in Spanish-­A merican Publishing Houses: Translation and Adaptations of Translations.” Mónica María del Valle Idárraga is a translator, founder of the publishing project Lasirén, and tenured professor in the Department of Education Sciences at the Universidad de La Salle in Bogotá. A former Fulbright scholar, her recent translations include the novel Loas (The Loneliness of Angels by Myriam J.A. Chancy), in collaboration with María Luisa Valencia Duarte (Lasirén, 2020). Christian Elguera  is a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Mary’s University of San Antonio. He has a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Languages and Literatures from The University of Texas at Austin (2020). At this institution, he also completed a Graduate Portfolio in Native American and Indigenous Studies. As part of his research on colonialism in Latin America, he edited a volume of three novels by Julián M. del Portillo (Ediciones MYL, 2021), a nineteenth-century Peruvian writer who supported the racial whitening and Europeanization of Lima. Currently, Dr. Elguera is Indigenous Literature Correspondent for the journal Latin American Literature Today. In 2020, his tale “El extraño caso del Señor Panizza” received an honorable mention for the XXI Short Story Biennial Copé Award. Furthermore, his poem “Biografía mercurial de Alberto Caeiro” was a finalist in the “Juana Goergen” Poetry Award (2022), organized by DePaul University and the literary magazine Contratiempo. He also teaches classes in the Graduate Program of Literature at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, Peru). The University of South Florida awarded him with the Latin American Science Fiction Research Travel Grant to start his translation of the novel O Presidente Negro ou O Choque das Raças in fall 2022. Written by the Brazilian author José Monteiro Lobato in 1926, this text has not been translated from Portuguese to English until now. Juan Antonio Ennis is a Professor of Spanish Philology and Linguistics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and a member of Argentina’s Research Council (CONICET). He was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Freiburg and Halle-Wittenberg, an External Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and a Georg-Forster Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His main research interests are language ideologies, glotopolitics, and the history of language sciences. Marlene Hansen Esplin is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University. Her main research interests are self-translation and problems of translation or rewriting between US and Latin American literatures. Recent projects include an article that discusses intersections between translation and ethnography in English translations of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación and a review essay on recent trends in translation studies for the I­ CLA’s Literary Research. Future projects include a monograph on self-translation in the United States xv

Contributors

and Latin America and a coedited book, Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice. Alejandrina Falcón has a PhD in Literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is a Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), located at the Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani” (CONICET/UBA). Along with Patricia Willson, she is the director of the Specialization Degree in Literary Translation (CETRALIT) in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UBA). She teaches a history seminar on translation within the Argentine publishing industry in CETRALIT; she has also offered seminars on Translation Studies in several master’s programs, as well as in undergraduate courses for Literature students within the Philosophy and Literature Department (UBA). Martín Gaspar  is an Associate Professor at Bryn Mawr College. His research engages Latin American intellectual history since the nineteenth century, modern Latin American fiction and contemporary film, translation studies, visibility in literature and the media, and narrative theory. He is the author of La condición traductora. Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la ficción latinoamericana (Viterbo, 2014, second edition 2020). His articles on film, literature, and translation studies have appeared in journals such as Variaciones Borges, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Lusophone Studies, and Latin American Literary Review, among others. Isabel C. Gómez is an Associate Professor in Latin American & Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her articles on Latin American translation studies can be found in the Journal of World Literature, Hispanic Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Transfer, Mutatis mutandis, and Translation Review. Recipient of a 2019 ACLS Fellowship and the 2022 Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Prize from the ACLA, her book Cannibal Translation is forthcoming in Spring 2023 with the FlashPoints Series at Northwestern University Press. As president of the ICLA Translation Committee, she is leading an ongoing research project on “Translating Home.” María Constanza Guzmán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she teaches in the graduate programs in Translation Studies and Humanities. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York, an MA in Translation from Kent State University, and a BA in Languages from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her publications include translations, articles, and books. She translated (with J. Price) the novel Heidegger’s Shadow, coedited volumes such as Negotiating Linguistic Plurality: Translation and Multilingualism in Canada and Beyond (with S. Tahir G., McGill-Queens UP, 2022), and guest-edited issues such as Translation and/in Periodical Publications for TIS ( John Benjamins, 2019). She is the author of Gregory Rabassa’s Latin American Literature (Bucknell UP, 2011) and Mapping Spaces of Translation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Print Culture (Routledge, 2020). Ellen Jones has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London. Her monograph Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her literary translations from Spanish include Iván de la Nuez’s Cubanthropy (2023), Ave Barrera’s The Forgery (2022, co-translated with Robin Myers), Bruno Lloret’s Nancy (2020), and Rodrigo Fuentes’s Trout, Belly Up (2019). xvi

Contributors

Denise Kripper is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College (USA) and the Translation Editor at Latin American Literature Today. She is an active literary translator and the author of Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature. Efraín Kristal is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA where he teaches Latin American literature in comparative contexts and translation studies. Kristal is editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (2005). His most recent books are Tentación de la palabra. Arte literario y convicción política en las novelas de Mario Vargas Llosa (2018) and Querencias. Guerra, traducción y filosofía en Jorge Luis Borges (2022), both published by the Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica. Ilse Logie is a Professor of Latin American Studies at Ghent University. Her research deals with the representation of different types of violence within contemporary Latin American fiction (especially in Argentina and Chile) and with translation issues. Christopher Lord (translator) has lived in ten countries so far and so far speaks seven languages. A writer of philosophical, dramatic, musical, and other works, he is grateful to have found the compromise with capitalism of translating for a living, although like many other people he finds that his means of support is menaced by the encroachments of artificial intelligence, so much better suited to the needs of large corporations than the flimsy human alternative. For this volume, he translated Gersende Camenen’s chapter “French translations in Latin American boom novels.” Elizabeth Lowe is a faculty member in the M.S. in Translation and Interpreting program at New York University. She is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature (1982) and Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature, with co-author Earl E. Fitz (2007). She curated Review 102, “Digital Brazil: Voices of Resistance.” Lowe translates fiction from Luso-­A fro-­ Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. She received a 2021 NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, and served as Endowed Chair of Portuguese Studies at UMass Dartmouth in Spring 2022. Fiona Maloney-McCrystle (translator) is a translator, interpreter, writer, and educator. She holds an MA in Translation and Interpretation (Spanish English) from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a BA in history from Middlebury College in Vermont. She is also an alum of Middlebury’s Betty Ashbury Jones MA ’86 School of French. Fiona has translated book reviews for Latin American Literature Today, co-translated Chapter 4 of Routledge’s Languages in the Crossfire in collaboration with her MIIS classmates, Professor George Henson, and Holly Mikkelson, and translated in community settings, including for nonprofit program evaluations. Her interpreting work is largely focused on the areas of education, entrepreneurship, nonprofits, and environmental justice. Fiona’s training in history, translation, and interpretation collectively motivates her desire to give voice to overlooked narratives and perspectives. For this volume, she translated Mónica María del Valle Idárraga’s chapter “The Woven Threads of Literary Translation in the Greater Caribbean.” Taís Diniz Martins is an independent researcher on the work of Monteiro Lobato, with a special interest in his translations and adaptations. She graduated with a degree in Letters Portuguese/English from FURG – University of Rio Grande Foundation. She is a member of the REGIONEM Research Group (Unipinhal) and the Adaptation and Translation Study xvii

Contributors

Group/CNPq/USP. She has published in anthologies of short stories and poetry and has a chapter in the book To Understand Monteiro Lobato – II Jornada Monteiro Lobato, organized by John Milton, Vanete Santana-Dezmann, and Silvio Tamaso D’Onofrio, published in 2021 by Editora Oxalá, and a chapter in the book Monteiro Lobato: New Studies – III Jornada Monteiro Lobato, organized by John Milton, Vanete Santana-Dezmann, and Silvio Tamaso D’Onofrio, published in 2022 by Editora Oxalá. John Milton is a Titular Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo in Translation Studies. He helped establish the Postgraduate Program in Translation Studies and was the Program Coordinator from 2012 to 2016. His publications include Agents of Translation, John Benjamins, 2009, ed. with Paul Bandia; and Tradition, Tension and Translation in Turkey (with Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar and Saliha Paker) (2015). He has also published articles in academic journals in Brazil and in Target and The Translator, and translated poetry from Portuguese to English. Michelle Mirabella (translator) is a Spanish to English translator whose work appears in The Arkansas International, World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, Firmament, and elsewhere. A finalist in Columbia Journal’s 2022 Spring Contest in the translation category, Michelle has also published her original writing in Hopscotch Translation and co-translated Chapter 4 of Routledge’s Languages in the Crossfire in collaboration with her Middlebury Institute classmates, Professor George Henson, and Holly Mikkelson. She holds an MA in Translation and Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, an MA from NYU, and a BA from Carnegie Mellon University. A 2022 American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellow, she is an alumna of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre and the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. For this volume, he translated Max Hidalgo Nácher’s chapter “Transcreación y plagiotropía en Haroldo de Campos.” Will Morningstar (translator) is a freelance translator and editor from Boston. His translation work is published in ANMLY, Two Lines, Latin American Literature Today, Strange Horizons, and The Massachusetts Review. He has a master’s degree in religion and anthropology from Harvard Divinity School. For this volume, he translated Lucas Petersen’s chapter “José Salas Subirat and the First Ulysses in Spanish.” Max Hidalgo Nácher is a Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona. His principal areas of research revolve around the poetics of modernity, the writings from the Republican exile of the 1939 Spanish Civil War, and the circulation of literary theory and its uses since the second half of the twentieth century, which is why he has studied Haroldo de Campos’s work. He has published articles on Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges, Oscar Masotta, Nicolás Rosa, and José Bergamín, among others. He has conducted research while at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario (2013), the Universidade de São Paulo (2015 and 2017), Harvard University (2016), Fundação Haroldo de Campos (2018), École Normale Supérieure de París (2021), and Yale University (2022). He has also co-directed the magazine Puentes de crítica literaria y cultural alongside Fernando Larraz and Paula Simón. His essay Teoría en tránsito. Arqueología de la crítica y de la teoría literaria españolas de 1966 a la posdictadura (2022) was published by the Universidad Nacional del Litoral press, the first research volume in Los estudios literarios en Argentina y en España: institucionalización e internacionalización coordinated with Analía Gerbaudo. xviii

Contributors

Andrea Pagni is Professor Emerita of Latin American Literature and Culture at University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. She edited América Latina, espacio de traducciones (1994/5) and coedited Traductores y traducciones en la historia cultural de América Latina (2011) and Refracciones/Réfractions: Traducción y género en las literaturas románicas (2017). Escritura y traducción en América Latina. Diálogos críticos con Andrea Pagni was released in 2021. Lucas Petersen is a journalist, writer, and professor at the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (Argentina). He has published El traductor del Ulises: Salas Subirat (2016) and Santiago Rueda: Edición, vanguardia e intuición (2019). His forthcoming book—titled Malogrados—focuses on five biographical narratives of Argentine writers who died young and is currently in press. Daisy Saravia earned her master’s degree in Peruvian and Latin American Literature from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. She teaches a course on Modern Japanese Literature at the Centro de Estudios Orientales at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), and the course on Research at Universidad Tecnológica del Perú (UTP). She also collaborates with the association Tusanaje (秘从中来) and is a researcher at Red Latino (e Hispano) Americanista of Sinology Studies in Costa Rica. She has published the book Migración china y orientalismo modernista (2020). Her areas of research are Chinese immigration and Asian culture and literature. Teng Wei, PhD, is a graduate of Peking University, Prof. at South China Normal University, Director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at South China Normal University, and Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Scholar (2013–2014). Her research fields include Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, and Hispanic Literature. Eric Winter (translator)  is an American translator, lexicographer, and interpreter. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Maine at Augusta, where he completed his studies with a focus on the performance of jazz and Afro-Latin music. He currently resides in New York City and works for SpanishDict.com and as a freelance translator. For this volume, he translated Andrea Pagni’s chapter “Translating Heine in Latin America.” Paul M. Worley is a Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Appalachian State University. Co-written with Rita M. Palacios, his most recent book, Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (2019), was given an honorable mention for Best Book in the Humanities by LASA’s Mexico Section.

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Delineating a Latin American ­Approach to Literary Translation Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper

Introduction The turn of the millennium has witnessed a growing interest in translation on a global scale. The notion—which in the past was limited to the passage of a text from one language to another—has now expanded to a model of cultural exchanges and the constitution of alterities. The rapid proliferation of scholarly events devoted to the subject of translation has been paralleled by an increasing number of publications and academic courses that illustrate the prominence given to both its practice and theorizing. At a time in which hegemonic Western ideals have been consistently challenged by postcolonial critique as well as by gender, racial, and environmental lenses, among others, the issues surrounding translation become crucial for recognizing and envisaging alternative communal forms in accordance with the complexity of contemporary cultural configurations. Primarily about difference, translation is inseparable from reflections on how this difference is articulated. Literature, as the art of language, is a prolific space for studying the singularities of the diverse contexts of textual production as well as the power-inflected relationships between peoples, languages, and territories. It is not by chance, then, that questions concerning the development of cultural identities lie at the heart of the debates on translation, which this book addresses from a specific locus of enunciation: Latin America. In the history of Latin America’s literary tradition, as the chapters of this handbook show, translation has been fundamental and foundational; part and parcel of the creative writing processes of key intellectual figures who put forth their own critical engagements and conceptualizations of the translator’s task. Nevertheless, Latin America, as a disputed territory and a problematized identity, still holds a peripheral place in Translation Studies, a field predominantly anchored in Anglophone literatures and theories. This can be rapidly verified by observing that, among the vast number of Translation Studies publications since the creation of the discipline in its own right in the late 1970s, to date there are a few that reflect from a viewpoint of Latin America’s historical complexities and traditions, making comprehensive and systematic engagement with this type of transregional translation still elusive. This volume aims to show the ways in which translation both shaped and questioned a Latin American literary imaginary in dialogue with its colonial and postcolonial histories,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-1

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Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper

its identity formation, and its circulation across borders, offering a significant contribution to the diversifying of the Translation Studies field at large. As academics devoted to exploring the questions raised by translation in our times, and also as former colleagues who studied and trained professionally as literary translators in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s, our commitment to editing this handbook stems from our belief that Latin American literary translation deserves recognition as a distinctive, productive, and exciting object of study. During our formative years as translators and translation scholars, it became evident to us that there was a need to encourage engagement with multiple, diverse reflections and viewpoints that, due to their own situated geopolitical heritage, have not received the attention they deserve in other latitudes. For anyone interested in Latin America as a major cultural space of inquiry, it is clear that its ethos cannot be decoupled from the experience of translation, and hence we are dedicated to the teaching, production, and dissemination of studies that link it to the literatures of the continent. Since translation began to interest researchers and theorists of culture and literature some decades ago, a set of theoretical frameworks and methodologies have been developed and systematized, turning Translation Studies into an established and productive field. However, there is still much to be done in this discipline regarding the articulation of different contexts of knowledge production and alternative epistemologies. To begin accounting for its diverse potential as a field of study, the subsequent chapters that make up this volume were written by renowned and emerging scholars based both in Latin America and elsewhere around the globe, all experts in the field of Translation Studies and specialized in Latin American literature. For some of these scholars, this marks the first time that their work has appeared in English, after having published mostly in other languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Chinese, and it is our hope that their contributions will expand the international research network on literary translation by opening up new exchanges with the canon of Anglophone Translation Studies. Additionally, we intend to increase the visibility of colleagues whose works, due to the enduring asymmetry of translation to and from English, have not yet received due recognition. Accordingly, and given the ubiquity of translation in the history of Latin American literature, it becomes paramount for translation scholars to engage critically with its situated specificities. This need becomes even more pressing when faced with the extensive bibliography that remains largely inaccessible for English-speaking readers. Nearly all the contributions in this handbook provide examples and close readings of primary and secondary sources in languages other than English. In these cases, quotes and references appear in their original language followed by a bracketed translation into English by the author of the chapter when an official translation has not yet been published. The inclusion of these bracketed intromissions is meant to both make visible the need for further translations of literary and critical texts and to inscribe the process of translation on the page. At the intersections of translation and Latin American literature, it is noticeable that the role of translation in the emergence of national literatures and cultures is transversal to most studies on the subject. As Patricia Willson points out in her pioneering work, La Constelación del Sur. Traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX (2004), translation contributed to the development of national writing models through the incorporation and revision of foreign modes of representation and narrative materials. In this regard, while Willson’s book focuses on Argentine literature, its solid theoretical and methodological approach laid a novel foundation for framing the understanding of literary translation in other Latin American national contexts. In each historical period, local debates about what and how to translate gradually gave shape to literatures in tension with the canon and the languages of the former imperial centers. Hence, the role translation played in the creation of a Latin American 2

Delineating a Latin American A ­ pproach to Literary Translation

identity discourse is consistent with the region’s colonization, one of the main effects of which was the imposition of monolingualism along with the drastic reduction of the continent’s linguistic diversity. This is why, far from promoting an uncritical or complacent reading of the idea of Latin America derived from colonialism and neocolonialism, this volume addresses, through the multifocal perspective offered by translation, the cultural and political conundrum that “Latin America” has raised and continues to raise today. The study of translation within identity formation processes is thoroughly examined by Edwin Gentzler in Translation and Identity in the Americas (2008), which not only considers Hispanic America, but also Brazil, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States. Gabriela Adamo also adopts this transnational perspective in the edited volume La traducción literaria en América Latina (2012), as does Nayelli Castro Ramírez in Traducción, identidad y nacionalismo en Latinoamérica (2013), which bring together a series of heterogeneous contributions on the state of the practice of translation in several Latin American countries. Driven by a similar encompassing and panoramic impulse, Francisco Lafarga and Luis Pegenaute compiled the two volumes Aspectos de la traducción en Hispanoamérica: autores, traducciones y traductores and Lengua, cultura y política en la historia de la traducción en Hispanoamérica, both published in 2012. Additionally, La mediación lingüístico-cultural en tiempos de guerra: cruce de miradas desde España y América (2012), edited by Gertrudis Payàs and José Manuel Zavala, is concerned with translation as a linguistic-cultural mediation in contexts of conflict, including consideration of Indigenous languages in the colonial period. Along these historical lines, El tabaco que fumaba Plinio. Escenas de la traducción en España y América: relatos, leyes y reflexiones sobre los otros (1998), the outstanding volume edited by Nora Catelli and Marietta Gargatagli, collects and comments on overlooked historical and literary primary sources that deal with translation. Striving to show the implicit political and ideological aspects of translation practices that reveal a culture’s approach to otherness, their book presents a selection of heterogeneous materials that range from historical texts, poems, essays, translator’s notes, memoirs, dictionaries, and grammars to manifestos, laws, and Inquisition verdicts. Alongside the aforementioned works that attempt to render a continental panorama of Latin American translation, other studies have concentrated on translators and their translations as cultural agents within specific historical, geopolitical, and interlinguistic contexts. Some examples of this approach are Traducción como cultura (1997), edited by Lisa Bradford, which features articles that explore the intricate relationships between cultural systems; Traductores y traducciones en la historia cultural de América Latina (2011), edited by Andrea Pagni, Gertrudis Payàs, and Patricia Willson, which gives an overview of the cultural functions of translations in a Latin American setting; De oficio, traductor. Panorama de la traducción literaria en México (2010), by Marianela Santoveña, Lucrecia Orensanz, Miguel Ángel Leal Nodal, and Juan Carlos Gordillo, focused on the experience of Mexican literary translators; and Traducir el Brasil. Una antropología de la circulación internacional de las ideas (2003), in which Gustavo Sorá researches the translations of Brazilian writers into Spanish carried out in Argentina, concentrating on the different institutional, market, and political mediations that influence translation processes and how this network collaborates in the development of binational cultural relations. Much has also been written about the figures of prominent Latin American writertranslators of the twentieth century, resulting in a rich bibliography that includes works such as the aforementioned book by Patricia Willson, La Constelación del Sur, devoted to the analysis of literary translations by Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges, and José Bianco; Los puentes de la traducción. Octavio Paz y la poesía francesa (2004) by Fabienne Bradu; and Borges y la traducción (2005) by Sergio Waisman; along with works by some of our contributors such as Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (2002) by Efraín Kristal, Las lenguas vivas. Zonas de exilio 3

Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper

y traducción en Manuel Puig (2016) by Delfina Cabrera, and El traductor del Ulises (2016), Lucas Petersen’s biography of José Salas Subirat, the eccentric first translator of Joyce’s Ulysses into Spanish. In recent years, Brazilian scholar Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira spearheaded a new line of research concerning the representation of translators and the act of translation in literature, which proved very fruitful for the study of contemporary Latin American narrative. Antonio Lavieri and Rosemary Arrojo both include Latin American case studies in their respective monographs Translatio in fabula. La letteratura come pratica teorica del tradurre (2007) and Fictional Translators: Rethinking Translation Through Literature (2017). This “fictional turn” of Translation Studies has been considerably expanded with books by contributors in this volume, as in the case of Martín Gaspar’s La condición traductora (2014), Heather Cleary’s The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction (2021), and Denise Kripper’s Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature (2023), all focused on the figure of fictional translators. Other works have addressed the translation of Latin American literature into other languages, mainly English and French, whose publishing markets helped shape the Latin American boom of the mid-twentieth century. Jeremy Munday’s Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English (2008) and Scènes de la traduction France-Argentine, edited by Roland Béhar and Gersende Camenen (2020), are two fine examples of this area of research. In turn, María Constanza Guzmán’s monograph Gregory Rabassa’s Latin American Literature: A Translator’s Visible Legacy (2011) focuses on a single translator and is part of a corpus that highlights translators’ specific contributions. For example, the books The Subversive Scribe (1991) and If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents (2005) by influential translators Suzanne Jill Levine and Gregory Rabassa, respectively, have become essential first-person accounts of their experiences translating Latin American texts. Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature (2002), edited by Marcy E. Schwartz and Daniel Balderston, presents a compilation of essays by Latin American translators and writers offering valuable personal insights into the world of literary translation, and the more recent translation memoir essays Música prosaica (2014) by Marcelo Cohen and Se vive y se traduce (2022) by Laura Wittner continue expanding translators’ voices, visibilizing their task from a Latin American perspective. In addition to the books listed in this brief and by no means exhaustive survey, there is also a wealth of scholars working at the intersection of translation and Latin American literature whose notable research is spread throughout journal articles, essays, and individual contributions in edited volumes and readers. The authors of the chapters collected in this handbook have shaped—and continue to shape—the understanding of translation in Latin America, drawing from and dialoguing with these and other texts.

Content Overview Through a framework that links translation to the cultural, political, economic, and social contexts in the area and beyond, the Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation is divided into three sections: In Translation: Linguistic & Cultural Diversity Within the Continent; In & Out of Latin America: Reception of Translated Literature; and In Circulation: Publishing & Networks of Translation. These groupings respond to a necessary organizational principle to guide a reading of the handbook and were conceived around three elementary aspects of translation—its production, reception, and circulation—that also allow for a much deeper engagement with the topic at large (and its subsequent diverse thematic, historical, theoretical, and pedagogical approaches) woven through the connections and dialogues established by the chapters across sections. 4

Delineating a Latin American A ­ pproach to Literary Translation

Following a loose chronological order, the first section—In Translation: Linguistic & Cultural Diversity Within the Continent—aims to illustrate the role of translation in the shaping of a Latin American ethos from the nineteenth-century independence movements, when translation became fundamental for the development of a national identity, to the present day, when translation serves to navigate and negotiate the diverse linguistic communities and cultural makings of the continent. Translation thus becomes the privileged standpoint from which to critically address Latin America’s transnational character and lay bare the long-lasting impact of its translational foundations. Juan Antonio Ennis and Andrea Pagni open the volume with chapters that explore the emergence of new states, a moment with little precedent in history, and the role translation played in their emancipation from European colonial powers and standards. In “Philology and Translation on the Way to a New World: Andrés Bello, Translator,” Ennis focuses on a key historical protagonist in the independence and national organization movements for Venezuela, Chile, and Latin America at large. By addressing Bello’s intellectual and philological undertakings in London’s British Library, Ennis uncovers how his praxis of translation gave way to his influential political career. Pagni provides productive strategies for assessing translations in “From Romanticism to Modernism: Translating Heine in Spanish America,” focusing on the transforming aesthetics and cultural potentialities of translation for the enrichment of the Spanish language and literature in the Americas. Taking up the case study of Heinrich Heine, Pagni demonstrates how Modernist translators appropriated German Romantic poetry by finding historical analogies relevant to their respective local contexts at the turn of the century. Next, Esther Allen brings the figure of José Martí into the conversation in “Translation & Transculturation: José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, César Vallejo.” Tracing a network of creative adaptations, reappropriations, and other effects of transculturation, Allen weaves the Cuban revolutionary activist’s translational writing with the works of American poet Helen Hunt Jackson and Peruvian poet César Vallejo around issues of indigeneity germane to the continent’s self-definition. Through these macrotextual connections, Allen homes in on the meaning of literary translation by questioning the stability of originals and proposes new readings of Martí’s poetry in translation through the lens of global indigeneity. Continuing with translation as a political act of representation, Fanny Arango-Keeth takes up a Peruvian writer’s translation activism in her chapter “José María Arguedas: Decolonizing Translation.” Focusing on the need to defy a homogeneous cultural and linguistic identity rooted in Spanish as the dominant form of linguistic expression, Arango-Keeth shows how Arguedas challenged the Peruvian hegemonic cultural and literary paradigm of the early twentieth century as he recognized the significant contribution of ancestral languages in the country, particularly those of Quechua, through a translation praxis that resisted the acculturation of native texts. Bringing this cultural and linguistic diversity to the fore, Mónica María del Valle Idárraga’s contribution to this volume centers on the Greater Caribbean. In “The Woven Threads of Literary Translation in the Greater Caribbean,” del Valle Idárraga studies the conglomeration of translational processes—including the presence of a range of creole and Amerindian languages—that characterizes the area beyond a geographical designation that runs the risk of homogenizing it behind the hegemonic languages of Spanish, English, French, or Dutch. While overall a celebratory and longitudinal piece highlighting the Greater Caribbean’s dense and complex makeup, the chapter also uncovers the need for more research contributions that engage with it in depth. Continuing to weave the threads of diversity into the conversation not only in the cultural production of the continent but also in the formation of its cultural agents, Max Hidalgo Nácher turns to Brazilian author and translator Haroldo de Campos’s consumption of foreign literature in “Translation and Anthropophagy from the Library of Haroldo 5

Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper

de Campos.” Analyzing the multilingual networks of influence enabled by the space of de Campos’s library and personal correspondence, Hidalgo Nácher offers novel insights into the cultural specificity of Brazil and, by extension, Latin America, through de Campos’s anthropophagic appropriation of difference in translation. Lastly, to end this first section, and leading into the next, Sarah Booker’s and Marlene Hansen Esplin’s respective texts address adjacent contemporary phenomena that push the boundaries of what is considered “Latin American” writing: multilingualism and self-translation. In “Resisting Translation: Spanglish and Multilingual Writing in the Americas,” Booker continues destabilizing the dominance of the Spanish language by paying particular attention to the use of Spanglish and the prevalence of other languages in contemporary novels focused on questions of gender and sexual identity negotiated in translation. Code-switching, self-translation, bilingual and multilingual writing, and cultural translation also play a key role in Esplin’s contribution, “Approaching Literary Self-Translation in the United States and Latin America.” Focusing on the case studies of Latin American and US Latino writers and self-translators, Esplin challenges notions of authorship, originality, and linguistic purity and expands this analysis to expose the material dimensions of the global literary marketplace, calling for new terms and categories for these texts that defy literary conventions and create new ones. The chapters in this first section set the translation scene theoretically, geographically, and historically. Engaging with questions of identity and alterity, they challenge the notion of Latin America as a monolithic entity, foregrounding instead the particularities of the diverse countries, regions, and communities that make up this vast and expansive continent. The national Latin American identities founded throughout the nineteenth century, when translation was considered a mechanism for importing cultural goods, were consolidated via a Latin American literary identity formed in the mid-to-late twentieth century when authors achieved international status in translation during what came to be known as the “boom” of Latin American literature. The second section—In & Out of Latin America: Reception of Translated Literature—therefore focuses on the interplay between the reception of translated literature in Latin America (continuing a topic already tackled by many chapters in the previous section) and the reception of Latin American translated literature abroad, opening up an expanded zone of linguistic, cultural, and political encounters. The chapters in this section allow for situated readings of particular texts that speak to both the historical and cultural contexts of their translation production and reception. Lucas Petersen opens this section by focusing on an unexpected translator figure in “José Salas Subirat and the First Ulysses in Spanish.” An insurance salesman with a rudimentary knowledge of English, Salas Subirat translated Joyce’s masterwork and made a significant contribution through which to read the center–periphery relationship within a linguistic space. Reconstructing Salas Subirat’s unique story and analyzing his translation approach along with the mixed reception of his work from a historical perspective, Petersen evaluates the impact of the first Spanish Ulysses within the framework of linguistic and literary debates that were taking place in Argentina and, more broadly, in Latin America and Spain. Next, Efraín Kristal takes up Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s well-known ideas on translation as recreation and explores them in his translation of Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames,” which he turned into a work of fantastic literature. In “Jorge Luis Borges’s Theory and Practice of Translation,” Kristal maps out the collaborative publishing efforts of Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, alongside the short story’s reception, through Roberto Bolaño’s reading and analysis, showcasing a network of reading in translation in Latin America. Turning to French and Chinese translations of Latin American novels, respectively, Gersende Camenen and Teng Wei shed light on translation as a cultural, political, and ideological process. Assessing new collections 6

Delineating a Latin American A ­ pproach to Literary Translation

of foreign literature that emerged around the late 1960s and the early 1970s, in “The Boom of the Latin American Novel in French Translation,” Camenen puts forth an aesthetic reading of Latin American literature that signified a renewal for French critics and readers and that showcased the creative collaborations that emerged between authors and translators at the time. Moreover, in “Chinese Translation of Latin American Literature (1950–1999),” Teng provides a historical overview of some of the major Latin American publications in translation in China during the second-half of the twentieth century and their impact in Chinese social and political spheres. Next, Christian Elguera and Daisy Saravia focus on the influence of Japanese and Portuguese literature in the writing of one of Mexico’s foremost intellectuals in “Octavio Paz, Thinker of Translation: Versioning Matsuo Bashō and Fernando Pessoa.” They propose that, in translating these writers (one an author of haikus and the other an unfamiliar poet for Hispanic readers at the time), Paz advocated for circulating “other” or “exotic” systems of knowledge in Latin America’s literary fields. Next, Paul Worley and Ellen Jones challenge literary studies often centered on national literatures (that are assumed to be monolingual, monoscriptural, and reflective of a national culture) by turning their attention to the English literary translation of Indigenous texts from Mexico and Central America in “‘Tequio Literario’: Translating Indigenous Literature as Communal Labor.” Worley and Jones draw on original interviews with contemporary literary translators to argue for the communal nature of (re-)writing as a response to the ethical and political complexities of translating from an oppressed language into a colonial lingua franca. Tying into the next section, Heather Cleary’s and Ilse Logie’s chapters address the importation of William Shakespeare to Latin America and the exportation of twenty-first century Spanish-language Latin American fiction to Anglophone global markets, respectively. In “Killing Bill: Shakespeare in Latin America,” Cleary delves into various translational cultural projects that imbued the British dramaturg’s plays with regional sensibilities, upending conservative notions of fidelity, exploring the limits of linguistic exchange, and also challenging notions of textual proprietorship and authoritative interpretations. Meanwhile, Logie addresses the material conditions of literary circulation and its respective publishing and translation networks in the proposal of a new hybrid literary configuration in “‘New Female Gothic’: Latin American Fiction in the Anglophone Markets Through Translation.” Presenting translators as influential cultural brokers, Logie also acknowledges the fundamental shifts that have taken place in the international book industry and the literary practice of translation (its production, circulation, and reception) that inform and often govern the marketplace. The chapters in this second section ultimately show that the issues that surround translation are no longer limited to exchanges between two national cultures but respond to multifaceted global networks. The migration movements that accompanied the circulation of books in translation both locally and globally facilitated a rethinking of national identities as well as a renewal of literary traditions that gave way to the rise and development of various editorial endeavors on both sides of the Atlantic. The third and final section—In Circulation: Publishing & Networks of Translation—considers the context of presses, literary magazines and periodicals, library collections, and other publishing projects that made possible the circulation of translation and its extended cultural impact. Essential for this section is María Constanza Guzmán’s opening contribution that maps out the concept of “print culture,” linked to the materiality of texts, the modes of circulation of translated narratives, and the forms of sociability of translation praxis. In “Translation and Print Culture in Latin America,” Guzmán spotlights twentieth-century Latin America’s growing publishing industry by focusing on books and cultural magazines that were a key part of the intellectual development and strategic dialogue of authors within and beyond national borders, such as Mexico’s publishing house Fondo de 7

Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper

Cultura Económica and Cuban cultural magazine Revista Casa de las Américas. Next, Alejandrina Falcón homes in on the case of Argentina in “Exile Networks in Spanish-American Publishing Houses: Translation and Adaptations of Translations.” Exploring four translation scenes within the Argentine publishing industry of the twentieth century, Falcón takes up issues of migration and publishing practices (such as transference of copyrights, plagiarism, and joint editions) in the circulation of translations between Spain and Latin America. Turning to popular magazines in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, Martín Gaspar then engages with translators’ decision-making. In “Manipulation in Translation: The Case of the Modern Woman and the Flirt in Early Twentieth Century Latin American Magazines,” Gaspar shows how texts for a mainstream female audience likely circulated in translation at odds with their original intended purpose, manipulating readers through certain conservative values. With a focus on intra-Latin American translation and collective publishing, Isabel C. Gómez explores a cartonera volume in “A Laboratory of Texts: The Multilingual Translation Legacies of Haroldo de Campos.” Proposing a cannibalistic approach to translation, and dialoguing with issues of multilingualism and displacement previously addressed by other chapters, Gómez explores the performance of de Campos’s politically engaged poetry in Spanish translation, making use of the author’s translation theories such as “transcreation” within a culturally and linguistically diverse sphere of writing and circulation in Latin America. Continuing on with Brazilian case studies, the last two chapters in this section, by John Milton and Taís Diniz, and Elizabeth Lowe, respectively, exemplify in different ways the many as-of-yet unexplored research avenues at the intersection of Latin American literature and Translation Studies. In “The Deep-Sea Diver and the Sculptor: The Translations of José Bento Monteiro Lobato, Brazilian Publisher, Translator, and Children’s Author,” Milton and Diniz revisit the figure of a major Brazilian publisher surprisingly not well known outside Brazil today. In this chapter, the authors offer an overview of Monteiro Lobato’s sphere of influence in the Golden Age of Translation in Brazil and emphasize the importance of collections (of translations and adaptations of children’s books especially, in Monteiro Lobato’s case) from publishing houses. Lastly, Lowe takes us into the twentieth-first century in “Author, Reader, Editor, and Translator in the Digital Age: Changing Norms of Production and Reception.” Circulation via new media and online platforms has inevitably changed the rules of the publishing game—and of translation strategies—and will continue to do so. Zooming in on the case of three Brazilian authors, Lowe analyzes both the opportunities and challenges for literary translators bringing their authors’ works into English in the digital space. Readers will be quick to notice overlapping themes and approaches emerging from the various contributions and dialogues that comprise this book and which ultimately reflect the fundamental role of translation for and in Latin American literature as a whole. Still, through the diverse representations of translation included here, one of the primary goals of this book is precisely to challenge and expand the meaning of “Latin American.” Beyond this volume’s table of contents, readers can set aside the proposed chapter order in favor of following their specific research needs, intellectual inquiries, or pedagogical questions. Interdisciplinary themes and theoretical trends can emerge, varying geographical regions of interest be delineated, historical surveys be traced, translation strategies and approaches be assessed, and various cultural and linguistic as well as political and cultural impacts be foregrounded, among other readings invited by the different paths to be taken while navigating the handbook. Latin American Literary Translation Studies focuses on the ways in which translation has collaborated in shaping not only the Latin American literary field but also a singular literary aesthetic founded on the complex relationship with its colonial and postcolonial histories. This volume strives to elevate the polyvocal nature of the Latin American 8

Delineating a Latin American A ­ pproach to Literary Translation

sphere and to highlight the collective efforts of the task of translating, questioning conventional norms of fidelity and servility that have been defied in the practice of translation in the region, and ultimately challenging a single defining identity in favor of multiple, connected, and entangled viewpoints.

Pedagogical Applications Because of its broader impact on contemporary debates on culture, language, and the relationships between the global and the local, and due to its scope and purpose, this volume lends itself well to being used in educational settings. To facilitate classroom application and research inquiries, chapters include a list of suggested further readings. Established translation bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs around the world will find this handbook relevant and useful, providing both students and instructors with conceptual frameworks to comprehend the relevance of translation in the study of literature and vice versa. Moreover, the global acknowledgment and rise of multilingual populations and the subsequent emergence of translation programs and growing offerings of translation courses make for an especially productive context. By the same token, it has become common practice among language departments to include translation literacy materials in their programs and to regularly offer elective classes in and on translation. Course instructors and university libraries will find this handbook to be a critical text well-suited to syllabi for Spanish, Portuguese, and translation courses, and an important contribution to their contemporary Latin American and Translation Studies collections, of interest for practitioners, researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students alike. Benefiting from a long tradition of translation scholarship, instruction, and professionalization in Latin America, the contents of this book will have an impact on translation pedagogy, providing new tools for the training of future translators and scholars of translation. In addition, beyond Translation Studies, we expect this book to also contribute to the reshaping of the field of Latin American literatures and cultures, broadening its scope to include an understanding of translation both domestically and within intercultural contexts. It is our hope that the Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation will function as a reference book in the field of Latin American Translation Studies by providing established and new insights into this subject area, therefore making an impact on the development of the practice and theorization of translation itself.

Further Reflections One of the main goals of the handbook is to diversify and complexify Translation Studies by highlighting the overlooked contributions of Latin American literature and scholarship in ongoing discussions in the field. Chapters seek to broaden the geopolitical, sociocultural, and historical scope of the field by including different perspectives so that it becomes more transdisciplinary and transnational. By presenting original critical contributions, we seek to reconfigure the peripheral theoretical place that Latin America has been granted and largely occupied in the discipline of Translation Studies. As such, this book aims to be an introductory volume. It does not pretend to—and cannot—be exhaustive. Many important, pressing topics were left out for a variety of reasons and still need to be addressed. It is our hope that the growing interest in translation and engagement with Latin American literature continues to find outlets and platforms for the ongoing dialogue between these disciplines. 9

Delfina Cabrera and Denise Kripper

Works Cited Adamo, Gabriela, editor. La traducción literaria en América Latina. Paidós, 2012. Arrojo, Rosemary. Fictional Translators: Rethinking Translation Through Literature. Routledge, 2017. Balderston, Daniel and Marcy E. Schwartz, editors. Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature. SUNY, 2002. Béhar, Roland and Gersende Camenen, editors. Scènes de la traduction France-Argentine. Parution, 2020. Bradford, Lisa, editor. Traducción como cultura. Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997. Bradu, Fabienne. Los puentes de la traducción. Octavio Paz y la poesía francesa. Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 2004. Cabrera, Delfina. Las lenguas vivas. Zonas de exilio y traducción en Manuel Puig. Prometeo Libros, 2016. Castro Ramírez, Nayelli, editor. Traducción, identidad y nacionalismo en Latinoamérica. Bonilla Artiga Editores, 2013. Catelli, Nora and Marietta Gargatagli, editors. El tabaco que fumaba Plinio. Escenas de la traducción en España y América: relatos, leyes y reflexiones sobre los otros. Ediciones del Serbal, 1998. Cleary, Heather. The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Cohen, Marcelo. Música prosaica (Cuatro piezas sobre traducción). Entropía, 2014. Gaspar, Martín. La condición traductora. Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana. Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2014. Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. Routledge, 2008. Guzmán, María Constanza. Gregory Rabassa’s Latin American Literature: A Translator’s Visible Legacy. Bucknell University Press, 2011. Kripper, Denise. Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature. Routledge, 2023. Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. Munday, Jeremy. Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English. Routledge, 2008. Lafarga, Francisco and Luis Pegenaute, editors. Aspectos de la traducción en Hispanoamérica: autores, traducciones y traductores. Academia del Hispanismo, 2012. ———. Lengua, cultura y política en la historia de la traducción en Hispanoamérica. Academia del Hispanismo, 2012. Lavieri, Antonio. Translatio in fabula. La letteratura come pratica teorica del tradurre. Editori Riuniti, 2007. Levine, Suzanne Jill. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Dalkey Archive Press, [1991] 2009. Pagni, Andrea, Gertrudis Payàs, and Patricia Willson, editors. Traductores y traducciones en la historia cultural de América Latina. Dirección de Literatura, 2011. Payàs, Gertrudis and José Manuel Zavala, editors. La mediación lingüístico-cultural en tiempos de guerra: cruce de miradas desde España y América. Universidad Católica de Temuco, 2012. Petersen, Lucas. El traductor del Ulises. Salas Subirat: La desconocida historia del argentino que tradujo la obra maestra de Joyce. Sudamericana, 2016. Rabassa, Gregory. If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents. New Directions, 2005. Santoveña, Marianela Lucrecia Orensanz, Miguel Ángel Leal Nodal, and Juan Carlos Gordillo, editors. De oficio, traductor. Panorama de la traducción literaria en México. Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2010. Sorá, Gustavo. Traducir el Brasil. Una antropología de la circulación internacional de las ideas. Libros del Zorzal, 2003. Waisman, Sergio. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Bucknell University Press, 2005. Willson, Patricia. La Constelación del Sur. Traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX. Siglo veintiuno editores Argentina, 2004. Wittner, Laura. Se vive y se traduce. Entropía, 2022.

10

Part I

In Translation Linguistic & Cultural Diversity Within the Continent

1 Philology and Translation on the Way to a New World: ­Andrés Bello, Translator Juan Antonio Ennis

Introduction Early nineteenth-century revolutions in the South American territories of the Spanish Colonial Empire were triggered by a crisis in the metropolis that jeopardized the Empire’s entire structure, for the very foundations of its legitimate sovereignty were temporarily vacant or void. The Napoleonic invasion of Spain and Portugal in 1807 had set off a conflict between King Charles IV and his successor Ferdinand VII. In May, this would lead to the crowning of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as king of Spain, and the imprisonment of the Bourbon heir to the Spanish throne, the aforementioned Ferdinand VII. Throughout the Spanish colonies, there was resistance to Bonaparte through democratic forms of government in the name of the monarch: the Juntas. These Juntas would soon pave the way for various attempts at colonial emancipation from Spanish rule, led by criollos, the white creole elites from different regions in the Spanish-ruled American continent. Thus, South American emancipation unfolds as not only an internal process within the borders of the Spanish Empire but also as an additional stage upon which various conflicts played out between European powers. Consequently, the setting of this stage would involve translation—as a praxis as well as a figure—in many ways. First, in the context of a Spanish rule obsessed with monopolistic trade policies and controlling symbolic goods, it could be said that the smuggling of foreign books (mostly those related to the French Enlightenment) laid the groundwork for the emancipatory movements in the region. As would be later stated by Argentine intellectual and politician Domingo F. Sarmiento, South American emancipation was part of a global movement, which had been triggered by “France and its books” (Sarmiento 1986: 65, see Ennis 2010). But it was not only France, its culture, and invasions that would contribute to shaping this process. Great Britain, an imperial counterpart to both France and Spain, and the political and financial center of a modern, globalizing world, also played a prominent role. Translation would become a fundamental issue for the South American criollos who had taken the process of emancipation and organization of new nation-states upon themselves so far as it was essential for taking part in the world trade of capitals, material, and symbolic goods. In response to the perception and representation of the isolation and backwardness imposed by the Spanish rule, it was their task to translate as much as possible

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-3

13

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from European practical and theoretical knowledge. They needed to become active players in the game of modern capitalism, to finally be part of a world that appeared to still be new. In this complex and changing scenario, the skills needed to move between languages, cultures, and unstable political settings were equal parts rare and needed. As these processes began to unfurl, on July 15, 1808, in Caracas, Captain General Juan de Casas entrusted a young learned man from the colonial city with the translation of a text from the Times, which had made its way from the island of Trinidad, through Cumana, to the capital of the recently established Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada. On the same day, a French Navy officer, Paul de Lamanon, arrived at the city with the very same news that piece of paper had brought: Charles IV and his sons had abdicated the Spanish throne, and Bonaparte’s brother, Joseph, had become the king of Spain and its territories. Casas called for a general assembly of all the influential residents of the city, where the translator, Andrés Bello, would act as Accidental Secretary (Sambrano Urdaneta 2011: 16). The reaction of the people of Caracas, unwilling to come under French rule, the arrival of a British ship with news of resistance to Bonaparte’s regime in Spain, the summoning of Juntas to replace the fallen monarchy, and the support of England against a shared French enemy would shift the winds in favor of the Spanish king. It was this critical situation that led the colonial rule in Caracas to ask the Trinidad government (under English rule since 1797) for a printing press and two printers, Matthew Gallagher and James Lamb. It was the first time that this mechanical device, an icon of lettered modernity, arrived in the region. The goal was to make publishing a newspaper possible. Andrés Bello, the abovementioned young employee of the colonial administration in Caracas, was appointed to the role of editor-in-chief for the first local newspaper in the 240 years of Spanish rule in Caracas, and he would remain in this position until his departure for Britain in June 1810 (Iturriza 2008: 99). As Jakšić has noted (2001: 13), Bello’s language skills and administrative solvency were the reasons he was appointed to a position involving the duties of editing, translating, and preparing articles for publication. La Gazeta de Caracas published its first issue on October 24, 1808, and it functioned as a propagandist newspaper, reporting on the situation in Europe and simultaneously defending Ferdinand VII’s position as the rightful heir to the throne and the loyalty of the overseas colonies. This printing press would also publish the first book entirely made in the country, the Calendario manual y guía universal de forasteros en Venezuela para el año de 1810, released that year in Caracas. Although Bello did not sign this publication, it is widely held that he was the one who was in charge of writing the account of the history of Venezuela (“Resumen de la historia de Venezuela”), which took up almost the entire volume. As would also happen in other regions of the Spanish Empire (see Acree 2009, 2011), the same printing presses that had been brought to the country to garner support for the royal cause would rapidly turn into efficient driving forces for revolutionary ideas, many of them brought and translated from European and North American books and newspapers (González Núñez 2018: 88). Born in Caracas in 1781, in a remote corner of the world accurately depicted by Eric Hobsbawm as much smaller and at the same time much larger than our contemporary world (1996: 7), Bello was in many ways a socially well-situated member of that colonial capital city. Trained in the local scholarly tradition, under the supervision of learned members of the church, he obtained his degree in arts and philosophy, and was known as an outstanding Latinist. As told by his biographers, by 1797, Father Montenegro, his mentor, regretted the fact that Bello was reading Racine: “it’s really a pity, my friend, that you have learned French” ( Jakšić 2001: 38). One could deduce that the priest considered this a pity because of the revulsive potential of the French reading material available at the end of the eighteenth 14

Philology and Translation on the Way to a New World

century, despite the efforts of Spanish censorship (“France and its books,” as Sarmiento would say). Bello’s acquaintance with Alexander von Humboldt after his visit to Caracas in 1799 is perceived as a milestone in Bello’s development as an intellectual, given the prestige of the German Baron and their shared scientific interests (Rodríguez Monegal 1969: 25). Once more, language skills seem to make a difference, to be the one who can engage with one of “the best-educated and best-informed men then living” (Hobsbawm 1996: 7), through whose eyes Bello and other salient nineteenth-century Latin American intellectuals would come to perceive their own surroundings (Pratt 1992). Translation is a key issue throughout the radical changes the former Spanish Empire went through in the nineteenth century. It is directly related to the sense of backwardness in an age that began to be obsessed with progress. In the steadily growing map of world trade, which included cultural goods, Spanish appears as a receiving rather than a producing pole in the global economy of modern languages. It was the extended practice of bad French translations that was responsible for the state of affairs that made it possible, by the end of the eighteenth century, for a Spanish enlightened writer like Juan Pablo Forner to write his Exequias de la lengua castellana [Funeral Services for the Spanish Tongue]. “Lloremos, pues, y traduzcamos” [Let us cry, then, and keep translating] would be the answer of Spanish liberal Romantic writer Mariano José de Larra to this issue in his “Horas de invierno” [Winter hours] from 1836. Nevertheless, translation had played a central role in the spread of the Enlightenment’s ideas and discourse among cultivated criollos, mainly in French. The dissemination of such ideas, firstly put into practice in the former English colonies in North America, was due in large part to translation (see Bastin 2003: 207; Bastin/Iturriza 2008: 82; González Núñez 2018: 70). Not only did Bello have the opportunity to become acquainted with those key thinkers of modernity, like Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Condillac, but also he had allegedly made an attempt to translate Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, a lost manuscript that Bello would later attribute to his brother (Grases 1989: 115). Still, during Caracas’s turbulent times at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Bello was also responsible for the correspondence with Curaçao, as the Anglo-Spanish alliance against France favored contact between British and Spanish colonies in the region. John Robertson, his correspondent there, provided him with newspapers from England as well. According to Jakšić, the two colonial officials became close friends, and Robertson exposed him to different kinds of literature “including an English grammar, to facilitate Bello’s acquaintance with the language,” as well as to information “crucial for reporting on the confusing events taking place in Spain” (2001: 17). On April 19, 1810, Captain General Vicente Emparán was forced to resign from his position as the head of the colonial government of Venezuela. This marked the onset of the country’s long process of independence from Spanish rule. Bello stayed in his administrative post (where he had been since 1802) as a proven loyal and efficient officer for State business ( Jakšić 2003: 193). Later, when Simón Bolívar— who would become one of the outstanding leaders of South American emancipation and a central figure in the Latin American pantheon of national heroes—was sent on a diplomatic mission to seek British support, he would ask for Bello as secretary. Bello had been Bolívar’s geography and literature teacher—when the former was only 16, the latter 14 years old—and sometimes took part in his salon, which was well visited by Caracas’s lettered society. Once Caracas’s revolutionary government was overthrown by Spain, Bolívar had to return to the Americas, leaving Bello and López Méndez in London, representing a state that no longer existed. Bello’s knowledge of European languages and literary traditions had been one of the main reasons to send him to London, and he would focus on the deep study of those languages and literatures’ history in the years to come. 15

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Philological Foundations for a New Order: Transcription and Translatio Andrés Bello never returned to the land where he was born. From 1810 to 1829, he remained in London for nineteen years, living through times of extreme need, with limited resources to provide for his growing family. In 1829, he left London for Santiago de Chile, where he would stay until his death in 1865. After arriving in his late forties, it is in Chile that Bello—perhaps the most important scholar in Spanish-speaking Latin America throughout the nineteenth century—would produce his most influential work on many levels, disciplines, and fields. Most telling is the wide reach and afterlife of his Gramática Castellana para el uso de los americanos (1847), Chile’s Código Civil (1855), or his many works as a publicist, senator, poet, and translator, as well as his many posthumously published works, like his philologically lucid and rigorous edition of the Poem of the Cid (see Grases 1945, 1988; Oroz 1964; Jakšić 2001; Altschul 2009, 2012; Ennis 2015; Frago 2015; Kæmpfer 2015), or his philosophical masterpiece Filosofía del entendimiento (Gutiérrez Girardot 2006). As founder and Rector of the University of Chile, his work cannot be fully understood without considering its shaping impulse toward an ordered political community ( Jakšić 2001) based on the autonomous development of a received cultural tradition that of course had yet to be invented. Therefore, most of Bello’s work can be read, and benefits from being read, through the lens of a translational praxis that was fundamental and foundational to the Latin American political, linguistic, and literary tradition. Schooled in Latin and Spanish literature, Bello was also known as an accomplished translator from English and French. Translation was more than a mere technical skill for him. Rather, it was a political undertaking. His poetical translations were therefore versions, poems written on the basis of prestige models, like Victor Hugo’s “Fantômes” (“Los fantasmas” 1842), “Le Prière pour tous” (“La oración por todos” 1843), or “Les Djinns” (“Los duendes” 1843)—translation was never thought of as a transparent transposition of one message between two equivalent codes, but an opportunity to give form to a new poetical text, adapted to the poetics of the author and the context of his readership. Bello called it “imitation” (see Durán Luzio 1986; Pagni 2008; Calderón 2010). There is a good amount of research on different aspects of Bello’s translational thought and practice, mostly related to this later period of his life (see Crema 1955; Rossi 1967; Durán Luzio 1986; Herrera Montero 1995; Pagni 2003, 2004, 2008; Valero 2013; Cartagena 2014; Soltmann 2021). This chapter, however, will focus on Bello’s activity before the time of his flourishing in Chile. Andrés Bello’s London years can be divided into two periods, approximately corresponding to each of the two decades of his stay in the capital city of the British Empire. During the first, the political instability in South America, where independence was far from secured, led to situations like that of Bello and López Méndez, who, having been commissioned and sent to London by new governments, had to remain there without a home country to represent or back them financially. James Dunkerley provides a poignant description of Bello’s profile and circumstance during that time: Bello was a scribe, not a warrior, at a time of war in a heroic age. Whilst his student Bolívar led successive armies in a twelve-year continental ‘war to the death,’ he was bottled up in north London, for half of his time here scraping a living through translation, tutoring, and even assisting his tailor in order to pay off the family clothes bill. His own trade was pen and ink, his posture sedentary, and although his gait was rapid, there is no evidence he ever rode a horse in adulthood. That did not look too good in the age of Byron and Bolívar. (2014: 111) 16

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Bello’s first decade in London appears to have been especially hard in terms of material need and distress. Alongside the many jobs he did to be able to provide for his family each day, it is well known that he would spend a significant amount of time at libraries. In fact, when Bello and López Méndez first arrived, they stayed in Francisco de Miranda’s private library in his London exile residence. There, he is thought to have learned Ancient Greek (Rodríguez Monegal 1969: 44–45). But it was a bit later, at least from 1814 on, that Bello would “seize any moment he could to devote himself to the most patient and careful works of scholarship” (Amunátegui 1882: 149). In the British Museum’s Library at Montague House, he conducted a vast study of diverse subjects related to philological matters. He focused particularly on the history of Romance languages and literatures throughout the Middle Ages, giving special attention to the emergence of modern languages and the development of Romance verse forms in general, and especially those of Spanish, focusing on the Poema de Mio Cid, which was hardly known at that time. As Jakšić has noted, although “very little of what Bello thought and wrote about these subjects was published during his lifetime,” the very “core of knowledge which informs all of his other major concerns, especially civil law, history, and the philosophy of education” was built on the foundations provided by the hours of study and the materials gathered in the British Museum’s Library (2001: 47). There Bello devoted an important part of his time to studying—sometimes directly in the medieval codices preserved in the British Museum Library—the origins and development of Western European languages and poetic traditions. Bello’s British Library notes were preserved in thirteen notebooks, most probably written between 1814 and 1823 ( Jakšić 2015, 2017). Instead of translations, they consist mostly of transcriptions from transcriptions (Avilés 2016: 19), keeping a record of the pathway made by his research through an enormous amount of published works and manuscripts on different matters, and in Latin, Old French, Middle English, Italian, some hints of Greek, and even Old Norse. These notebooks, Bello’s Cuadernos de Londres, have been recently published in a careful edition by Jakšić, Avilés, and their team in a volume containing around 900 pages of transcriptions and notes. As has been outlined elsewhere (Ennis 2018, 2020), Bello barely allowed his voice to rise from the pages of his London notebooks: he just collects, points out, copies, describes, and observes. There’s only a mere—sometimes tacit—record of the links he establishes between one passage and the next. These highly valuable materials signal a renewed need for research on Bello’s work. They have been compared, considering the form, range, and value, with Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk [1927–1940] (Pérez 2018: 547). This comparison is of special value, not only because of the way in which it lets the reader understand his collection of quotes taken in a library as a new nineteenth-century work but also because it leads to a point where Bello and Benjamin diverge—expectedly—yet dwell on and address the same issues: translating, trading, transporting texts as a way of engaging with tradition. Hannah Arendt described Benjamin’s poetics of quotation as a way of dealing with the authority of the past in its capability of being preserved and inherited by tradition (its Tradierbarkeit, which involves both trade and tradition): “Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition” (1968: 76). But if Benjamin’s Passagenwerk was the result of its author’s discovery— the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind’, the mindless peace of complacency (76) 17

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Bello’s London notebooks, in turn, could be read as another way of addressing the authority of the past, indeed, as a careful search for the philological foundations of that very authority, and how to transpose it to the New World. The transcription exercise displayed throughout Bello’s London notebooks can be conceived as a way of dealing with the deep sense of translation and tradition that was at stake in Europe at the time the manuscripts he read had been written, just as they were at stake for Latin American white elites during those times of transition. In doing his research on the origins of Romance languages, of Spanish assonant verse, and of the Poema de Mio Cid, among other subjects, he was also shaping a voice of authority on how to manage the inherited language and culture that brand new Spanish American states would now seek to handle on their own. Translation is not per se a frequent concern in those London notebooks. Most are devoted to taking notes in and about languages he already knew or was trying to learn. However, the philological concerns underlying the entirety of the notebooks’ pages, and their few partially published outcomes (Bello, “Consideraciones,” “Qué diferencia hay,” “Sobre el uso antiguo”)—especially later in the journal projects that will be addressed in the following section of this chapter—tell a lot more about how Bello was thinking about the construction of a reliable target language in an increasingly complex world trade of symbolic goods. In these notebooks can be therefore observed Bello’s concern for language as well as for political change, most of all when these concerns emerge as answers to moments of crisis arising from inherited forms of power and representation, tied to the big foundational myths and narratives that provided European nations with deep-reaching roots, well sustained, both philologically and mythologically. These were years of want and studying, and little was known about Bello’s work at the time until these notebooks were finally published. By 1820, much began to change, both in the progress toward independence in South American countries and in Bello’s personal situation. He started cooperating with some diplomatic representatives from South American governments, such as José Irisarri, from Chile. In March of 1820, he also assisted in the diplomatic negotiation between his homeland and the Pope. The political situation had radically changed in South America, where after many years of difficulties for the cause of independence, Bolívar had managed to free New Grenada and presided over the Congress of Angostura, which proclaimed the Republic of Colombia, made up of the territories of today’s Colombia, Ecuador, and parts of Venezuela already free from Spanish rule. According to Jakšić, after Bolívar’s successive victories, the Congress of Angostura was able to drive more aggressive policy, seeking not only British protection in the case of a French invasion but also looking to be acknowledged as sovereign, independent states. The Representatives Fernando Peñalver and José María Vergara were sent to London, where they failed to change the British position of strict neutrality and consequently decided to concentrate on another task requested of them: communications with Rome to establish formal relations with the Vatican. A letter sent to Rome, signed by both Peñalver and Vergara, was later revealed to be a work of Bello’s writing skills in Latin, as well as of his knowledge of the political and theological traditions that were at stake in the argument (Leturia 1935: 11; Espinosa Pólit 1981: LXXIX), and was subsequently incorporated into the volume VIII of his complete works, published in Caracas in 1981. The letter, following the instructions provided by the authorities in Angostura, highlighted the increasing lack of priests to maintain the Catholic faith in the recently emancipated South American republics, given the fact that the appointment of religious authorities remained a prerogative of the Spanish authorities. Given the persisting 18

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hostility with the former colonial metropolis, these appointments were potentially controversial, as the priests sent from Spain could act or be perceived as enemies of the new states. Although this diplomatic enterprise did not have immediate effects, a few years later, in 1827, Great Colombia was the first country in Latin America to be recognized by the Vatican, allowing them to name their own bishops without intervention from the Spanish Church. As Jakšić sums it up, Bello’s letter shows that as early as 1820 he was in a position to elaborate on arguments in favor of independence that were based on national sovereignty, even if much of the argumentation was couched in religious and humanitarian terms. (2001: 77–78) Bello’s work as a translator involved much more than the act and the will to transpose a text to another language. In this case, he proved to be not only skilled enough in Latin to be able to write an official letter to the Pope, but also provided the ideological and theoretical tools to express the needs and desires of Great Colombia. The mastery of Latin acquired in Caracas to translate Virgil’s poems, deepened through the study of the history of decay, fragmentation, and transfiguration in Romance languages, as seen in the London notebooks, made it possible for Bello to address the Pope himself in a matter involving some of the fundamental concerns that could have guided his learning hours at the British Library: the transfer of an ecclesiastical prerogative between secular powers, the very chance to ensure a form of political continuity in times of revolution. This would underlie his entire lifework.

Translating for the New World: The London Reviews In June 1822, Bello was appointed secretary of the Chilean diplomatic representation in London. This position offered him a new connection with the emerging Latin American states, as well as a stable source of income, ending a long decade of material need. It was then that Bello was able to develop some of his writing and publishing projects. Most of this work would be published in two magazine projects designed and run along with his Colombian colleague Juan García del Río. Biblioteca Americana (1823) and El Repertorio Americano (1826)1 were ambitious, very influential journal projects (despite their short life) and designed based on a previous project carried out by García del Río in Lima, Peru under the rule of José de San Martín beginning in 1821. Though miscellaneous, the indexes of these publications followed clear goals and had a structuring principle, likely adopted from prestigious models of the time like the French Revue Encyclopédique, and other revues savants (Aurenche 2011: 390). The structure and the basic guidelines of both journals clearly resembled that of their Peruvian precedent. Perhaps the most salient innovation was the space taken up by the contributions devoted to philological matters, which were almost all authored by Bello. The journals’ contents were, in both cases, laid out in a first section on “Humanidades i artes liberals” [Humanities and Liberal Arts], a second section devoted to “Ciencias matemáticas i físicas, con sus aplicaciones” [Mathematical and Physical Sciences, along with their implementations], and a third, which Biblioteca called “Ideología, moral e historia” [Ideology, Morals, and History] and Repertorio called “Ciencias intelectuales i morales” [Intellectual and Moral Sciences]. Contemporary to the last decisive battles for independence, like those of Junín and Ayacucho (1824), 19

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Bello’s El Repertorio Americano was an attempt to contribute knowledge and vision to the task of founding the new American republics. Bello made himself a conduit and a filter for European writings that might be useful to the nation building process there. (Pratt 1992: 169) As would become particularly clear in two of his most influential masterpieces, the Gramática castellana destinada al uso de los americanos (1847) and Chile’s Código Civil, for Bello, no intellectual good could be merely transported from one country to the other. Translating meant always transforming, adapting a text to its new intended readership. Both journals began their inaugural issues with a prospectus, describing the aims and scope of the publication. The first had been signed only by García del Río—although Bello’s presence behind those lines was subject to critical debate (see Grases 1962, 1973; Guitarte 1966)—while the second one did not include any signature but was written in a plural first person clearly identified with the journals’ editors. A considerable portion of both texts was allotted to the description and justification of the time and place of the publication. The time was that of the already foreseeable victory over royalist Spanish forces in South America, and consequently that of a pathway opening to a new era of peace and integration into the modern world led by France and Britain. The Spanish past was represented as a time of darkness, the “media edad” [Middle Age] of Spanish authoritarian rule, preceding the maturity and freedom of the times to come (García del Río 1823: vii). The place of the imprint was, in turn, the best place to undertake a project like the one proposed by both journals (Racine 2017: 26). In the prospectus to Biblioteca, this is mentioned by saying “Amando la libertad, escribiendo en la tierra clásica de ella, y en el foco de la cultura intelectual” [loving freedom, writing in its classic land, and at the center of intellectual culture] (Ibid.: viii). In Repertorio, however, the praise of the strategic value of the journal editors’ location in London is much longer and emphatic: En el estado presente de América i Europa, Londres es acaso el lugar mas adecuado para la publicación de esta obra periódica. Sus relaciones comerciales con los pueblos trasatlánticos le hacen en cierto modo el centro de todos ellos; i los auxilios que la circulación industrial suministra a la circulación literaria son demasiado obvios para que sea necesario enumerarlos. Pero Londres no es solamente la metrópoli del comercio: en ninguna parte del globo son tan activas como en la Gran Bretaña las causas que vivifican i fecundan el espíritu humano; en ninguna parte es más audaz la investigación, mas libre el vuelo del injenio, más profundas las especulaciones científicas, mas animosas las tentativas de las artes. Rica en sí misma, reúne las riquezas de sus vecinos; i si en algún ramo de las ciencias naturales les cede la palma de la invención o de la perfección, hace a todos ellos incomparable ventaja en el cultivo de los conocimientos mas esencialmente útiles al hombre, i que mas importa propagar en América. (Bello and García del Río, “Indicaciones”, 1–2) [In the present state of America and Europe, London is perhaps the most suitable place for the publication of this journal. Its commercial ties with the transatlantic peoples place it in a way at the center of them all; and it is appreciably clear that industrial trade facilitates the distribution of literature. But London is not only the metropolis of trade: there is nowhere else in the world where the causes which enliven and enrich the human spirit are as active as they are in Great Britain; nowhere is the research more daring, the soaring of genius freer, the scientific speculation more profound, the artistic attempts 20

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livelier. Rich in its own right, it includes the richness of its neighbors; and if any of them should best it in any realm of the natural sciences in regard to invention or perfection, it has an unbeatable advantage over them in the cultivation of knowledge that is most useful for man, and what is most important to disseminate in America]. London was depicted as an ideal hub for the trade exchange between Europe and the ­A mericas—art and knowledge included—even making the point that there, in South America, it would be fairly difficult if not impossible to attempt such a project, given not only the unstable political situation, but also the disadvantageous technical conditions (like “el estado del arte tipográfico en América” [the state of the typographic art in the Americas] Ibid.: 2). London appeared as the center of a world in which the editors wanted to see the independence project they represented be carried forward: freedom for trading goods and ideas, a thick fabric of intellectual life, and print goods made up part of the strongest and wealthiest trade and industry networks in the world. It was considered the ideal place in which to translate the knowledge necessary for the development of the South American republics. Indeed, both journals posited themselves as spaces of transit and circulation, pathways along which European science and culture could be transmitted and adapted to South American needs. In turn, South American culture could be adequately mediated through them, for its correct interpretation overseas. Most of the texts in both journals were authored or translated by their two editors and a small group of well-known contributors, such as Vicente Salvá and Pedro Creuzer. The texts were divided between works of their own making (poems or essays) and those of others, offering a sample of European and American intellectual production, on a continuum ranging from essays or critical reviews to different forms of translation. There were two poetic pieces by Bello—part of his unfinished large epic project, “America”—which introduced the inaugural issues of Biblioteca and Repertorio. The pieces can be very helpful in understanding the broad and complex way in which translation became key to this undertaking. In those poems, the aim was to transfer knowledge, languages, and practices from one shore to the other. Seen by Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1954: 103) as the first time Latin American literature expressed a longing for intellectual independence, Bello’s “Alocución a la poesía” invites poetry to move from old, learned Europe, then ruled by tyrants, to “del mundo de Colón la grande escena” [the grand stage of Columbus’s world]. Both a philologist and a poet, Bello asserted poetry’s foundational role—through the poem itself and based on the contemporary understanding of poetry’s foundational role for civilization—in the origin of those cultured nations: He invokes poetry as a “maestra de los pueblos y los reyes” [teacher of peoples and kings], who had sung “al mundo las primeras leyes” [to the world its first laws] during “la infancia de la gente humana” [humanity’s childhood] (31–32). The early nineteenth century coincided with the emergence of modern nations and nationalisms, as well as the heyday of Romantic literature and vernacular philology. Those three elements need to be understood together, given the fact that, as pointed out once again by Eric Hobsbawm, “even historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity” (1983: 7). The invention of this historical continuity in Europe through the philological construction of national languages and literatures attempting to reach as deep as possible into the depths of history is something Bello knew very well through his own philological research in the British Museum’s Library. Bello’s scholarship has repeatedly highlighted the exceptionality of his becoming a pioneer of a national Spanish philology from the standpoint of a South American criollo involved in the emancipation projects. Nadia Altschul (2009, 2012) and Ivan Jakšić (2001) have provided 21

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convincing hypotheses on the role his edition of Poema de Mio Cid and his thorough study of Arthurian and Carolingian epic cycles played in the way he intellectually engaged with the political transition in which he was so deeply involved, the emancipation of the Spanish colonies in South America, and the subsequent formation of new nation-states. Key to these issues was the medieval trope of translatio imperii in the writing of Bello’s majorly canonical poem (“Alocución”). This goes beyond this particular poem and has been highlighted in scholarship on Bello to address his translational praxis more generally. After reviewing some of the central titles of the literature on this topic (Meyer-Minnemann 2000; Lauterbach 2002), Nadia Altschul provides a useful definition: The trope of translatio studi et imperii was used in the Middle Ages to refer to the physical movement and renovation of superior civilization and dominion from one geographical location to a new one. With strong ties to the renovation of the power of Rome, the movement of translatio was that of the sun, from the East to the West. As explained by Jacques Le Goff, the geographical transfer of power (imperii) was above all a transfer of knowledge and culture (studii). (2012: 167–168) Power, knowledge, and culture had to come together in a movement that necessarily entailed its counterpart: making the New World correctly understood by the Old one, and the traditions of the latter suitable to be continued—and renewed—in the former. Opening Repertorio, the “Oda a la agricultura en la Zona Tórrida” is a georgic poem that celebrates the potential wealth of the New World, thereby “translating” into Spanish the vocabulary typical of its products. Both poems included footnotes that explained to the reader the meaning of the terms and tropes used when they were related to Latin American places or products, specifying that “Avila” was a mountain next to Caracas; that the city related to the eagle and the Aztecs was Mexico (“Alocución” 72, 80); where and how cocoa was usually grown in Venezuela; where coffee came from; or the many products that could be obtained from palm trees. Later, the fourth issue of Repertorio was also opened by another lyric text by Bello—also fragmentary, inaugural, and unfinished: a translation of the opening stanzas of Delille’s famous poem Les Jardins ou l’art d’embellir les paysages. That is, a version—like those from Victor Hugo’s later work—which did not set out to faithfully reflect the original verses (see Pagni 2003). The trope of translatio imperii can also be put to work in reading Bello’s philological essays, which partially showcase the outcome of his scholarly work at the British Library. Those essays with a thorough knowledge of the history of the Romance languages (acquired first in the colonial colleges and later in libraries and archives away from Spanish soil) reveal a very firm mastery of the Spanish language and history, its embedment in the Romance language family, and its textual traditions. All this allows Bello to challenge continental philological authorities like Sismondi (Bello, “Noticia de la obra de Sismondi”), or traditional Peninsular institutions like the Royal Academy, notably through the proposal of a new Spanish orthography (Bello and García del Río, “Indicaciones”; Bello, “Ortografía castellana”) and a treatise on prosody (“Qué diferencia hay”), or even by highlighting the decline of contemporary Peninsular literature, proven by its loss of connection with the poetical tradition of its own language (“Sobre el uso antiguo”). Power through knowledge—the knowledge to politically shape a community in an efficient way through adequate incorporation of the inherited culture: this is where philology meets translation in Bello’s work, inasmuch as it becomes about giving shape to a suitable target language. 22

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Finally, translation per se, extensively used in both Biblioteca and Repertorio, can be analyzed through the lens of translatio imperii. Bello translated a lot of material for every section, putting different strategies to use in order to make the texts suitable for the type of culture and knowledge transfer intended for them. One of those strategies was the search for a careful translation, very close to the original text, where the translator left no trace of his presence except for his initials “A. B.” at the end. This is the case, for instance, of the text immediately following the poem “Oda a la agricultura en la Zona Tórrida,” a translation from the French of a critical review made by Jean-Baptiste Sanson de Pongerville for the Revue Encyclopédique (1826, vol. 29, pp. 92–99) on Pierre François Tissot’s Études sur Virgile. The texts devoted to other scientific disciplines showed a wider range of differing types of intervention in the process of translating knowledge into the Spanish language for a South American readership. Section II of Biblioteca’s first volume, for example, began with a translation by Bello, from Julien-Joseph Virey’s introduction to the first of thirty-six volumes of the Nouveau dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle, appliquée aux arts, à l’agriculture, à l’économie rurale et domestique, à la médecine (1816–1819). The translation in this case still remained close to the French original, allowing only slight rhetorical translation decisions. For example, in the first page, two such cases can be identified: first, while the French text said “Lorsque nous contemplons cette voûte céleste peuplée d’astres … nous n’avons encore qu’une faible idée de la Nature” [When we contemplate this celestial vault populated with stars … we still have only a feeble idea of Nature] (Virey 1816: xi), the Spanish version prefers to address the reader emphatically: “Contemplemos esa bóveda celeste tachonada de astros, … y aún no formaremos más que una escasa y mezquina idea de la naturaleza” [Let us contemplate that celestial vault studded with stars,... and still we will form but a meager and paltry idea of nature] (Bello, “Consideraciones” 77). That is to say, instead of just arguing “When we contemplate this celestial vault populated with stars…” he preferred to invite the reader to contemplate the celestial vault, and all the diverse beauty of the world, in order to admit human ignorance in the face of Nature. Something similar happens a few lines later, as Bello decided to translate the statement “Cependant, elle n’est elle–même que le bras du Tout– Puissant, et le ministre de ses volontés immortelles; c’est de la Divinité la partie qui se manifeste pour perpétuer l’existence de toutes les créatures” [However, it is itself only the arm of the Almighty, and the minister of his immortal will; it is the part of the Divinity which manifests itself to perpetuate the existence of all creatures] (Virey 1816: xi) as a rhetorical question: “¿Y qué es la naturaleza misma sino el brazo del Todopoderoso, el ministro de su voluntad soberana, la parte de la divinidad que se revela a nosotros en la existencia de las cosas creadas?” [And what is nature itself but the arm of the Almighty, the minister of His sovereign will, the part of Divinity that reveals itself to us in the existence of created things?] (Bello, “Consideraciones” 77–78). In other cases, he nevertheless allowed himself an extensive introduction aimed at situating the problem (and attempts at its solution) in its South American context. An example of this can be found in the article “Descubrimiento de un nuevo remedio contra las paperas, comunicado a la Sociedad Helvética de Ciencias Naturales,” where a footnote announced that “esta comunicación constituye el objeto del tratado ‘Découverte d’un nouveau remède contre le goître’, del Doctor Coindet, Ginebra 1820, 8vo. [this communication relays the treatise ‘Découverte d’un nouveau remède contre le goître,’ by Doctor Coindet, Geneva 1820, 8th]” (Bello, “Descubrimiento de un nuevo remedio” 107). When it came to showing the South American landscape as perceived, measured, and judged through European eyes, translation strategies also diverged. A recurring source for this kind of literature was Alexander von Humboldt’s Voyage aux régiones équinoxiales du 23

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Nouveau Continent. In this case, Bello preferred not to offer a word-for-word translation but rather a detailed and careful commentary and long translated quotes from the text—a reminder that, although the text is not always identical in its arrangement, it is still Humboldt’s voice speaking. It is his authority that stood behind the account of the most hidden and unknown corners of the continent. Bello’s stance in this case can be understood, thanks to his comment on the “Descripción del Orinoco entre la cascada de Guaharivos i la embocadura del Guaviare” [Description of the Orinoco between the Guaharivos Falls and the Mouth of the Guaviare], in the first volume of Repertorio: “El ilustre Humboldt (a quien debemos toda la materia de este artículo, que solo nos hemos tomado la licencia de disponer en otro orden)” [The illustrious Humboldt (to whom we owe all the material in this article, of which we have only taken the liberty of arranging in another order)] (Bello, “Orinoco” 75). In “Ensayo político sobre la isla de Cuba” [Political Essay on the Island of Cuba], labeled as an excerpt from the same work (volumes XI and XII)—and again with the translator’s signature “A.B.” at the end—this same gesture is reduced to the recurrence of the expression “according to Humboldt,” another reminder that the information and opinions in the text came from the prestigious German author (Bello, “Ensayo político sobre la isla de Cuba”). In other cases, such as in the essay on the economic usefulness of the “cochinilla misteca,” a sessile parasite native to tropical and subtropical regions in the Americas (Bello, “Descripcion de la cochinilla misteca”), Humboldt’s travel report appears as one of several sources for the composition of the article. As has been noticed by Mary-Louise Pratt, Bello’s translations can be seen at the beginning of a “transculturated” reading of Humboldt’s texts, which “became essential raw material for American and Americanist ideologies forged by creole intellectuals in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s” (Pratt 1992: 172). Something different happened with Francis Bond Head’s popular Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes (1826). The book appeared twice in the second volume of Repertorio. It was announced by the editors among other books of potential interest for their readership, conceding some accuracy and beauty in the description of a few things he would have not perceived “so rapidly,” but only as an ironic introduction to a final heavy criticism: “En lo que cuenta de oídas, se ve que tuvo poco caudal de noticias, i no manifiesta gran discernimiento en escojerlas, vendiendo como nuevo lo que estaba dicho i redicho por otros viajeros, i con mejores informes” [According to hearsay, it can be seen that he had little news, and he does not show good judgment in choosing them, passing off as new what had been told and retold by other travelers, and with better reports] (vol. 2, 301). The second time, two excerpts were featured from Bond Head’s book translated by Bello. These engaged with Argentine gaucho customs and the Nolasco mine in Chile. In this case, there was a clear cut between the translated text and the voice of the translator, who did not only select the text passages to translate, but also added some comments in the form of footnotes: further explanation on specific South American vocabulary, some precise amendments on clearly misguided perceptions by the author (for example, when he claimed to have seen lions and tigers in the Pampas), and other forms of—sometimes lengthy—corrections. This was the case of the author’s comments on (the lack of ) agriculture in the Maipo Valley. There, Bello, the translator, intervened firstly by emphasizing through the use of italics the mistaken passage in Bond Head’s text (where he stated that the Maipo Valley remained no cultivado [uncultivated]), and then, by stating the following, in a footnote, on the exuberance of the allegedly wild fruit trees: El capitán Head debió de pensar que el suelo daba espontáneamente estas cosechas. La verdad es, que el valle de Maipo es uno de los mejor cultivados de toda la América. Si el 24

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señor Head hubiera transitado por allí algunas semanas antes, le hubiera visto cubierto de ricas mieses. Pero quizas hubiera creido que se nazian sin cuidado ni dilijencia alguna. (Bello, “Estractos del Viaje del Capitan Head” 145) [Captain Head must have thought that the soil spontaneously yielded these crops. The truth is, the Maipo Valley is one of the best cultivated in all of America. If Mr. Head had passed through it a few weeks before, he would have seen it covered with rich crops. But perhaps he would have thought that they were grown without any care or diligence]. There is an evident difference in the treatment of both traveler’s texts. On the one hand, Bello takes special care in preserving the identity of Humboldt’s text as a prestige source for a thoroughly rewritten text. On the other, Francis Bond Head’s text is made into an object of linear translation provided with clear signs of critical distance in the face of an already popular, though peculiar, representative of what Pratt called the “capitalist vanguard:” mainly British travelers giving accounts of their experiences in South America in the 1810s and 1820s “as advance scouts for European capital” (1992: 143). It is probably the contrast between the widespread ­scientific—and literary, more precisely Romantic—prestige of Humboldt and the overt admiration that Bello professes for him, on the one side, and the utilitarian, “rough,” and “rapid” nature of Bond Head’s essay, on the other, the result of a precise mission of business scouting, that explains the different treatment that each of those texts received. This contrast should also enable the journal’s readership to distinguish between good and bad representations of the American space, which was in any case always mediated by the gaze of European travelers.

Conclusion A thorough analysis of Andrés Bello’s translation strategies in his numerous interventions in the two publications Biblioteca Americana and El Repertorio Americano would largely exceed the boundaries of this chapter. Nevertheless, the partial approaches provided here should offer an idea of the general features, as well as of how this politics of translation continued to be relevant throughout time through his translational work and also within his philological practice and reflection. As many recent Bello scholars (such as Altschul and Jakšić) have demonstrated, an important aspect in the diverse body of work produced by Bello is his South American version of the Medieval trope of translatio studii et imperii in a time of emancipation and emergent new states. As has been lucidly pointed out by Pratt, in the Americas “this first wave of decolonization truly meant embarking on a future that was quite beyond the experience of European societies,” and consequently “Spanish America at independence was indeed a New World on its way down a path of social experimentation for which the European metropolis provided little precedent” (1992: 172–173). The mediating role that Bello was called upon to play in Caracas at the beginning of the nineteenth century—on the basis of his linguistic skills and his use of language in public writing—can still be noted even in the apparent isolation of the scholarly labor recorded in the notebooks, and it would be clearly expanded in his brief but influential London publishing projects. It is then in both Biblioteca Americana and El Repertorio Americano where, along with the results of his study in the British Library, through translation, comment, and discussion, Bello proved to be skillful in diverse modalities of moving between languages, of mediating, trading, and translating cultural practices and valuable knowledge between Europe and the Americas. In this sense, scholarship and philological practice are not only means and conditions of possibility, but necessary and unavoidable steps in a translational praxis conceived as a path toward a world that, becoming readable to the old one, could finally become new. 25

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Note 1 Texts from El Repertorio Americano are quoted from the facsimile edition published in Caracas, Edición de la Presidencia de la República en conmemoración del Sesquicentenario de la Independencia Literaria de Hispanoamérica, in 1973. Those from the first volume of Biblioteca Americana follow the original page numbers, while the remaining volumes are cited after the edition of Miguel Andúgar Miñarro. Madrid: Biblioteca Saavedra Fajardo, 2015.

Works Cited Acree, William. “Words, Wars and Public Celebrations: The Emergence of Rioplatense Print Culture.” Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations, edited by William Acree and Juan Carlos González. Vanderbilt University Press, 2009, pp. 32–58. ———. Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Rio de la Plata, 1780–1910. Vanderbilt University Press, 2011. Altschul, Nadia. “Andrés Bello and the Poem of the Cid: Latin America, Occidentalism, and the Foundations of Spain’s ‘National Philology.’” Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp. 219–236. ———. Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic. Chicago University Press, 2012. Amunátegui, Miguel Luis. Vida de don Andrés Bello. Santiago: Imprenta de Pedro G. Ramírez, 1882. Arendt, Hannah. “Introduction. Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. Harcourt, 1968, pp. 10–105. Aurenche, Marie-Laure. “La presse de vulgarisation ou la médiation des savoirs.” La Civilisation du journal. Histoire Culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, edited by Dominique ­K alifa, Philippe Régnier, Marie-Éve Thérenty, and Alain Vaillant. Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2011, pp. 383–415. Avilés, Tania. “Para el establecimiento de una genealogía de los manuscritos: el caso de los Cuadernos de Londres de Andrés Bello.” Anales de Literatura Chilena, vol. 17, no. 25, 2016, pp. 13–32. Bastin, Georges. “Por una historia de la traducción en Hispanoamérica.” Íkala, revista de lenguaje y cultura, vol. 8, no. 14, 2003, pp. 193–217. Bello, Andrés. “Alocución a la Poesía, en que se introducen las alabanzas de los pueblos e individuos americanos, que mas se han distinguido en la guerra de la independencia. (Fragmento de un poema inédito, titulado ‘América’).” Biblioteca Americana, no. I, 1823, pp. 3–16. ———. “Consideraciones sobre la naturaleza, por Virey.” Biblioteca Americana, no. I, 1823, pp. 77–95. ———. “Noticia de la obra de Sismondi sobre ‘la literatura del Mediodía de Europa’” Biblioteca Americana, no. II, 1823, pp. 459–472. ———. “Qué diferencia hay entre las lenguas griega y latina por una parte, y las lenguas romances por otra en cuanto a los acentos y cuantidades de las sílabas; y qué plan deba abrazar un tratado de prosodia para la lengua castellana.” Biblioteca Americana, no. II, 1823, pp. 444–456. ———. “Descripción del Orinoco entre la cascada de Guaharivos y la embocadura del Guaviare: canal natural de comunicación entre el Orinoco y el Amazonas.” El Repertorio Americano, no. I, 1826, pp. 74–98. ———. “Oda a la agricultura en la Zona Tórrida.” El Repertorio Americano, no. I, 1826, pp. 7–26. ———. “Descripcion de la cochinilla misteca i de su cria i beneficio.” El Repertorio Americano, no. II, 1827, pp. 152–167. ———. “Descubrimiento de un nuevo remedio contra la papera, comunicado a la Sociedad Helvética de ciencias naturales.” El Repertorio Americano, no. II, 1827, pp. 107–114. ———. “Ensayo político sobre la isla de Cuba.” El Repertorio Americano, no. II, 1827, pp. 249–260. ———. “Estractos del Viaje del Capitan Head por las Pampas de Buenos–Aires i la Cordillera de Chile.” El Repertorio Americano, no. II, 1827, pp. 141–152. ———. “Ortografía castellana.” El Repertorio Americano, no. II, 1827, pp. 50–55. ———. “Sobre el uso antiguo de la rima asonante en la poesía latina de la media edad i en la francesa; i observaciones sobre su uso moderno.” El Repertorio Americano, no. II, 1827, pp. 7–18. ———. Código Civil de la República de Chile. Santiago: Imprenta Nacional, 1855. 26

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———. Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos. 1847. Paris: Roger & Chernovitz, 1914. ———. Cuadernos de Londres. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria–DiBAM, 2017. ——— and Juan García del Río. “Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar y uniformar la ortografía en América.” Biblioteca Americana, vol. I, 1823, pp. 59–70. ———. “Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar y uniformar la ortografía en América.” El Repertorio Americano, no. I, 1826, pp. 27–40. ———. “Prospecto.” El Repertorio Americano, no. I, 1826, pp. 1–6. Calderón de Cuervo, Elena María. “Andrés Bello, la Oración por todos y los conflictos espirituales del siglo XIX.” Fuego y Raya, vol. 1 no. 2, 2010, pp. 47–67. Cartagena, Nelson. “El aporte de don Andrés Bello a la lingüística y filología modernas.” Boletín de Filología, vol. 49, no. 1, 2014, pp. 135–148. Crema, Edoardo. “La originalidad de la ‘Oración por todos’.” Revista Nacional de Cultura, no. 108, 1955, pp. 13–22. De Pongerville, Jean-Baptiste Sanson. Review: “Études sur Virgile, par P.-F. Tissot.” Revue Encyclopédique, vol. XXIX, 1826, pp. 92–99. Dunkerley, James. “Andrés Bello and the Challenges of Spanish American Liberalism.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 24, 2014, pp. 105–125 Durán Luzio, Juan. “Víctor Hugo en un traductor americano: Andrés Bello.” Letras, no. 11–12, 1986, pp. 71–85. Ennis, Juan. “Paris als Hauptstadt des kolonialen und postkolonialen Argentiniens.” Koloniale ­Vergangenheiten–(post–)imperial Gegenwart, edited by Jörn Leonhard and Rolf Renner. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010, pp. 185–200. ———. “Del retorno a un nuevo origen: filología, archivo y nación en el Cid de Andrés Bello.” Return Migrations in Romance Cultures, edited by Marco Thomas Bosshard and Andreas Gelz. Freiburg: Rombach, 2015, pp. 103–126. ———. “Transcribir. El legado de Bello.” Estudios Públicos, no. 152, 2018, pp. 239–253. ———. “Filología para los americanos: los años londinenses de Andrés Bello.” Chuy. Revista de Estudios Literarios Latinoamericanos, vol. 7, no. 9, 2020, pp. 6–37. Espinosa Pólit, Aurelio. “Prologue.” Obras completas, by Andrés Bello, vol. 8, Caracas: La Casa de Bello, 1981, pp. xi–xcic. Frago, Juan Antonio. “Andrés Bello, historiador de la lengua. Sobre el Cantar de Mío Cid.” Boletín de Filología, vol. L, no. 1, 2015, pp. 107–134. García del Río, Juan. “Prospecto.” La Biblioteca Americana, no. I, 1823, pp. v–viii. ——— and Andrés Bello. “Boletín bibliográfico.” El Repertorio Americano, vol. II, 1827, pp. 300–320. González Núñez, Gabriel. “Traducciones para y por los españoles americanos: el papel de los traductores en la independencia de Hispanoamérica.” Humanidades, revista de la Universidad de Montevideo, no. 3, 2018, pp. 69–100. Grases, Pedro. “Don Andrés Bello y el Poema del Cid.” Revista Iberoamericana, vol. 9, no. 18, 1945, pp. 243–286. ———. Tiempo de Bello en Londres y otros ensayos. Caracas: Ministerio de Educación, 1962. ———. “Prólogo.” El Repertorio Americano. Londres, 1826–1827, vol. I. Caracas: Presidencia de la República, 1973. ———. “El calvario de los estudios de Andrés Bello sobre el Poema del Cid.” Nueva revista de Filología Hispánica, vol. 36, no. 2, 1988, pp. 1159–1181. ———. “Traducciones de interés político–cultural en la época de la independencia de Venezuela.” Escritos selectos. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989, pp. 108–118. Guitarte, Guillermo. “Juan García del Río y su Biblioteca Columbiana (Lima, 1821). Sobre los orígenes de La Biblioteca Americana (1823) y El Repertorio Americano (1826–1827) de Londres.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, vol. 18, no. 1–2, 1966, pp. 87–149. Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael. Pensamiento hispanoamericano. Mexico: UNAM, 2006. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. Las corrientes literarias en la América hispánica. Mexico & Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954. Herrera Montero, Rafael. “Andrés Bello, traductor de una oda de Horacio.” Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios Latinos, no. 8, 1995, pp. 299–314. Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 1–14. 27

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———. The Age of Revolutions. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Iturriza, María Gabriela. “Traducción de la prensa extranjera e intertextualidad en el periodo preindependentista de la Gaceta de Caracas.” Trans. Revista de Traductología, no. 12, 2008, pp. 94–120. Jakšić, Iván. Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. ­Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. “La república del orden: Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello y las transformaciones del pensamiento político de la Independencia.” Historia, vol. 36, 2003, pp. 191–218. Kæmpfer, Álvaro. “Andrés Bello, el Poema de Mío Cid y las ruinas originales del Hispanismo.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 41, no. 82, 2015, pp. 21–35. Lauterbach, Frank. “Escribir al Oeste, mirar al Este: Andrés Bello y el curso de la poesía.” Do the Americas Have a Common Literary History?, edited by Barbara Buchenau and Annette Paatz. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 175–194. Leturia, Pedro. La emancipación hispanoamericana en los informes episcopales a Pio VII; copias y extractos del Archivo vaticano. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1935. Meyer-Minnemann, Klaus. “Poesía de fundación y subjetividad en las ‘Silvas americanas’ de Andrés Bello.” Iberoamericana, vol. 78–79, no. 2–3, 2000, pp. 72–87. Oroz, Rodolfo. “Andrés Bello y el Poema del Cid.” Revista de Filología Española, vol. 47, no. 1–4, 1964, pp. 437–443. Pagni, Andrea. “Traducción del espacio y espacios de la traducción: Les Jardins de Jacques Delille en la versión de Andrés Bello.” Ficciones y silencios fundacionales. Literaturas y culturas poscoloniales en América Latina (siglo XIX), edited by Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle. Madrid: Vervuert, 2003. ———. “Olimpio en América del Sur: usos hispanoamericanos del romanticismo francés.” Estudios. Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales, no. 24, 2004, pp. 117–132. ———. “¿Orientalismos americanos? Lugares de traducción de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y de Andrés Bello.” Trans. Revista de Traductología, no. 12, 2008, pp. 43–50. Pérez, Francisco Javier. “Menéndez Pidal y su evaluación crítica sobre los estudios cidianos de Andrés Bello.” Boletín de la Real Academia Española, vol. 18, no. 318, 2018, pp. 543–572. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London & New York: Routledge, 1992. Racine, Karen. “Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827.” The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance, edited by Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani Da Silva. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 15–32. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. El otro Andrés Bello. Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1969. Rossi, Giuseppe Carlo. “Nuevas consideraciones sobre Andrés Bello traductor de poesía italiana.” Actas del Segundo Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, edited by Norbert Polussen and Jaime Sánchez Romeralo. Nijmegen: Instituto Español de la Universidad de Nimega, 1967, pp. 525–527. Sambrano Urdaneta, Oscar. Cronología de Andrés Bello. Caracas: Casa Nacional de las Letras Andrés Bello, 2011. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo, o civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas. 1845. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986. Soltmann, Claudio. “‘Sobre las traducciones’. El pensamiento traductológico británico en Chile a partir de una traducción de Andrés Bello (1838).” Mutatis mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, vol. 14, no. 1, 2021, pp. 92–118. Valero, María Alejandra. “Andrés Bello y sus traducciones de Victor Hugo: un ejemplo ilustrativo del proceso de construcción de las nuevas literaturas americanas en el proceso de Independencia.” Mutatis Mutandis, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 43–59. Virey, Julien-Joseph. “Discours préliminaire.” Nouveau Dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle, appliquée aux arts, à l’agriculture, ‘a l’Économie rurale et domestique, ‘a la médicine, etc, by VV.AA. Paris: Deterville, 1816, pp. xiii–ixxix.

Further Readings Altschul, Nadia. Geographies of Philological Knowledge: Postcoloniality and the Transatlantic National Epic. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2012. A lucid, well-documented reading on Bello’s philological work that pays special attention to the issues of transmission, tradition, and translation.

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Jakšić, Iván. Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. ­Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A historical and biographical study on Andrés Bello by the greatest scholar of his work in recent times. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London & New York: Routledge, 1992. An essential text for understanding the movement of discourse and knowledge about the American continent in modern times. Chapters 6 (“Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America”) and 8 (“Reinventing America/Reinventing Europe: Creole Self-fashioning”) are especially recommended.

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2 From Romanticism to Modernism Translating Heine in Spanish America Andrea Pagni

Introduction: First Translations of Heine in Buenos Aires and Montevideo (1836–1838) With the end of the wars for independence and the gradual formation of new nation states in Spanish America, there was a marked increase, beginning in the 1820s, in the publication of newspapers and importation of European books and magazines, especially those from France and Spain, into the new Spanish American countries. Libraries were founded, reading rooms and new bookstores opened, and social spaces were created, like the Salón Literario in Buenos Aires. There was also an increase in translation activity as part of the new nations’ apparatus of cultural importation, eager to overcome the intellectual limitations imposed by the colonial regime. The Romantic journalism driven by Juan María Gutiérrez (1809–1878), Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851), Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), and other members of the Salón Literario (Pas 2008: 73 ff.) mapped out the idea of a social literature permeated with an Enlightenment attitude (Myers 1998), in tune with the French Romanticism of the moment and in contrast with the German Romanticism represented by Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), whose conversion to Catholicism and interest in Spanish literature were viewed as more than suspicious in the Río de la Plata region. The Enlightenment perspective of the Romantics of the Río de la Plata shares traits with that of the Jewish author Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), the only famous German writer who “for all his affinities with Romanticism, retains an undiluted concept of enlightenment,” according to Adorno (1991: 81). Aware of living in the midst of a crisis of values made evident by the deaths of Goethe (1749–1832) and Hegel (1770–1831), Heine was a mediator between the Romanticism of the first-half of the nineteenth century and the transformations that brought about its end in the second-half of the century, willing to relinquish the Romantic dream of unity and face social modernization and the economic market with eyes wide open, thus making way for the aesthetic and cultural modernity of the end of the century (Becker 2008: 290–294). Having attained rapid fame in Germany with the publication of his book of poems Buch der Lieder in 1827, Heine went into exile in Paris in 1831. In 1832, the Revue de Paris published the first translations of his travel notes, which arrived in the Río de la Plata region, where some fragments were translated into Spanish. In 1834, the French version of

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-4

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his travel writings appeared: Reisebilder. Tableaux de voyage, which also drew the interest of publicists in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In the preface of the French version, Heine says he wrote the book in the years leading up to the July Revolution of 1830, when anyone in Germany who dared defend the revolutionary ideals of 1789 was the object of persecution and censorship by the joint power of the church and the aristocracy (Heine 1978: 17–18, 1834: I–VII). It is no surprise that the Romantics of the Río de la Plata found similarities between Heine’s situation and their own, as opponents not only of the already defeated colonial regime but also of colonial structures that continued to exist in the new republics of the Río de la Plata. From what is currently known, the first translations of Heine published in Latin America appeared at the end of the 1830s in Río de la Plata newspapers in which Gutiérrez, Echeverría, and Alberdi collaborated: El Recopilador (Heine, “Extractos de un viaje: Napoleón y Wellington”; “Extractos de un viaje: Londres”) and Boletín Musical (Heine, “Rossini y Bellini”; “Bellini (Continuación)”), of Buenos Aires, and El Iniciador of Montevideo (Heine 1838).1 The three fragments are an indication of the circulation of Heine’s prose as part of what Jorge Myers calls “eclectic reading itineraries” (2004: 162), armed with the freedom granted to the Río de la Plata intellectuals by the distance that separated them from Europe. They did not read from the perspective of the European situation and tradition, but rather from their own situation as they conceived it (Myers 2004: 162–163). Thus, Juan María Gutiérrez expressed in his speech marking the inauguration of the Salón Literario in 1837 the desire that “nos familiaricemos con los idiomas extranjeros, y hagamos constante estudio de aclimatar al nuestro cuanto en aquéllos se produzca de bueno, interesante y bello” [we familiarize ourselves with foreign languages, and apply constant study to adapting to our own language all that is produced in them that is good, interesting, and beautiful], but always keeping in mind “nuestras necesidades y exigencias” [our needs and demands] and crafting a literature that is national by virtue of its language, themes, and concerns (Gutiérrez: 145–146). In El Iniciador, an article titled “Emancipación de la lengua” [Emancipation of the language], attributed to Juan Bautista Alberdi (Pas 2013: 241), maintains that “es necesario abandonar la estructura española de la lengua que hablamos, y darla [sic] una forma americana” [it is necessary to abandon the Spanish structure of the language we speak, and give it an American form], imitating forms from the French language, but taking care not to import that which is unique to the French spirit (Alberdi 1838: 224–225). It was also through translation that the project of American cultural independence of the first Romantics of the Río de la Plata was taking shape; the translations of Heine represent moments in that process, and they are also specific episodes in the history of the German writer’s reception in Latin America, which would reach its peak in the final quarter of the century, starting with the translation of his poetry in the 1860s. In addition to contributing to the creation of a literary language emancipated from peninsular Spanish, translation played a role in building a body of literature for the new nations. In the prologue of his Spanish version of a book by Louis Figuier about the history of modern discovery, the Argentine essayist and politician Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–1888) writes in 1854: Los libros, que son almacenes del saber, no vienen preparados para nosotros i tales como los necesitamos, es decir, en nuestro idioma, i para la lectura común. Los libros necesitamos hacerlos en casa, i ya que nuestro saber no alcance a crear los conocimientos de que son conductores i propagadores, podemos, vaciando, por decirlo así, en nuestro idioma, los tesones que en este genero poseen otras naciones, hacer nuestro el trabajo de todo el mundo. (Payàs 2007: 38) 31

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[Books, which are storehouses of knowledge, do not come prepared for us just as we need them, that is, in our language, and for everyone’s reading. We need to make books at home, and until our scholarship is able to create the knowledge that they carry and share, we can, by pouring, so to speak, into our own language, the tenacity that other nations possess in this regard, make the work of all the world our own]. Commenting on these ideas from Sarmiento, Gertrudis Payàs observes that una sociedad que traduce no es, a priori, como podría creerse, una sociedad que depende de lo que otras producen, sino que es una sociedad dinámica, abierta al exterior. Su creatividad se manifiesta, sin duda, en producción propia, pero su voracidad intelectual y capacidad de asimilación de lo exterior se expresa en las traducciones. (Payás 2007: 38) [a society that translates is not, a priori, as one might imagine, a society that depends on what others produce, but is rather a dynamic, outward-looking society. Its creativity is manifested, undoubtedly, in its own production, but its intellectual voracity and its capacity for assimilation of what is foreign is expressed in translations].

Heine’s Lyrical Self Travels to Spanish America The Romantics of the Río de la Plata, who were engaged in the endeavor of building new nations, rejected, like Heine, German Romantic intimism, which they saw as disconnected from politics. Heine’s Reisebilder—the travel writings that were promptly published in French translation, and from which some excerpts were translated in the Río de la Plata region—put an end in Germany, with their digressive, referential, and sarcastic style, to the aesthetic autonomy of the era of Goethe, which also includes Romanticism. Heine’s poetry, seemingly intimist and sentimental, took on a political function by repeating as parody the sentimental clichés of German Romanticism (Preisendanz 2015: 228). Adorno observes that Heine, who could no longer ignore the violence of capitalist society, does not go so far as to articulate, like Baudelaire, the archetypes of modernity, but applies to the conventional Romantic archetypes the technique of reproduction that corresponded to the logic of the industrial age (Adorno 1991: 82). In the process that led to the shaping of Romantic lyrical subjectivity in Spanish America over the course of the nineteenth century (Monteleone 2003), translation fulfilled a significant role because, on the one hand, it evidently constituted a practice of poetic writing; on the other hand, faced with the priority of civic duties and obligations of the state, it legitimized the expansion of the intimacy of a lyrical subject that was articulated through two voices, and as was very often the case with indirect translations from French, through three voices. The voice of the translator very often goes unnoticed, hidden behind the mask of the translated poet. The reception of Heine’s poetry in Spanish America began some ten years after the publication of those excerpts from his prose that were translated in the Río de la Plata region, when a significant body of his poems were translated into French prose by Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) and published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in July and September of 1848 (Nerval, “Les Poésies de Henri Heine”; “L’Intermezzo”). While there were some previous translations of poems by Heine into French, it was this version by Nerval that served as the model for most of the indirect translations that were published in Spain and Spanish America 32

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in the second-half of the nineteenth century. Unlike the swift translation of his travel writings, the translation of Heine’s poetry to French was a slower process, which culminated in the prose versions completed by Gérard de Nerval in collaboration with Heine himself. In the French tradition of the belles infidèles, translation in verse had to respect the rules of French meter, untethered from the obligation of fidelity; translation of poetry in prose, meanwhile, was standard practice when a foreign text was being presented as a source of documentation (Lombez 2009: 101–102). When creating a prose translation of Heine, who strictly forbade that his poetry be translated within the strict confines of French meter, Nerval did not adhere to textual literalness, but rather experimented with the poetic potential of French prose and thus cleared the way for prose poetry and the prosodic liberty that would lead to free verse (Lombez 2009: 96). Nerval’s translations accentuated the intensity of Heine’s poetic images but neglected the unmasking gesture (Höllerer 2004: 115–116), the contrast between lyrical expressiveness and ironic contrast (Preisendanz 1991: 103). The irony of Heine views the lyrical subject, who is represented rather than expressed, from a place of superiority, functionally incorporating the reader as an uninvolved and distant observer, who is therefore shocked and alarmed by this irony; Nerval by contrast restores in his translations the expressiveness and immediacy of the lyrical subject and excludes the reader (Stierle 1967: 56–57), offering only the possibility of an emotional identification. By not capturing the willfully inauthentic gesture, the unmasking of that which the lyrical subject evokes, the version by Nerval, the one most commonly translated into Spanish, both in Spain and in the Americas, excludes weapons in the fight against sentimentality (Höllerer 2004: 139), that aspect of the Romantic subject against which Heine writes his poems. Thus, Nerval’s translation removes political gesturing from Heine’s poetry. Something similar occurred with the translations into Spanish. In 1857, Heine’s poetry arrived in Spain through a selection of fifteen poems from the “Lyrisches Intermezzo” by Eulogio Florentino Sanz (1822–1881), translated directly from German and published in Madrid, in the Museo Universal (Sanz 1857). In the following years, twenty-three translations and imitations of Heine by Augusto Ferrán were released (1835–1880) (Ferrán 1861, 1873).2 Unlike Nerval, Sanz and Ferrán translated Heine in verse; like Nerval, they conveyed the sentimental expressiveness of the lyrical subject, but not the sarcasm, the irony, and the parody (Gómez García 2008). Sanz’s and Ferrán’s translations opened the door to the poetry of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870) when they formally opted for the brevity, assonance, metric combinations, and the musicality of Heine’s verse, in opposition to the rhetorical pomposity that characterized the Spanish poetry of the day. The last of these features was, however, that which generally served as a model for the widespread translations in verse produced in Spain based on the Nerval versions—by Mariano Gil Sanz (1867), Manuel Fernández y González (1873), and José J. Herrero (1883), among others—and for Spanish American versions such as those of Peruvian Ricardo Palma (1833–1919), translated beginning in the 1860s and published in 1886. When Heine’s poems arrived in Spanish America in German or in Nerval’s French translation, they did so devoid of the specific context of their production and translation (Bourdieu 2002: 4). The Spanish American translators incorporated the poetry of Heine into the process of creating a poetic language in a very different historical, cultural, and literary framework from which he was writing in Germany during the 1820s and from which they were translated in France in 1848. While the reception in Spain that inspired the poetry of Bécquer captured the musicality and emotional dimension of Heine’s poetry, readers in Spanish America also saw the contradiction, the ambiguity, and the irony embedded in a poetry of double meaning, even if the translations did not always succeed in representing them.3 33

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Translating Heine in the Contact Zone: Spanish American Exile in New York The poetry of Heine reached its Spanish American translators in German not only from Europe but also from and in the United States. Between 1855 and 1856, the first German edition of the complete works of Heine was published in seven volumes in Philadelphia, “the first reasonably accurate and complete collected edition to appear,” a widely distributed pirated edition, with five printings by 1860 and 18,000 sets sold in the United States by 1864 (Sammons 111).4 Two important Spanish American translators of Heine lived in New York in the final decades of the nineteenth century, and it was there that they produced and published their translations. Cuban Francisco Sellén (1836–1907) and Venezuelan Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde (1846–1892) formed part of the community of exiles who arrived in New York from Cuba starting in 1868, with the beginning of the Ten Years’ War, and from Venezuela starting in 1870 and during the various stages of the dictatorial government of Antonio Guzmán Blanco. Within that circle, a network of intellectuals who were linked to printing culture took shape, whose participants included bookseller, editor, and writer Néstor Ponce de León, essayist, historian, and publicist Enrique Piñeyro, poets and translators Antonio and Francisco Sellén, educator Luis Felipe Mantilla, and literature professor and physician Luis A. Baralt, among other exiled Cubans, the most prominent of whom was José Martí. The Venezuelans in the group included, in addition to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, poet and politician Jacinto Gutiérrez Coll and writer and journalist Nicanor Bolet Peraza, who would be the editor of the Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York from 1885 to 1890, in which the Sellén brothers, Pérez Bonalde, and Néstor Ponce de León published, and where Martí’s “Nuestra América” would also appear (Ameal Pérez 2015). From the second volume of the pirated German edition of Heine in the 1865 press run, Francisco Sellén translated “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” which he published in New York in 1875 in the printing house and bookstore of Néstor Ponce de León. In the “Introducción” Sellén presents his version as the first complete translation into Spanish in verse, translated directly from the German, distinguishing it from other existing versions. Concerning the translation by Manuel Fernández y González (Madrid 1873), he writes that it was done based on the French version in prose by Gérard de Nerval and comments that no es posible hacer una buena traducción en verso sobre un texto en prosa: la forma poética influye mucho en esta clase de trabajos; el ritmo, el metro, la melodía del original, todo lo que constituye, en fin, el ropaje de la poesía, sirven á veces de gran auxilio al que intenta trasladar en verso, en el idioma nativo, una obra poética extraña. [...] El estilo es lo que hace vivir á las producciones literarias, y las salva del olvido. (Sellén “Introducción” 18–19) [it is not possible to do an adequate translation in verse based on a text in prose: the poetic form greatly influences this sort of work; the rhythm, the meter, the melody of the original, all that comprises it, in short, the garments of the poetry, are at times of great service to he who seeks to translate in verse, into his native language, a work of foreign poetry... Style is what makes literary productions live and saves them from oblivion]. Regarding the version by Mariano Gil Sanz published in El Museo Universal in 1867 and cited by Fernández y González in his introduction, Sellén writes: “... el Sr. Gil Sanz emplea 20 34

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versos para expresar lo que en el original se dice en seis, en el Lied marcado con el número III.” [in the Lied marked with the number III, Mr. Gil Sanz employs twenty verses to express what the original does in six] (“Introducción” 19). He goes on to praise the poetry of Intermezzo “admirably” translated by Eulogio Florentino Sanz and “una traducción en prosa del Intermezzo, fiel, elegante y completa, hecha sobre el texto original por mi amigo el Sr. Néstor Ponce de León” [a faithful, elegant, and complete prose translation of Intermezzo, based on the original by my friend Mr. Néstor Ponce de León], published in 1866 in Revista del Pueblo, in Havana (“Introducción” 20). In summary: compared with the translation by Fernández y González, his is direct; compared with the one by Gil Sanz, it is concise; compared with Sanz’s, it is complete; unlike the one by Ponce de León, it is in verse. In that same “Introducción,” Sellén presents Heine as a poet who knows how to “maridar felizmente las formas de la poesía popular con el arte supremo del artista; tierno, apasionado, original, irónico ahora, sarcástico luego, complaciéndose en destruir con un rasgo, con una palabra, la emoción que había despertado” [happily marry the forms of popular poetry with the supreme art of the artist; tender, passionate, original, first ironic, then sarcastic, delighting in destroying, with a word, the emotion he had aroused] (“Introducción” 7–8). He explains that he had managed to strictly adhere to the text to the extent that “el génio y la índole peculiar de idiomas tan distintos como el castellano y el alemán” [the genius and peculiar nature of languages so distinct as Spanish and German] permitted, and he highlights that, with a few exceptions, he had tried to reproduce the same form, meter, and number of verses as the original (“Introducción” 20). According to Francisco Díaz Solar, Sellén developed as a translator, possibly influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher, a “poetic literalism,” which on some occasions drove him to stilted solutions, but on others led him to create metric innovations and craft a verse that was tense and often approaching the dissonance of current poetry (2004: 48–49). In 1877, Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde published, also in New York, a new version of “Lyrisches Intermezzo” translated in verse directly from German. The translation, separated clearly from the body of his own poems, is preceded by an introduction written by the Cuban critic Luis A. Baralt, who could not have been unaware of the version by Sellén published two years before, and who holds that Pérez Bonalde’s “es la única traducción completa y fiel, á la vez que correcta, elegante y artística que exista en verso castellano” [is the only existing complete and faithful translation in Spanish verse that is at once correct, elegant, and artistic]. He observes that Pérez Bonalde “se resolvió, á sacrificar en algunos casos la forma al fondo... preservando así no sólo el pensamiento del poeta, sino al mismo tiempo la lozanía y galanura de que está revestido el original” [decided to sacrifice form in favor of content in some cases... thus preserving not only the thought of the poet, but at the same time the vigor and elegance that characterizes the original], in such a way that his version “es á veces libre, pero siempre fiel; a menudo literal, pero nunca servil ni prosaica” [is at times free, but always faithful, often literal, but never servile nor prosaic] (Baralt 1877: 167–168). Taking into consideration the paratextual strategies of the day, which evaluated translations in comparison with existing ones, these statements from Baralt could imply a hidden criterion of distinction regarding Sellén’s equally complete, faithful, and correct, but perhaps less elegant and artistic, translation. In reference to the peculiarity of Heine’s poetry, Baralt highlights “el placer que parece experimentar en destruir con una sola frase, con una palabra, el efecto que había producido... el sentimiento que había despertado en nuestro corazón” [the pleasure he seems to derive from destroying with a single phrase, with a word, the effect he had produced... the feeling that he had awakened in our heart], and calls attention to the unexpected and ingenious endings of many of his poems (1877: 169). Baralt would not have emphasized these 35

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features of Heine’s poetry had he not considered that the translation by Pérez Bonalde took them into account. In 1885, also in New York, Pérez Bonalde published El Cancionero, translated directly from Buch der Lieder, for which he partially reworked his 1877 version of “Intermezzo lírico.” In his prologue, laconically titled “Una traducción,” he explains that his objective in translating Heine had been to contribute “al aumento y enriquecimiento de la literatura de mi patria y de mi lengua” [to the elevation and enrichment of the literature of my country and of my language] (“Una traducción” X). As with the Romantics of the Río de la Plata, translation was for Pérez Bonalde, at the beginnings of Modernism, a path toward the enrichment of the Spanish language in the Americas and of American literature, specifically Venezuelan literature in his case. He also makes explicit, like Sellén, the criterion of formal fidelity that guides his translation, which pretende ser fidelísima, no sólo en las ideas y sentimientos, en la intención profunda y poderosa individualidad poética del autor, sino también en la forma, conservándole á la estrofa su original estructura, y observando, en gran número de casos, el mismo metro, el mismo ritmo y hasta la misma disposición de la rima; todo esto, tratando al mismo ­t iempo de preservar la frescura y espontaneidad de la inspiración teutónica, y de ­m antener limpia de extraño urdimbre la soltura del verso y el idioma castellanos. (“Una traducción” VI) [seeks to be highly faithful, not only in the ideas and sentiments, in the deep intention and formidable individuality of the author, but also in the form, preserving the stanza in its original structure, and observing, in a great number of cases, the same meter, the same rhythm, and even the same rhyme scheme; all of this, while trying at once to preserve the freshness and spontaneity of the Teutonic inspiration, and to keep the fluidity of Spanish verse and language free of foreign cadence]. And like Sellén, he underscores the difficulties arising from translating “en verso castellano de una lengua tan diametralmente opuesta a la española como la germana; de una lengua emi­nentemente sintética y monosilábica, a una esencialmente parafrástica y polisilábica” [into Spanish verse from a language so diametrically opposed as German is to Spanish: from an eminently synthetic and monosyllabic language to one that is essentially paraphrastic and polysyllabic] (“Una traducción” V–VI). In an essay titled “Enrique Heine,” which follows this paratext on questions of translation, Pérez Bonalde presents the German poet with his contradictions as a starting point: desdeñaba el sentimiento, y la belleza le hacía derramar lágrimas... tenía un aguijón para cada virtud y un bálsamo para cada dolor; era escéptico absoluto en la fe y profundamente religioso en el arte... Nada, excepto la belleza, fue sagrado para su sátira; se deleitaba en arrastrar por el suelo las cosas aceptadas como santas, y cuando el público se escandalizaba, se complacía entonces de nuevo haciéndole ver que no eran joyas verdaderas, sino únicamente despreciables imitaciones en vidriecillos de color. (“Enrique Heine” XIII–XV) [he disdained sentiment, and beauty brought him to tears... he had a stinger for every virtue and a balm for every pain; he was an absolute skeptic of faith and profoundly religious about art. [...] Nothing, except beauty, was so sacred as to be safe from his satire; 36

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he delighted in dragging upon the ground those things accepted as holy, and when the public was scandalized, he took pleasure once more in making them see that these were not true gems, but purely contemptible stained-glass imitations]. Bonalde’s two paratexts are preceded by a dedication to his patron Edward Kemp,5 who financed the edition, a prologue by the German Hispanic philologist Juan Fastenrath, a letter from Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, and a second dedication to the last of those listed. Fastenrath compares the translation of Pérez Bonalde with Italian versions and with some of the already mentioned translations into Spanish, and he deems it highly faithful (Fastenrath 1885: xxviii). The German philologist places in the mouth of a resuscitated Heine the comparison of Pérez Bonalde with the Italian translator Zendrini, and, criticizing some isolated aspects of the translation, concludes: “en la mayor parte de los casos, el metro, el ritmo, la acentuación, la disposición de la rima, es exactamente la misma en el original y en la versión del Sr. Pérez Bonalde” [in most cases, the meter, rhythm, accents, and the rhyme scheme, are exactly the same in the original and in the version by Mr. Pérez Bonalde], which he considers “la más poética y la más fiel de cuantas se han hecho al castellano” [the most poetic and most faithful of all those that have been translated into Spanish] (xxxv; emphasis in the original). Menéndez Pelayo, who had written a preface to the indirect version by José J. Herrero two years before, also praises in his letter the fidelity of the translation compared with others, including the best, which he considers “paraphrastic, audacious, and extremely free, because they do not devote the proper attention to the rhythm, to the more extensive form, to the melodious placement of the words” (Menéndez Pelayo 1885: xli). While Pérez Bonalde was translating the Buch der Lieder in New York, Valencian Teodoro Llorente (1836–1911) was doing so in Spain. His direct version appeared in 1885 in Barcelona with the title Libro de los Cantares with a dedication to Juan Fastenrath, “great friend of Spain and propagator of Spanish letters in Germany” (Libro de los Cantares). In his extensive prologue Llorente presents Heine, “caballero andante del Espíritu Santo” [knight errant of the Holy Spirit], as a naive politician in his political prose, but an inspired bard in his early poetry (“Enrique Heine y su Libro de los Cantares” xxxviii). Llorente reviews the Spanish translators of Heine and finally states his intention to “make Heine Spanish,” for which “hay que adivinar cómo hubiera dicho en castellano el autor alemán lo que se intenta traducir, si en lugar de su idioma natal hubiera hablado el nuestro” [one must figure out how the German author would have said in Spanish that which is meant to be translated, should he have, instead of his native tongue, spoken our own], and he formulates the question he considers rhetorical: “¿Sería buena traducción aquella, que, no por los pensamientos expresados, sino por la forma de la dicción, nos advirtiese de qué lengua estaba hecha?” [Would good translation be that which, not for the thoughts expressed, but rather for the style of diction, informed us what language it came from? ] (“Enrique Heine y su Libro de los Cantares” l–lii).

Ways of Translating Heine The poetics of translation varies depending on the goals of the translators, laid out in their respective prologues. Llorente set out to Hispanicize Heine and incorporate him into the heritage of Spanish poetry by translating him into the Spanish poetic system; Sellén translated German poetry “on foreign beaches” thinking about Cuba to contribute to the progress of its “nascent literature” (1881: V–VI), maintaining, as much as possible, the form of Heine’s poems. Pérez Bonalde translated to enrich the language and literature of his homeland, respecting the freshness and spontaneity of Heine without detriment to the poetic language he 37

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sought to enrich. In line with the two ways of translating set forth by Schleimacher in 1813, Sellén and Pérez Bonalde wanted to expose Spanish American readers to the poetry of Heine by preserving Heine’s diction as much as possible, while Llorente wanted to bring the poetry of Heine closer to the Spanish reader by hispanicizing “the style of diction.” To understand how these differences are reflected in the respective translations, this chapter will compare the first two stanzas of the prologue to the “Intermezzo lírico” in the translations by Sellén, Pérez Bonalde, and Llorente with the German text. The objective is not to determine if one translation is better than another, but to understand why the translators chose one strategy or another, and to understand how these translations function within their respective literary fields. Heine (1981, I: 74) writes: 1

5

10

Es war mal ein Ritter trübselig und stumm, Mit hohlen, schneeweißen Wangen; Er schwankte und schlenderte schlotternd herum, In dumpfen Träumen befangen. Er war so hölzern, so täppisch, so links, Die Blümlein und Mägdlein die kicherten rings, Wenn er stolpernd vorbeigegangen.

There once was a knight so afflicted with care, So silent, with cheeks white and haggard, He stumbled and bumbled he didn’t know where, In a gloomy trance he staggered. He was so wooden, so clumsy, so daft, The flowers and maidens giggled and laughed As they passed the blundering laggard.

Oft saß er im finstersten Winkel zu Haus; Er hat sich vor Menschen verkrochen. Da streckte er sehnend die Arme aus, Doch hat er kein Wörtlein gesprochen. Kam aber die Mitternachtsstunde heran, Ein seltsames Singen und Klingen begann – An die Türe da hört er es pochen

He often sat home in the gloomiest nook; With the world of men he had broken. He stretched out his arms with a yearning look, Yet never a word would be spoken. But soon as the hour of midnight came round, A singing and ringing would strangely resound – A knock on the door was the token (Heine 1982: 51, tr. H. Draper)

For this poem, Heine utilizes a relatively complex seven-verse stanza from the medieval popular tradition, which gained broad distribution after Luther adopted it in the sixteenth century for hymn texts. Verses 1, 3, 5, and 6 are in iambic tetrameter, and the rest are in iambic trimeter; the consonant rhyme follows the scheme A-B-A-B-C-C-B/X, A and C always being masculine, and B, feminine. Heine makes ironic use of this stanza by employing it for a sardonic poem. Below are, respectively, the translations of Sellén (Intermezzo lírico 25), Pérez Bonalde (El Cancionero 143), and Llorente (Libro de los Cantares 91):

1 Érase un caballero silencioso; pálido, triste, el rostro demacrado; tambaleaba en su andar, lento, dudoso, siempre en locos ensueños abismado. 5 Un poste tan sin gracia y desairado, que muchachas y flores sonreían, siempre que junto á ellas le veían pasar, medio dormido y desgarbado.

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1 Érase un caballero macilento 1 Era un hidalgo sombrío, Trémulo, triste, silencioso y lento, de faz adusta y siniestra, Que vagaba al acaso, que pálido y silencioso Con inseguro paso, vagaba con planta incierta, 5 Siempre en hondos ensueños sumergido, 5 lleno el pecho de suspiros, Tan desairado, y zurdo y distraído llena el alma de quimeras. Que susurraban flores y doncellas Era tan arisco y fosco Al pasar, vacilante, junto a ellas. Que al verlo pasar, malévolas, mirábanse y sonreían

Translating Heine in Spanish America

De su hogar en la estancia más sombría, 10 de los hombres oculto, se sentaba: 10 suspirando, los brazos extendía; ni siquiera un acento pronunciaba. Llega la medianoche: resonaba misterioso concierto de sonidos 15 y cánticos extraños, nunca oidos, 15 y álguien quedo en la puerta golpes daba.

Huyendo de los hombres a menudo, El lugar más recóndito escogía De la casa, y allí, anhelante y mudo, En la sombra los brazos extendía. ¡Media noche sonó!... Rara armonía Y voces peregrinas se escucharon Entre la vaga bruma, Y a la puerta quedísimo tocaron.

las flores y las doncellas. 10 En el rincón más oscuro de su lóbrega vivienda, recatándose de todos, pasaba la noche entera. 15 Ambos los brazos al cielo levantaba con frecuencia, sin decir una palabra, sin murmurar una queja. Pero, al tocar medianoche, 20 escuchábanse allá fuera acordados instrumentos, coros de voces angélicas, y al poco rato llamaban blandos golpes á la puerta.

Heine’s rhyme scheme is translated by Sellén in octaves with hendecasyllabic verses and the rhyme scheme A-B-A-B-B-C-C-B. The fixed accentuation of the sixth and tenth syllables produces a rhythm based on iambs. Forgoing a fixed strophic scheme, Pérez Bonalde translates in silvas, a poetic form consisting of an indefinite series of heptasyllabic and hendecasyllabic verses with consonant rhyme and no fixed rhyme scheme. The separation of stanzas is in keeping with the strophic division of Heine, but in the translation, the stanzas have a variable number of lines, and the rhyme may continue into the following one, as happens here with the penultimate line of the second stanza, where “Entre la vaga bruma”—an extension that generates the only heptasyllabic line in the stanza—rhymes with “espuma” and “perfuma” in the following stanza. Llorente domesticates Heine’s prologue by translating it in the meter of a romance and extends it by incorporating the very typical parallelisms of the romance (vv. 5–6; 17–18). The medieval popular origin of the stanza used by Heine justifies the metric choice by Llorente, who wanted to Hispanicize Heine. None of the translators achieves the ironic effect produced by using a liturgical stanza for this poem. The strophic and accent scheme of Sellén is, of the three, the one that most resembles the model of Heine. Llorente, by contrast, incorporates Heine’s poem into the Spanish tradition of the romance. The silva that Pérez Bonalde translates into allows him to experiment with the rhythm and melody, as he need not adhere to a fixed scheme to approximate Heine, like Sellén, or the Spanish tradition, like Llorente. On the semantic level, we see that the tone of distant mockery with which Heine’s speaker presents the “blöden Ritter” [foolish rider]—as he referred to him in the title of his initial 1821 version—(“so hölzern, so täppisch, so links,” translated by H. Draper as “so wooden, so clumsy, so daft”) is taken up again by Sellén (“Un poste tan sin gracia y desairado” [a half-wit so plain and disregarded]) and by Pérez Bonalde (“Tan desairado y zurdo y distraído” [so disregarded and graceless and distracted]), while the “hidalgo” [gentleman] in the version by Llorente is “sombrío” [somber], “arisco y fosco” [sullen and surly], of “faz adusta y siniestra” [severe and sinister countenance], but never ridiculous. Therefore, the damsels who “mirábanse y sonreían” [looked at each other and smiled] are “malévolas” [malicious], an adjective added by the translator to justify the conduct of the damsels toward the gentleman. The translation of “Ritter” as “hidalgo” [gentleman] instead of “caballero” [knight] is another feature of domestication; in the same way, the parallelism “lleno el pecho de suspiros/llena el alma de quimeras” [his bosom full of sighs/ his soul full of chimeras] where Heine’s poem only speaks of vague dreams (“dumpfen 39

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Träumen,” translated by H. Draper as “gloomy trance”) emphasizes the reference to Don Quixote. Llorente incorporates, furthermore, a religious isotopy absent in Heine’s poem: the “hidalgo” lifted “los brazos al cielo” [his arms to the heavens], the voices that were heard were “angélicas” (vv. 15, 22), and later an exclamation is added: “¡ay Dios!” Through these devices, Llorente manages to Hispanicize Heine (“Enrique Heine y su Libro de los Cantares” lii). It is precisely this feature of the translation that Menéndez Pelayo highlights when he writes to Llorente that, “comparadas ambas traducciones, hallo la de V. en conjunto más poética, mejor versificada, más agradable de leer, y en suma más ‘castellanizada’” [in comparing both translations, I find yours to be overall more poetic, better versed, more pleasant to read, and, on the whole, more ‘hispanicized’]; from his point of view, “el mayor empeño del traductor debe consistir en que los poetas traducidos hablen en la lengua a donde pasan con la misma espontaneidad y soltura que en la propia” [the greatest task of the translator should be for the translated poets to speak in the target language with the same spontaneity and ease as in their own] (Corbin Llorente 2013: 177, qtd. in Atalaya Fernández 2018: 196). The Spanish novelist Juan Valera (1824–1905), Minister of Spain in Washington from 1884 to 1886, who had contact with Pérez Bonalde in New York, judged El Cancionero the “obra de un desmañado imitador de Bécquer, sin chiste, sin estilo poético y con rarezas y extravagancias tan tontas, que pensará usted que no tiene sano el juicio” [work of a clumsy imitator of Bécquer, without poetic style, and so foolishly strange and bizarre, that you will surely think he has taken leave of his sanity], as he writes in his letter dated March 26, 1886 to Menéndez Pelayo (qtd. in Flores Requejo 2015: 169). From his point of view, the translator to Spanish should “escribir una obra que parezca original y espontánea, y que guste a los españoles” [write a work that seems original and spontaneous, and that will please Spaniards]. He finds El Cancionero, at first glance, to be insufferable; in his eyes, Pérez Bonalde belongs to the group of “los traductores mecánicos y fieles que traducen escrupulosamente, pero dejándose la gracia, el chiste, el quid divinum del original en el tintero” [mechanical translators who translate scrupulously, but neglect the humor, the wit, the quid divinum in the original inkwell] (Valera, qtd. in Flores Requejo 2015: 167). Those things the Spanish critics found in the version by Pérez Bonalde to be so foolishly strange and bizarre, less enjoyable to read, were the result of reading a poetic language that did not adhere to their expectations. That which detracts, in Valera’s view, from Pérez Bonalde’s translation, is a symptom of the Spanish American difference that this translation inscribes at the beginnings of Modernism. While Llorente’s translation “preserves the state his own language happens to be in,” Sellén and Pérez Bonalde translated with the awareness that through translation it is possible “to expand and deepen [their] language by means of the foreign language,” according to Rudolf Pannwitz’s statement cited by Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator” (2002: 262). They thus advanced the transformation of the language and literary system that Juan María Gutiérrez and Juan Bautista Alberdi had laid out at the end of the 1830s. Pérez Bonalde’s translation practices were not limited to transforming the language of translation. Like Llorente, he also incorporates Heine into another culture through translation, but not into a canonical and established system such as that of Spanish popular poetry; Pérez Bonalde’s translation projects the imagery of Heine onto a literary context and a poetic language in the making. A comparison of the poem “Intemezzo lírico” with Heine’s poem allows us to analyze the Modernist translation practices of Pérez Bonalde:

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Lyrisches Intermezzo, XLVI

Lyrical Intermezzo, 46

1

Es leuchtet meine Liebe, In ihrer dunklen Pracht Wie’n Märchen traurig und trübe, Erzählt in der Sommernacht.

1 In all her dusky splendor My love shines on my sight Like a story, sad and tender, Told on a summer night.

5

“Im Zaubergarten wallen Zwei Buhlen, stumm und allein; Es singen die Nachtigallen, Es flimmert der Mondschein.

5 “In a garden of magic, clinging Two lovers walk mutely by The nightingales are singing The moon shimmers in the sky.

Intermezzo lírico, LI 1 Aparece mi amor triste, y sin glorias, en su esplendor sombrío, como una de esas trágicas historias que se recitan bajo el cielo espléndido 5 de las noches de estío:

“Por encantado bosque se pasean dos callados amantes; los ruiseñores, trémulos, gorjean, y la luna derrama en la alta bóveda Die Jungfrau steht still wie ein Bildnis, “The maiden is standing and blushing, 10 sus perlas y diamantes. 10 Der Ritter vor ihr kniet. 10 The knight is on his knees. Da kommt der Riese der Wildnis, Upon them a giant comes rushing, Inmóvil como un cuadro está la hermosa, Die bange Jungfrau flieht. The timid maiden flees. y él a sus pies postrado... En esto surge de la selva hojosa “The knight sinks wounded and gory, el gigante, y la dama escapa, trémula, The giant reels back to his cave –” 15 cual pájaro asustado... 15 There’ll be an end to this story When I am in my grave. El caballero cae en sangre tinto, y cantando victoria, se retira el gigante a su recinto...”. Mi cuerpo helado en el angosto féretro, (tr. H. Draper) 20 será el fin de la historia!

While the translation respects the number of stanzas, the quatrains in iambic trimeter with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes are converted in Pérez Bonalde’s translation to stanzas of five heptasyllabic and hendecasyllabic verses in AbACb, C being always accented on the antepenultimate syllable. The metric scheme of the translation is decidedly artistic, while Heine’s meter abides by German popular poetry. Pérez Bonalde could have resorted to the traditional octosyllabic line, as did Llorente (Libro de los Cantares, 120) and Herrero (1883: 50) when they translated this poem in five-line stanzas in a-b-a-a-b rhyme, or Mariano Gil Sanz when he translated it as a romance (Sanz 1867), but the Venezuelan translator chose to create for this poem a strophic scheme that emphasized the artistic and literary aspect instead of the popular and oral dimension that Heine was interested in referencing. Sellén, meanwhile, maintained the four-line stanzas: the first three are octosyllabic, the fourth hendecasyllabic, with masculine consonant rhyme in the even lines. At the semantic level, one may observe a similar displacement: in Heine’s poem, the lyrical subject compares his love—and his poem—to a “Märchen,” a fairytale from the German popular tradition, shared within families; Pérez Bonalde compares it to “tragic stories that are recited”—a modality, declamation, which was typical for the transmission and reception of poetry in Spain and Spanish America during the second-half of the nineteenth century (Urrutia 1995: 9), and that refers to a different social framework from the one that appears in Heine’s poem. Consistent with his strategy of domestication, Llorente translates into the Spanish context of popular medieval poetry: “cual canto conmovedor/ que refiere un trovador” [like the stirring song/told by a troubadour] (vv. 3–4); and Sellén, closer to Heine: “fantástica historia/que se oye... contar” [fantastic story/that is heard told] (1875: 56).

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The stereotyped topography of Heine, the enchanted garden with a nightingale and moonlight, is enlarged, moving it toward Modernist topography in Pérez Bonalde’s version: “y la luna derrama en la alta bóveda/sus perlas y diamantes” [and the moon pours into the high vault/its diamonds and pearls] (vv. 7–8). The “Zaubergarten” [magic garden] becomes “encantado bosque” [enchanted wood] (v. 6), and the giant emerges from the “selva hojosa” [leafy forest] (v. 13). Llorente chooses an everyday scene, neither stylized nor magical, consistent with the tradition into which he was translating: “un jardín lleno de flores” (v. 6) [a garden full of flowers], a “huerto” [orchard] (v. 13), and Sellén, closer to Heine, translates it as “jardín encantado” (v. 5) [enchanted garden]. This brief comparison of several aspects of many other possibilities demonstrates that deviation from the original is not just a question of details, let alone errors or misunderstandings. Neither Llorente nor Pérez Bonalde, perhaps unlike Sellén, conceived of translation as serving the original. Llorente translated Heine to incorporate him into the Spanish-language tradition; Pérez Bonalde, who was a very lucid poet and edited his translations carefully, could have stayed closer to the original German, as Sellén sought to do. If he did not do so, it was because his objective of enriching American language and literature was stronger than his aim to reproduce Heine’s diction. Pérez Bonalde and Llorente visibly transformed Heine’s text in their respective versions without their translations being seen as unfaithful by the translators themselves and contemporary critics because of that fact. In the context of the translation discourse of the nineteenth century, fidelity, which constituted a central criterion of the quality of a translation, was defined by comparison with the widespread paraphrastic versions. But even leaving that aspect aside, the deviation is explained by keeping in mind that the function of the translations within their respective cultural and literary fields differs from that fulfilled by the original text within its own culture.

Conclusion: Heine and His Spanish American Translators at the Outset of Modernization With Buch der Lieder, Heine moves away from German Romanticism. Pérez Bonalde, who obviously had no need to distance himself from German Romanticism, instead distances himself with his own translation as much from contemporary Spanish lyric poetry and its pathetic-sentimental language, evident in the various indirect translations of Heine, as from late-Romantic poetry written in Spanish America. The Venezuelan translator was in search of a new poetic language. While Heine ironically cited German Romanticism, Pérez Bonalde, of course, did not seek to repeat that gesture or ironically cite the Spanish or Spanish American lyric poetry of his time and thus in some way preserve it, as Heine did with German Romanticism, but rather he sought to displace and dispose of it through the creation of a new language. Llorente, meanwhile, did not seek to recreate late-Romantic poetic language, but to transmit Heine in Spanish form, using the established language and imagery he had at his disposal. Additionally, the clichés of German popular poetry cited by Heine—the enchanted garden, the nightingale, and the moon; the damsel, the knight, and the giant—were not seen that way in the Spanish American cultural sphere. In the literary language of Pérez Bonalde, they were not clichés, and that made it almost impossible to achieve the same ironic distance that Heine establishes from the tradition he was citing. It was specifically that topography that was perceived in Spanish America as artificial and exotic, which fascinated the Spanish American Modernists, while in Germany, the poetry of Heine was beginning to be perceived as sentimental and superficial. 42

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the new German poets—Hofmannsthal, George, Rilke—were dreaming of autonomy again, and they removed from lyric poetry the language of commodity and exchange that Heine had incorporated when he could no longer ignore the violence that capitalist expansion was inflicting on literature (Adorno 1991: 82). From today’s perspective, however, Heine is viewed as one of the founders of the literary Modernism that Hofmannsthal, George, and Rilke represent in German-language poetry. Drawing on his experience in Paris, Heine infers the disorientation of the traditional poet in the big city and the inadequacy of his or her literary resources and artistic conception for market conditions. Anguish no longer belonged to the individual; it was a social and historical phenomenon: the city demanded another way of writing, Sabina Becker contends in an apt diagnosis of Heine as the founder of modern German poetry (2008: 295–297). In the midst of a redefinition of the place of literature in relation to the new economic structures that made them subject to the circumstances of the market (Rama 1985: 55), Spanish American writers were also faced with the task of renegotiating their cultural status, newly in a framework of growing internationalization. This new circumstance overlaps with that of Heine at the close of the era of Goethe. José Martí writes in his prologue to “Poema del Niágara” by Pérez Bonalde: desprestigiadas y desnudas todas las imágenes que antes se reverenciaban; desconocidas aún las imágenes futuras, no parece posible… producir aquellas luengas y pacientes obras… que se escribían pausadamente… en época de elementos constantes… de posible tranquilidad individual. (Martí 1977: 303) [with all the images that were once revered now naked and discredited while the future images are as yet unknown… it is no longer possible to produce those long and patient works… that were written with great deliberation… in an era of stable elements… when individual tranquility is possible]. (Martí 2002: 45; tr. Esther Allen) Exiled in New York at a moment of crisis in which the political future of their countries was at stake, Pérez Bonalde and Sellén shared, forty years later, something of what Heine experienced while exiled in Paris and confronted from the outset with the new rules of engagement after the collapse of the structures of patronage that had sustained culture in the era of Goethe. As they too were immersed in a foreign language and a great modern city, they viewed Heine as someone who had been in their shoes. And as Heine had taken on the established tradition of the great German literature with an act of defiance, Pérez Bonalde’s and Sellén’s defiance remained effective behind the mask of apparent submission to the requests of the Spanish establishment represented by Valera, cited by Sellén, or Menéndez Pelayo, whose letter Pérez Bonalde published as a paratext in El Cancionero. This chapter is not interested in emphasizing these biographical coincidences, but rather the structural analogies between two moments in history that saw the poets confronting new market structures at the outset of the social and economic modernization of Europe and the Americas. Hanna Geldrich holds that the exceptional feature that links the Modernists with Heine is their position as innovators of poetry and prose in their respective languages and literary fields; to achieve that innovation, the Modernists employed irony, musicality, the minimalism of Heine’s poetic language—that is, a whole body of stylistic features, beyond themes 43

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and motives (1971: 267). Nerval’s translations in 1848 in Paris and those of Pérez Bonalde in 1877 and 1885 in New York form part of the renewal of poetic language that in France led to Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose and to Modernist poetry in Spanish America. It seems no coincidence that Baudelaire and the Modernists shared with Heine the artist’s struggle for survival in a context hostile to literature. This chapter seeks to further emphasize that those translations contributed to the innovation of the poetic language in France and in Spanish America. At a time when Heine was dismissed by some in Germany as the last Romantic, and by others as the poet who had desacralized poetry, the translations of his poems reveal the innovative and profoundly modern potential of his work. Translated from Spanish by Eric Winter

Notes 1 El Recopilador translated two chapters of “Fragmens de voyage,” which were taken from translations by Maximilian Kaufman in Revue de Paris (Heine 1832). This first translation of Heine in Spanish America had not been analyzed until now. I am grateful to Hernán Pas for making a copy of the original 1836 edition available to me, which did not appear in the anthology of El Recopilador published in 2013 under his supervision. In 1837, Boletín Musical published a translated excerpt about Bellini and Rossini, which was taken, as the comparison reveals, from “Les nuits florentines” (Heine, “Les nuits florentines” 213–216). The excerpt published in 1838 by El Iniciador was translated into Spanish from the French version of Reisebilder. Tableaux de Paris under the direction of Adolphe Specht (Heine, “Œuvres III” 12–13). 2 Ferrán lived in Chile from late 1872 to 1877, where he opened his Librería Española y Americana (Englekirk 1959: 496); he published some of his translations of Heine in Revista de Santiago and SudAmérica in 1872 and 1873 (Zamudio 1958: 30). 3 In her monograph on Heine and Spanish American Modernism, Geldrich (1971) evaluates in detail the presence of Heine in the poetic work of Spanish American Modernists, starting with Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde and Manuel González Prada, continuing on to José Martí, Rubén Darío, Guillermo Valencia, and others, followed by Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Herrera y Reissig. Geldrich’s precise and detailed reading and her conclusions regarding Heine’s place in Spanish-­ American Modernism have not lost their relevance. Her study of the translations continues to prove very useful as a source of information, but developments in translation theory beginning in the 1970s have called into question a translation analysis such as Geldrich’s, which aims to determine the quality of the translations in relation to the originals, deeming them good, acceptable, or poor. 4 Gohdes’s article regarding Heine’s presence in the United States continues to be informative (1957); concerning the pirated edition and its possible impact on Heine’s opinion of the United States and of the relationship between literature and capitalism in his final years, see Holub (1989). 5 Edward Kemp was one of the owners of the company Lanman & Kemp, a firm of wholesale druggists Pérez Bonalde worked for as a traveling salesman out of New York. On the site https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/1016#, one may access company correspondence with international partners, which was largely conducted by Pérez Bonalde.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “Heine the Wound.” Notes to Literature, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 1, Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 80–85. Alberdi, Juan Bautista. “Emancipación de la lengua.” El Iniciador, vol. 10, 1838, pp. 224–225. Ameal Pérez, Alberto. “Nicanor Bolet Pereza [sic] La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York (1885–1890).” Camino Real, vol. 7, no. 10, 2015, pp. 77–91. Atalaya Fernández, Irene. Traducción y creación en la obra de Teodoro Llorente. 2018. Universitat de Barcelona, PhD dissertation. Baralt, Luis A. “Introducción.” Estrofas, by Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, New York, 1877, pp. 163–173.

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Becker, Sabina. “Heinrich Heine und die Moderne.” Harry… Heinrich… Henri… Heine. Deutscher, Jude, Europäer, edited by Dietmar Goltschnigg, Charlotte Grollegg-Edler, and Peter Revers, Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2008, pp. 289–299. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Translated by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1: 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, Mass. & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 253–263. Boletín Musical 1837. La Plata: Instituto Cultural de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 2006, http://sedici. unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/27271. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 5, no. 145, 2002, pp. 3–8. Corbin Llorente, Juan Teodoro, editor. Teodoro Llorente Olivares. Epistolario (1866–1911). Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana Nicolau Primitiu, 2013. Díaz Solar, Francisco. Las letras alemanas en el siglo XIX cubano. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2004. Draper, Hal, translator. The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine. Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982. El Iniciador: Periódico de Todo y para Todos, Montevideo, 1838–1839, https://anaforas.fic.edu.uy/jspui/ handle/123456789/5147. El Recopilador. Museo Americano. Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Comercio y Litografía del Estado, 1836–1837. El Recopilador: Museo Americano, edited, compiled, and preliminary study done by Hernán Pas, Buenos Aires Biblioteca Nacional, 2013. Fastenrath, Johannes. “Prologue.” El Cancionero, by Enrique Heine, translated by Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, New York, 1885, pp. xvii–xxxvii. Fernández y González, Manuel María, translator. Joyas Prusianas. Intermedio, Regreso y Nueva Primavera. Poemas líricos de Enrique Heine. Madrid: printed by J. Velada, 1873. Ferrán, Augusto, translator. “Traducciones e imitaciones del poeta alemán Enrique Heine.” El Museo Universal V, no. 46, Madrid, 1861, pp. 366–367. ———. “Canciones (Recuerdos de Enrique Heine).” La Ilustración Española y Americana, XVII, no. 4, 1873, p. 59. Flores Requejo, María José. “Las letras venezolanas en la obra crítica y en el epistolario de don Juan Valera: Andrés Bello, Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, Rafael María Baralt y José Heriberto García de Quevedo.” Cultura Latinoamericana, vol. 21, no. 1, 2015, pp. 153–185. Geldrich, Hanna. Heine und der spanisch-amerikanische Modernismo. Bern & Frankfurt: Herbert Lang, 1971. Gohdes, Clarence. “Heine in America. A Cursory Survey.” The Georgia Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 1957, pp. 44–49. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41396139. Gómez García, Carmen. “La repercusión de una traducción manipulada. Los primeros poemas de Heinrich Heine en español.” Enlaces: revista del CES Felipe II, no. 9, 2008. Gutiérrez, Juan María. “Fisonomía del saber español: cuál deba ser entre nosotros.” El Salón Literario, edited by Félix Weinberg, Buenos Aires: Librería Hachette, 1958, pp. 135–149. Heine, Heinrich. “Fragments de voyage.” Translated by Maximilian Kaufmann, Revue de Paris, vol. 40, 1832, pp. 201–211. ———. Œuvres III, 2. Reisebilder. Tableaux de voyage. Paris : Eugène Renduel, 1834, https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.0035531509&view=1up&seq=11. ———. “De l’Allemagne depuis Luther.” Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. 4, 1834, pp. 373–408; 473–503; 633–678. ———. [Enrique Heyne] “Extractos de un viaje: Napoleón y Wellington.” El Recopilador, no. 7, 1836, pp. 49–50. ———. [Henrique Heyne] “Extractos de un viaje: Londres.” El Recopilador, no. 7, 1836, pp. 51–53. ———. “Les nuits florentines.” Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. 16, 1836, pp. 202–226, https://www. revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/article-revue/n-i/. ———. [Enrique] “Bellini (Continuación).” Boletín Musical, no. 2, 1837, pp. 9–10, http://sedici.unlp. edu.ar/handle/10915/27271. ———. [Enrique] “Rossini y Bellini (Fragmentos de un artículo de la Revista de Ambos Mundos).” Boletín Musical, no. 1, 1837, pp. 5–6 http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/27271. ———. [Henrique] “Pensamientos de Henrique Heine.” El Iniciador, no. 8, 1838, pp. 184, http://www. periodicas.edu.uy/v2/minisites/el-iniciador/indice-de-numeros.htm.

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———. Säkularausgabe. Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse, vol. 14: Tableaux de voyage I, Berlin & Paris: Akademie-Verlag/Éditions du CNRS, 1978. ———. Sämtliche Schriften, edited by Klaus Briegleb, Frankfurt, Berlin, & Vienna: Ullstein, 1981. 12 vols. ———. The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version. Translated by Hal Draper, Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982. Herrero, José. Poemas y fantasias de Enrique Heine. Madrid: Luis Navarro Editor, 1883. Höllerer, F.“Les Poésies de Henri Heine.” Heinrich Heine in der Lesart Gérard de Nervals. Stuttgart & Weimar: Metzler, 2004. Holub, Robert C. “Heine and the New World.” Colloquia Germanica, vol. 22, no. 2, 1989, pp. 101–115, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23980904. Llorente, Teodoro, translator. “Enrique Heine y su Libro de los Cantares.” Libro de los Cantares, by Enrique Heine, Barcelona: Biblioteca “Arte y Letras,” 1885, pp. VII–LIII. ———, translator. Libro de los Cantares, by Enrique Heine, Barcelona: Biblioteca “Arte y Letras,” 1885. Lombez, Christine. La traduction de la poésie allemande en français dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Réception et interaction poétique. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2009. Martí, José. “El Poema del Niágara.” Nuestra América. 1882. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977, pp. 300–313. Martí, José. Selected Writings. Edited and translated by Esther Allen with an introduction by Roberto González Echevarría. New York: Penguin Books, 2002. Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. “Una carta.” El Cancionero, by Enrique Heine, translated by Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, New York, 1885, pp. xxxix–xlvi. Monteleone, Jorge. “La hora de los tristes corazones. El sujeto imaginario en la poesía romántica argentina.” Historia crítica de la literatura argentina: La lucha de los lenguajes, edited by Julio Schwartzman, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2003, pp. 119–169. Myers, Jorge. “La Revolución en las ideas: La Generación Romántica en la cultura y en la política argentinas.” Nueva Historia Argentina: Revolución, República, Confederación (1806–1852), edited by Noemi Goldman, vol. 3, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1998, pp. 381–445. ———. “Ideas moduladas: lecturas argentinas del pensamiento europeo.” Estudios sociales. Revista universitaria semestral, no. 26, 2004, pp. 161–174 http://www.historiapolitica.com/datos/biblioteca/117_myers.pdf. Nerval, Gérard de, translator. “Les Poésies de Henri Heine.” Revue des Deux Mondes, no. XIII, 1848, pp. 224–243. ———, translator. “Les Poésies de Henri Heine. L’Intermezzo.” Revue des Deux Mondes, no. XIII, 1848, pp. 914–930. Palma, Ricardo, translator. Enrique Heine. Lima: Imp. del Teatro, 1886. Pas, Hernán. Ficciones de extranjería. Literatura argentina, ciudadanía y tradición (1830–1850), Buenos Aires: Katatay, 2008. ———, editor. El romanticismo en la prensa periódica rioplatense y chilena. Ensayos, críticas, polémicas (1828– 1864). La Plata: Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Biblioteca Orbis Tertius, 2013, http://bibliotecaorbistertius.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/07-pas-1. Payàs, Gertrudis. “La Biblioteca Chilena de Traductores o el sentido de una colección.” Biblioteca Chilena de Traductores (1820–1924), edited by José Toribio Medina, 2nd ed., Santiago, Chile: Ediciones de la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2007, pp. 23–72. Pérez Bonalde, Juan Antonio, “Intermezzo lírico.” Estrofas, by Enrique Heine, New York, 1877, pp. 161–263. ———. translator. El Cancionero, by Enrique Heine, New York, 1885. ———. “Enrique Heine,” El Cancionero, by Enrique Heine, New York, 1885, pp. XIII–XXIX. ———. “Una traducción.” El Cancionero, by Enrique Heine, New York, 1885, pp. V–XI. Ponce de León, Néstor, translator. “Amor desesperado, extracto e imitación del poema ‘El Intermezzo’ por Enrique Heine.” Revista del pueblo, no. I, 1865–1866, pp. 159–160; 166–167; 175–176; 183–184. Preisendanz, Wolfgang. “Der Ironiker Heine. Ambivalenzerfahrung und kommunikative Ambiguität.” Heinrich Heine. Ästhetisch-politische Profile, edited by G. Hohn, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 72–90. ———. “Bridging the Gap Between Heine the Poet and Heine the Journalist.” New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 225–259, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400866984-011. 46

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Rama, Ángel. Rubén Darío y el modernismo. Caracas & Barcelona: Alfadil Ediciones, 1985. Sammons, Jeffrey L. “Retroactive Dissimilation.” German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Reception, Adaptation, Transformation, edited by Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin, Suffolk: Camden House, 2005, pp. 211–231. Sanz, Eulogio Florentino, translator. “Poesía alemana. Canciones de Enrique Heine. Traducidas del alemán al castellano.” El Museo Universal, vol. I, no. 9, 1857, pp. 66–67. Sanz, Mariano Gil, translator. “El Intermezzo. Poema de Enrique Heine.” El Museo Universal, 1867, pp. 18–22, http://hemerotecadigital.bne.es/issue.vm?id=0003373286&search=&lang=es. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “On the different methods of translating.” 1813. The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, New York & London: Routledge, 2004, 43–63. Sellén, Francisco, translator. Intermezzo lírico, by Enrique Heine, New York: Imprenta y Librería de N. Ponce de León, 1875. ———. “Introducción.” Intermezzo lírico, by Enrique Heine, New York: Imprenta y Librería de N. Ponce de León, 1875, pp. 5–21. Stierle, Karlheinz. Dunkelheit und Form in Gérard de Nervals “Chimères.” München: Fink, 1967. Urrutia, Jorge. “ Introducción.” Poesía Española del siglo XIX, edited by Jorge Urrutia, Madrid: Cátedra, 1995, 15–201. Zamudio, José. Heinrich Heine en la literatura chilena. Influencia y traducciones. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1958.

Further Readings Aparicio, Frances. “De imitaciones a versiones. La traducción durante el Modernismo.” Versiones, interpretaciones, creaciones. Instancias de la traducción literaria en Hispanoamérica. Gaithersburg: Hispamérica, 1991, pp. 27–63. A chapter on modernist translation practice. Englekirk, John E. “Heine and Spanish-American Modernism.” Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, edited by Friedrich Werner, Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 24, 1959, pp. 488–500. An overview that remains relevant. Fontana, Patricio. “Juan María Gutiérrez y la traducción. Los casos de José Antonio Miralla y Juan Cruz Varela.” Quaderns. Revista de Traducció, no. 22, 2015, pp. 149–166. An article on Gutiérrez’s ideas about translation as part of cultural policy in Río de la Plata during the nineteenth century. Mejías-López, Alejandro. The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. A book about the changes in the transatlantic circulation of culture between Spanish America and Spain at the end of the nineteenth century.

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3 Translation and Transculturation José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, César Vallejo Esther Allen

Introduction What is a literary translation? To define it in the usual way, as a copy in one language of a literary work written in another, seems inevitably to place the translated text in a position of inferiority and to suggest that a translation cannot take on the status of original vis-à-vis another work. But that paradigm is shifting. In an important recent study of translation and textual scholarship, Karen Emmerich boldly continues a tradition of contesting the concept of the “original:” [T]he very idea of a textual “original” or “source” not only ignores the many sources on which an “original” itself may itself rest, but rhetorically strips translations of their potential for what we conventionally (if problematically) call “originality” (14). José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary activist, journalist, diplomat, and poet who died fighting for independence from Spain, is widely viewed as an originator, a founding father, an urtext. Fidel Castro famously named Martí “the intellectual author” of the Cuban revolution in a rhetorical flourish that places Castro himself in the role of translator of Martí’s project for Cuban liberation. Martí has given rise to more scholarship than any other nineteenth-century Latin American figure. He is the subject of thousands of studies, his work has been translated into many languages, and there have been numerous editions of his Obras completas—at least ten, ranging in size from two to seventy-four volumes—since his death in May of 1895. Many of those editions of the Obras include the various works, by Victor Hugo, Hugh Conway, and others, that Martí translated, alongside his own journalism, speeches, manifestos, poetry, letters, drafts, and notes. Martí devoted a significant amount of his time to translation and wrote several compelling descriptions of what it is to translate. Still, the letter of April 1, 1895, known as his testamento literario—the directions he left for his literary executor on his way to Cuba to launch the war of independence in which he died—says nothing about his translations (Obras completas 1: 23–28). Their inclusion in editions of the Obras can perhaps best be explained by a taxonomy proposed by Martí’s contemporary, Eleanor Marx Aveling, whose preface to her 1892 translation of Madame Bovary defines three kinds of translator: (1) the “hack”; (2) the “conscientious worker” (the category Marx placed herself in); and (3) the “genius, who literally re-creates a work in his own language.” As examples of the latter, she offers Friedrich Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare into German and Charles Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe into French (xxi–xxii). 48

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-5

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Martí’s intellectual heirs placed him in this third category as well. Therefore, even translations he did as work for hire for the New York publishing company of D. Appleton—­ simply in order to earn a living and with no particular esteem for or interest in the works or authors translated—are viewed as his own creations, bearing the unique stamp of his genius. While Marx Aveling’s taxonomy of translators has long since been discarded, the mindset her categories reflect ensures that we still have easy access to Martí’s translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona—which Martí titled Ramona novela americana. A forthcoming project of mine titled “Kleptomaniac Classic: Ramona,” done in collaboration with Sean Cotter, proposes an experiment in translation. A chapter of Martí’s translation that he titled “Tempestad y amigos” (Chapter 22 of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel) is shifted into contemporary English and a contemporary time frame; horse-drawn wagons become cars or trucks, and other elements that date the text are transformed into more contemporary counterparts. This was done in part to show how little the fundamental problems Jackson’s novel addresses have changed, in light of the ongoing horrific treatment of refugees, many of them Latinx and Native, on the U.S. southern border. It was also done to help anglophone readers see Jackson’s novel in a new way: from the perspective of the white, mestizo, and indigenous Spanish-speaking communities that it represents, and for whom Martí reclaimed it. In the process of carrying out this experiment, a possible connection to another, more recent, literary work presented itself.

A Tentative Genealogy ¡Ay Majela, Majela de mi vida! ¡si me parece que se me pone negro el juicio! yo no sé, yo no sé lo que pienso: los pensamientos me dan vueltas, me dan vueltas de loco, como las hojas en el arroyo cuando baja la fuerza de la lluvia. Dime, Majela, ¿es que me vuelvo loco? (Martí Obras completas 24: 439)

[Ay Majela, my Majela, my life! Sometimes it’s like my mind is going black. I don’t know, I don’t know what I think: my thoughts spin around, spin me around like a madman, like the leaves in a stream during a hard rain. Tell me, Majela: am I going mad?]

The translation above is mine, as are all that follow unless another translator is indicated. The original English source of these lines, rearranged here into blank verse, is a passage of prose dialogue spoken by Alejandro, a Native Californian of the Luiseño tribe, who is shattered by the U.S. invasion and appropriation of California, the systematic dispossession, loss of ancestral lands, and government-sponsored genocide perpetrated against his people. Alejandro’s agonized outburst first occurs in Ramona, a work of fiction drawn from the historical reality of the dispossession and genocide of the Native peoples of California, which was witnessed firsthand by author Helen Hunt Jackson, who shared the race and privileges of the perpetrators of that genocide and spoke and wrote in their language. The lines are a fiction, and they are a translation, reworked by José Martí into Spanish—the language Jackson’s 1884 English-language novel pretends most of its characters are speaking, and one of the two languages a member of the Luiseño tribe most likely would have spoken during the mid-nineteenth century, the other being Luiseño, present here in the word majela (dove), Alejandro’s term of endearment for his mixed-race wife, the novel’s heroine, Ramona. The colonial eponym Luiseño comes from the Misión San Luis Rey de Francia, founded in 1798 by a Franciscan friar from Spain in what is now Oceanside, California. Members of the 49

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tribal community call their language Cham’teela—“our language.” Cham’teela is now an endangered language, and the community is working to revitalize it. Martí self-published his translation in 1888, in New York City, where he lived in exile, banned from his native Cuba for his work to abolish slavery and free the island from Spanish colonial rule. Its primary intended audience, however, was in Mexico, where he distributed it with the help of one of his dearest friends, Mexican politician Manuel Mercado. Several subsequent editions followed, published in Mexico and across Spanish-speaking America. Over the years, those editions of Ramona novela americana, which bore the name of the work’s increasingly canonical translator on their cover in letters as large as or larger than the author’s, passed from hand to hand, bookseller to bookseller, country to country. Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… Yo no sé! Golpes como del odio de Dios: como si ante ellos, la resaca de todo lo sufrido se empozara en el alma… Yo no sé!

[Life deals blows so crushing … I don’t know! Blows like the hatred of God: that send the harsh undertow of all suffering to stagnate in the well of the soul … I don’t know!]

These are the opening lines of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poems, César Vallejo’s “Los heraldos negros” (“The Black Heralds”), published in Lima in 1919 in the collection of the same title that Vallejo worked on from 1915 to 1918. The verbal and thematic echoes of Alejandro’s outburst in Martí’s Ramona novela americana are striking. There’s the powerful use of repetition, in particular of “yo no sé” (with, in both texts, the emphatic inclusion of the pronoun “yo,” not grammatically necessary in Spanish, and the omission, in Vallejo’s poem, of the initial, inverted exclamation mark that Spanish normally requires). There are the sonorities of “Ay”/“Hay” and “vida” in both first lines, the intensely alliterative language throughout (“hojas cuando baja la fuerza de la lluvia”/“como del odio de Dios”), and the dominant metaphor of water: in Alejandro’s outcry, the rushing waters of a brook, in Vallejo’s, the oceanic undertow of “resaca,” and the stagnant water in a well or puddle implied in the repeated use of the verb “empozar.” Son pocos, pero son... Abren zanjas oscuras en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte. Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaros atilas; o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

[They’re few in number but they are… They carve dark furrows in the haughtiest face and in the mightiest shoulder. Are they the steeds of barbaric Attilas, or the black heralds sent by Death?

Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma, de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema. Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema.

They’re the downfalls of the soul-Christs of some beloved faith that Fate blasphemes. Life’s blood-spattered blows are the crackling of our daily bread burning up in the oven door.

Y el hombre... Pobre... pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como

And the man… Poor, poor man! He turns his eyes as when someone taps us on the shoulder, he turns his mad eyes, and all that he’s lived, stagnates like a puddle of guilt in his gaze.

cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada; vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada. Hay golpes en la vida tan fuertes... Yo no sé! (Vallejo 33)

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Life deals blows so crushing… I don’t know!]

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Resonances of Alejandro’s outburst as rendered by Martí echo throughout Vallejo’s poem. In an image that may have suggested Vallejo’s metaphor of stagnant water, Alejandro says his mind is going black—“se me pone negro el juicio.” “Negro” occurs in the Vallejo poem’s title and eighth line. “Loco,” twice repeated in Alejandro’s outburst, appears in the fifteenth line of Vallejo’s non-sonnet. Other elements of Vallejo’s poem reverberate with the full storyline of Ramona. The “potros de bárbaros atilas” bring to mind the horse that Alejandro, in a fugue state, mistakes for his own and rides home, whereupon its invader owner shoots him dead in cold blood with near-total impunity. The image of bread burning up at the oven door corresponds to the novel’s many scenes of kitchens, hearths, and domestic life. Above all, the obscure bit of dialogue translated from a nineteenth-century U.S. novel and the seventeen lines of the canonical twentieth-century poem both evoke a trauma that lies beyond rational thought and the expressive possibilities of language. Alejandro grieves the destruction of his culture, his people, his way of life, his language, and his mind. César Vallejo, grandson of two Spanish Catholic priests from Galicia and two indigenous Peruvians, felt and understood that grief, had seen and lived the subjugation and profanation of a conquered culture. Subsequent poems in Los heraldos negros incorporate Quechua terms such as huaco (earthen vessel) and yaraví (melody or poem) into their distinctively hybrid Spanish. In one, titled “Imperial Nostalgias,” Vallejo writes: And the race takes shape in my word, A star of blood on the surface of muscle. (Vallejo 2007: 77, tr. Eshleman) The early twentieth-century Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui considered Vallejo “the poet of a breed, a race. In Vallejo is found, for the first time in [Peruvian] literature, a virginal expression of indigenous feeling… [which] finds in his poetry a modulation all its own” (202). This is not the first time a reader has glimpsed in a Vallejo poem a potential reworking of a rather obscure earlier work by José Martí. The late Cuban poet and Martí scholar Cintio Vitier noted that he found strong evidence of a “deep fraternal root” uniting the two poets when he reread Vallejo’s poem “Masa” (from the 1937 collection España, aparta de mí este cáliz) alongside the draft of an unwritten poem found among Martí’s miscellaneous papers under the heading “Asunto” (96–97). In Martí’s sketch, probably written during the 1880s, a poet put a bullet in his own head, and then, when his death was clamorously protested by all humanity, dragged himself up from the grave, pieced the shattered fragments of his skull back together, and walked on, “siguió andando” (Obras completas 22: 274). In Vallejo’s “Masa,” a freedom fighter killed in combat was surrounded by all humanity, demanding he return to life, and he slowly rose to his feet and began walking (“echóse a andar”). Vitier does not say so, but the resemblance between the two works suggests that the fallen freedom fighter evoked in Vallejo’s poem may have been Martí himself. Vallejo was, from an early age, a reader of Martí. A lengthy passage from Martí’s 1882 “Prólogo” to the Nicaraguan José Antonio Bonalde’s Poema del Niágara (both works written in New York City) is cited at length in the thesis on Romanticism in the poetry of Spain that Vallejo wrote to complete his bachelor’s degree at the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo in 1915. The young Peruvian was 23 years old and had just begun working on the poems in Los heraldos negros. The lengthy citation from Martí in his thesis includes these lines: 51

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An immense, pale man, dressed in black, with gaunt face, weeping eyes, and dry lips, is walking gravely across the earth without rest or sleep—and he has taken a seat in every home and has put his trembling hand on every bedstead. Such a pounding in the brain! [¡Qué golpes en el cerebro!]. (Martí 2002: 44, tr. Allen) In a letter cited by Vitier, the poet Juan Larrea, a close friend of Vallejo’s, recognized something in these cited lines, in astonishment. “Don’t these words breathe with the atmosphere of Los heraldos negros? The immense, pale man, dressed in black [negro], under whose influence tremendous blows [golpes] are felt in the brain…?” (95). Is it someone like this “immense, pale man” whose “trembling hand” delivers a palmada to the shoulder of the pobre hombre in the final lines of “Los heraldos negros”? And did Vallejo also have, somewhere in mind, as he wrote the poem, Martí’s translation of the words of a wholly fictional indigenous character devised decades earlier by a wealthy progressive woman in the United States? The question is probably unanswerable. Still, two additional pieces of evidence may be relevant here. First, in an intriguing 2014 study, Geoffrey Brock explores the textual roots and ramifications of another of Vallejo’s most famous poems, “Piedra negra sobre piedra blanca” [“Black Stone on a White Stone”], a sonnet, probably written around 1936, in which Vallejo, in exile in Paris, muses upon his own death. Brock runs through some of the many versions, variants, homages, and reworkings that have emerged from the poem since it was first published, noting that half the poems in the 2006 U.S. anthology Homage to Vallejo were inspired by it. He then demonstrates that “Piedra negra” was itself a version, “an imitation—a variation, a departure” (np). The ancestor-poem in the genealogy Brock convincingly establishes is unexpected: a witty, sociable, French rhyme—first published in 1903, and widely circulated in the 1908 anthology Poètes d’aujourd’hui—by a Genevan lawyer-poet named Henry Spiess, whose poem imagines the reactions of junior law clerks and fellow jurists in the Geneva courts when they learn of Henry Spiess’s death one rainy day. Brock maintains that Vallejo deliberately inverts Spiess’s “chummy” bourgeois poem, turning it inside out by transforming its speaker from an established lawyer into a helpless victim, completely alone, with no hope of justice, his death observed only by silent, inanimate witnesses. The compositional process Brock envisages is in line with the one intuited by Vitier: Vallejo takes an existing text as a point of departure for the creation of a new one that, in its dialogue with the earlier work, inverts, subverts, reworks, reinvents, or re-creates it. The second bit of evidence is more tenuous, though more directly pertinent. The archives of the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana hold a fragile edition of Martí’s Ramona novela americana, printed on tissue-thin paper held together by a thread, and published in February of 1892—the month before Vallejo was born—in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was published by the local newspaper, El Heraldo, having, the previous year, won the paper’s “El Heraldo” prize, so the words “El Heraldo” appear twice on the cover. Did a copy of this edition find its way over the course of the next two decades from neighboring Bolivia into the hands of a young Peruvian student with a deep admiration for its translator? Did it play a role in inspiring one of his earliest, bleakest poems? When the French secret police raided Vallejo’s Paris apartment in 1930, they confiscated almost all his books. In her memoir, the poet’s widow lists the eight works still in his possession when he died of illness and exhaustion in Paris in 1938 (de Vallejo, 34). They were, respectively, about two Russian writers, Surrealism, film, pre-Columbian art, African civilization, folklore, and revolution and the intellectual. It is the only catalogue of César Vallejo’s library we have. 52

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Jackson, Martí, Vallejo The words spoken by “Alessandro” in Chapter 22 of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona are: My Majella! My Majella! It seems to me I am going mad. I cannot tell what to do. I do not know what I think; all my thoughts seem whirling round as leaves do in brooks in the time of spring rains. Do you think I can be going mad? (272) Very few of the qualities that suggest a connection between Martí’s version of this passage and Vallejo’s “Los heraldos negros” are present. There are only two repetitions—of “my Majella” and “going mad”—no marked use of alliteration, and no repeated exclamations of “I don’t know!” The word “black” does not appear, and the English text includes a reference to springtime, omitted in the much more somber register of Martí’s version. Furthermore, and perhaps because Jackson is trying to convey the foreignness of her character’s speech, the language she puts in his mouth hardly sounds like heartfelt outcry. Instead it is odd and stilted, almost British in its reticence: “It seems to me I am going mad. I cannot tell what to do.” Kate Phillips explains that Jackson expresses solidarity with oppressed groups by inverting the ordinary regionalist method of transcribing local vernaculars: only white American settlers speak in dialect in the novel, whereas the words of Indian, Mexican and Spanish characters are set down in a heightened, formal English… (39) Nineteenth-century Latin American literature did not share the U.S. regionalists’ fondness for elaborate imitations of local speech patterns. Martí, who aspired for his translation to be read across many national and regional varieties of Spanish, simply ignores Jackson’s efforts in this respect and makes no attempt to translate them. A settler from Tennessee who says, when complimented by Ramona on her kindness, “I dunno’s I’m enny kinder’n ennybody else” expresses herself in perfectly standard grammatical Spanish in Martí’s translation: “Yo no sé si soy buena, o si soy como los demás” [I don’t know if I’m a good woman or if I’m just like everyone else]. To help her conjure up the idealized star-crossed lovers she was creating for her tale of romance and genocide, Helen Hunt Jackson would gaze, as she wrote, at a photograph inspired by an ethereal painting of a pair of lovers by the British Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Davis and Alderson, 170). This may be why she christened the extraordinarily handsome and noble Native sheep-shearer that she dreamed up with the Italian name of Alessandro. Another of Jackson’s inspirations—also a source for the authors of the 1957 musical West Side Story, it, too, a star-crossed romance about Spanish speakers in the United States that has been challenged by the community it purports to represent—was Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Ramona was not drawn entirely from European culture. Galvanized by a lecture by Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca nation that she attended in Boston in 1879—a lecture delivered in Ponca and interpreted into English by the Native writer Susette LaFlesche—Jackson spent what would be the final six years of her life journeying across the United States to document crimes and abuses committed against Native communities by the U.S. government. After her 1881 non-fiction work A Century of Dishonor—a copy of which she sent to every member of 53

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Congress—failed to stir public outrage, she wrote Ramona in a bid to reach and influence a wider audience of white, Anglo readers, as her school friend Harriet Beecher Stowe had done with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Qué habré escrito sin sangrar, ni pintado sin haberlo visto antes con mis ojos?” [What have I ever written without bleeding, or painted without having seen it first with my own eyes?] Martí wrote in his testamento literario. This holds true, as well, for Ramona novela americana. Though he never visited California, Martí traveled extensively among indigenous communities in Mexico, Guatemala, and other Central American countries during the four formative years he lived in the region (1875–1878). While in Guatemala, he undertook a project closely related to Jackson’s, a play titled Patria y libertad: Drama indio, which took up the cause of indigenous rights. Its defiant Native characters decry the abuses they have been subjected to, invoke the examples of indigenous heroes such as Hatuey in Cuba and Cuauhtemoc in Mexico, and seek, under the leadership of a mestizo revolutionary suggestively named Martino, to free their land. (Though it is loosely based on historical events, most of the play’s characters, including Martino, are fictional.) Like Jackson’s novel, Martí’s play revolves around a pair of lovers—a Native woman and the mixed-race hero Martino, who are in love but refuse to marry until national independence has been secured. The Guatemalan drama indio was important enough to Martí to be mentioned in his 1895 testamento literario as a work to be rescued and preserved—though it was written in just five days, he notes, and at the request of the Guatemalan government. In its evocation of the struggle between Natives and colonial Spaniards in Guatemala, the plotline of Patria y libertad much resembles that of Martí’s earliest drama, Abdala, which he wrote in 1869 at the age of fifteen. Both Abdala, set in ancient Nubia, and Patria y libertad culminate in national liberation—in the case of the Guatemalan play, the country’s 1821 independence from Spain. Martí’s decision to center Patria y libertad on indigenous and mixed-race characters harnesses a common nationalist motif of the early nineteenth-century Latin American colonial liberation movements whose criollo insurgents often proclaimed themselves Natives or claimed to be making common cause with Natives in their quest for freedom from Spanish colonial rule. Martí deftly uses that historical ploy to make Patria y libertad not the pious celebration of national independence that the Guatemalan government had commissioned but a critique of that same government’s ongoing abuse of indigenous communities. In the opening scene, two Native women discuss the battle between their noble, “cobriza” (copper-colored) ancestors and the pale Spanish conquistadores: “Echaron el dogal a nuestros cuellos, / nos impusieron la servil cadena…” [They put the noose around our necks, / subjugated us in servile chains…] (Martí Obras completas 18: 131). Later, a monologue delivered by a character named El Indio begins: ¡Un indio! ¡A nadie queda duda! ¡Doblada está mi espalda, mi piel negra! ¿Ni cómo ha de estar blanca, si aquí llevo de cuatrocientos años la vergüenza? (Martí Obras completas 18:135)

[An Indian! Plain for all to see! My back is bent! My skin black! And how could it be white, when there I bear Four hundred years of dishonor?]

The time frame is an accusation. Guatemala was first conquered by Spain in 1524. The 400year period invoked by El Indio in the 1878 play was an open declaration that the nation’s 1821 independence had not freed everyone, that Guatemala’s indigenous communities were still living in ignominious subjugation. Martí’s recognition of the similar critique Jackson’s novel sought to fling in the face of the U.S. government must have been one of the things that drew him to it—though, that was 54

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not his primary reason for engaging with it. His own outspoken criticism soon became so displeasing to the Guatemalan government that he was forced to leave the country. He had already paid a far higher price for Abdala. Set among Black warriors in the ancient African kingdom of Nubia, their land occupied by an enemy invader, Abdala was an accusatory allegory of the first Cuban independence revolution that had only just broken out in 1868 when Martí wrote it. The play and other writings by the gifted young son of a Spanish soldier were alarming enough to Cuba’s Spanish colonial authorities that they punished the outspoken sixteen-year-old with months of hard labor in a Havana stone quarry, before sending him into exile. Martí and Jackson were contemporaries, both writers, both constant travelers, whose home base for much of their lives was in the Northeastern United States. Both created narratives centered on fictional indigenous characters that aimed at decrying the abuses of colonial settlers and creating change. The resemblance does not end there. Like Jackson, of whom he wrote with admiration in his crónicas from the United States, published across the hemisphere, Martí was, within the society where he was born, a white person, of wholly European ancestry. Cuban colonial society was so race-obsessed that young Martí had to provide certification that his family was 100-percent European in order to attend a prestigious Havana elementary school. Born into racially privileged families (Martí’s poor, Jackson’s more economically comfortable), Martí and Jackson, for differing reasons, both lived in a nation—in Martí’s case, a series of nations—that did not grant them the right to vote. Both became activists on behalf of those who did not share their racial privilege. Martí and Vallejo also had a lot in common. Both had two Spanish grandfathers; both were poets and journalists who spent their adult lives living far from their home countries. Vallejo left Peru for Europe in 1923 at the age of thirty-one and never went back. Martí was shipped off to exile at the age of seventeen and for the rest of his life would return to Cuba only twice, for a little over a year in 1878–1879, and in the weeks before his death. Both poet-journalists lived under financially straitened circumstances, and both were involved in revolutionary politics. Vallejo began studying Marxist theory in earnest in 1927 and made two trips to the Soviet Union, which he wrote about extensively; he also went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War and supported the Republican Faction in poems and journalism. Both died young: Martí, at forty-two, and Vallejo, at forty-six. But Vallejo and Jackson? Yes, both were politically active writers whose work engaged with indigenous America. Beyond that it is hard to think of much they have in common. The two writers occupy separate and in some ways opposite cultural, linguistic, and ideological spheres, so separate that this may be the first time anyone has written about them together. In fact, it may strike some readers as dismaying, offensive, even blasphemous, to suggest that the “virginal” quality Mariátegui found in Vallejo’s work, its uniquely Peruvian “indigenous feeling,” could, in the case of this particularly crucial poem, be somehow connected to a bestselling nineteenth-century U.S. white-savior-tainted romance, written in English by the wife of a wealthy banker and railroad executive. Yet there are things to be gained by reading Vallejo’s poem in relation to Jackson and Martí. Among other things, such a connection casts new light on a translation problem in the opening words of the final stanza of “Los heraldos negros:” “Y el hombre…Pobre… pobre!” The language is so spare and simple that it is hard to imagine there could be a translation problem here. But Spanish uses the direct article quite differently from English; the generalized term for science itself is “la ciencia”—with the direct article. (English omits the direct article when speaking in general terms of science itself.) The direct article in “el 55

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hombre” can indicate a reference to mankind or humanity. That’s the reading all three of the translations (by Eshleman, Sieferle, and Fogden) analyzed by Schuster adopt; all three translate “Y el hombre” as “And man…”—therefore cueing readers to see the final lines of the poem as a description of the human condition. If we read Vallejo’s words as referring to the imaginary Luiseño Alejandro, driven to the edge of sanity by the oppression he and his people have endured at the hands of colonial settlers, the translation becomes “And the man…”. This cues a reading of the poem’s final lines not as a description of the human condition, but as the evocation of a man: a given, single, indigenous being, upon whom—and upon whose community and way of life—blows of singular harshness have rained down.

Macrotexts In a 2014 work on Kaf ka and translations of his work, Patrick O’Neill proposes what he calls a “macrotextual approach,” the macrotext being “a text and all its translations” (9). The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Miserables, by David Bellos, is a biography of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables that covers a considerable portion of that work’s near-­ infinite macrotext, with special emphasis on translations to the stage and screen. Prismatic Jane Eyre (prismaticjaneeyre.org), an Oxford digital humanities project spearheaded by Matthew Reynolds, aims to map the macrotext of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, at least insofar as its hundreds of print editions in dozens of languages are concerned: the project has catalogued 109 separate translations of Brontë’s novel into Chinese alone. A charting of the macrotext of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona would also cover a vast and ever-expanding territory. There are the numerous films, including a 1928 Hollywood Ramona directed by Chickasaw Native Edwin Carewe, and a 1946 Mexican Ramona directed by Víctor Urruchúa. There are the many adaptations for the stage, including Hemet California’s Ramona Pageant, Official Outdoor State Play of California, an annual tradition that will soon have lasted a century. Jackson’s 1884 novel also inspired the number one hit song in Holland and Germany in 1960 and was the basis for a seventy-four-episode Mexican telenovela that ran in 2000. And, of course, it has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Tagalog, and Icelandic. Martí’s Ramona novela americana squarely positions itself within the macrotext of J­ackson’s novel and proudly dons its mantle. This has been misinterpreted. The four-sentence entry on Martí in editions of the Encyclopedia Americana published during the period of the Cuban Republic in the first half of the twentieth century, when the United States retained colonial sway over Cuban affairs, highlights his work on Ramona as the final item in its scant biographical sketch. For the reader with no other information, this probably suggested an idea of Martí as a herald of United States culture, spreading its light to Spanish-speaking America. That would have been a serious misapprehension. The early history of relations between the Spanish and British empires offers a key example of the political repurposing, via translation, of a text involving the treatment of indigenous peoples. When, in 1552, Bartolomé de las Casas published his devastating account of the genocide of indigenous peoples under Spanish rule, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, translations quickly ensued into a number of European languages. Their titles screamed the purpose the Spanish friar’s book was intended to serve when translated into the languages of Protestant nations that were the rivals and enemies of imperial, Catholic Spain. The title of an anonymous 1689 translation published in London, for example, is: 56

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Popery truly display’d in its bloody colours: or, a faithful narrative of the horrid and unexampled massacres, butcheries, and all manner of cruelties, that hell and malice could invent, committed by the popish Spanish party on the inhabitants of West-India: together with the devastations of several kingdoms in America by fire and sword, for the space of forty and two years, from the time of its first discovery by them. Composed first in Spanish by Bartholomew de las Casas, a bishop there, and an eyewitness of most of these barbarous cruelties; afterward translated by him into Latin, then by other hands, into High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, French, and now taught to speak modern English. Las Casas’s work became one of the pillars of the so-called leyenda negra of the Spanish Empire’s excessive colonial cruelty. The unique authority of this document of Spanish sadism arose from the fact of its having been written by a Spanish Bishop who served the Spanish Crown, “an eyewitness of most of these barbarous cruelties.” This made the evidence it offered more compelling than any accusatory account written by an outsider could have been. Just so with Martí’s translation of Ramona—drawn from a person born in the United States and writing in the language of the United States, whose fictional narrative told of atrocities she had witnessed with her own eyes. Indeed, the translation of Ramona may have set Martí thinking more seriously about Las Casas, a figure to whom his work often alludes in passing. The year following the publication of Ramona novela americana, he penned a lengthy tribute to Las Casas for La Edad de Oro, the Spanish-language children’s magazine he wrote and edited (Obras completas 18: 440–448). The prologue Martí wrote for Ramona novela americana subverts and refutes hierarchies of original and replica and challenges the standard accounting techniques of cultural capital. Because Jackson (like Las Casas) wrote about characters whose ethnicity and race she did not share, Laura Browder has contextualized Ramona among what she calls U.S. “ethnic impersonator autobiographies:” Ramona, she writes, “has ethnic impersonation at the heart of its plot” (77). Martí saw matters quite differently. The essential basis for allowing a community to claim a text as cultural capital, in his assessment, is not the connection between an author’s nationality, race, or gender and their text’s subject matter, but the text’s fidelity to what it represents. Despite being an Anglo woman born in Norteamérica, Jackson, Martí writes in his prologue to Ramona novela americana, has offered a faithful reading, a faithful rendering, of Spanish America: She does not allow the novelty of the subject to make her exaggerate or deviate from the truth of what she copies; she does not allow her female grace to do more than heighten with new attraction the eternal virility of literature…. (Martí 2005: 358, tr. Allen) Jackson is a reliable translator who has not distorted or domesticated the truth of the source culture her work represents. Nor has her female talent undermined the inherently virile and masculine nature of literature itself, Martí adds, making a point that would have pleased Jackson who, says her biographer, criticized writing by women as “too effusive” and “was delighted whenever her writing was praised as ‘masculine’” (Phillips 33). (Martí himself might be accused of having undermined literature’s virility—for what other eminent ­n ineteenth-century male author devoted himself to translating a lengthy book by a woman?) Jackson achieved this perfect equivalence, says Martí in his preface, by virtue of long study and research, “in the manuscripts of the missionaries, in the archives of the monasteries, in the papers of the unhappy Mexican families…” (358) Careful, scrupulous, and selfless research into the source text that is Spanish America has enabled a woman from the United 57

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States to so flawlessly evoke “nuestra raza” that Martí proclaims Ramona “nuestra novela,” unhesitatingly appropriating the cultural capital of Jackson’s Ramona for Latin American literature. More tacitly, he claims it for the macrotext of his own vast and expanding body of work, knowing well that it would be his name and reputation that drew readers to the novel in a region and language where he was a person of renown and Helen Hunt Jackson an unknown. Vallejo, for instance, would hardly have thought of Ramona as Jackson’s novel. The draw for him would have been the connection to Martí. Martí’s preface praises Jackson as an author “who, with greater art than Harriet Beecher Stowe, has done for the Indians, and perhaps for others as well [my emphasis], what Beecher Stowe did for the Blacks…” (358, tr. Allen). Who are these “others” that, in Martí’s view, Jackson’s novel has done so much for? In the course of her research among California Natives, Jackson met and befriended many californios, members of the Mexican landowning classes who had controlled vast territories prior to U.S. annexation—people like her friends the Coronels, in whose Los Angeles hacienda she stayed as she researched and wrote. Mariana de Coronel was her interpreter in conversations with “Indian chiefs” arranged by Mariana’s husband Antonio Coronel, mayor of Los Angeles in 1835 and later California State Treasurer. The plight of the californios is not as dire as that of the Natives, but their status is nevertheless increasingly imperiled. The californios, too, must confront invading white settler colonialists whose primary characteristics are, in Browder’s words, “crudeness, brutality, and greed” (94). By the end of the novel, the situation of the Moreno family, on whose vast Southern California estate Ramona was raised, unaware of her own Native ancestry, has become untenable. Faced with structural racism—Jackson describes the Morenos’ gradual losses under a U.S. legal regime that is implacably hostile to their interests—and with the deeply rooted “odio de raza”—in Martí’s words—of an Anglo white supremacist social sphere that does not accept either the mixed-race Ramona herself or the daughter she had with Alejandro, Ramona and her now-husband Felipe Moreno sell their hacienda and move to Mexico City, a place neither has ever been before. (Or, as 2012 U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney might describe it, they “self-deport.”) Jackson wrote to contest the ideology of terra nullius underlying the U.S. conquest of the North American continent, the longstanding propaganda that the West was virgin, uninhabited wilderness, there to be taken by those who would finally put it to good use and whose Manifest Destiny it was to possess it. Ramona shows California not as a wilderness but as the homeland of a varied population whose rich culture and way of life the novel celebrates and mourns, as it depicts its destruction. Her intention was to raise consciousness and thereby create more just conditions for Natives and Californios alike. In the end, Jackson was unable to participate in shaping the novel’s reception because she died at age fifty-five from stomach cancer in 1885, only months after it was published. Its reception became a long story of elite capture. The central lesson the U.S. public Jackson wrote for took away from her work was that California was emptied out and there for the taking. After indulging in a little casual heartbreak over the lovely mixed-race maiden and the Native man she loves, marries, and loses, Jackson’s readers got down to business. Ramona grew into a massive pop cultural phenomenon, promoting a tourist and real estate boom in Southern California as people streamed across the country to visit and eventually settle in the areas it described, seeking out elements of its story in the real world as if it were historical fact. A whole genre of books quickly emerged, promising to reveal the “real” or “true” story behind Ramona. Around 1899, the author of one such volume, George Wharton James, tracked down a Native woman in Cuahilla, California whose husband was killed in cold 58

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blood by a white settler, a story said to have inspired Ramona. James describes this unfortunate woman as “squat…fat and unattractive” (Browder 107). A couple of entrepreneurs made a lot of money over the course of the first-half of the twentieth century by renaming an old adobe townhouse in San Diego “Ramona’s Marriage Place” and selling tickets; others sold “Ramona baskets” and other handmade crafts. If anything, Ramona and the sentimental sympathy they felt for its characters served to reassure later settlers in California—people like the members of my own family who settled there in the early twentieth century. Their dewyeyed response to the novel’s pathos and melodrama may have felt like evidence of their own moral superiority to the nasty early settlers Jackson depicted. As Teju Cole writes, “I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.” Jackson had written it for bestsellerdom, but the impact of Ramona’s success was not what she intended. The same can be said of Martí’s intentions for Ramona novela americana, which, though it tells the same story and adheres closely to Jackson’s work, was created for an entirely different purpose. As Raul Coronado notes, the “privileged mestizos of Spanish America” were the characters whose depiction within it were of primary concern to Martí and to the Latin American elite readers for whom his translation of the novel was destined. For much of the nineteenth century, Latin American elites had toyed with the idea of placing their class interests ahead of nationalism and yielding sovereignty to the United States, whose administrative competence, military might, and political stability—or so they thought—would subdue unruly populations, protect their interests, and increase their wealth. Following the outbreak in 1847 of the Maya insurgency in Yucatán known as the Caste War, Justo Sierra O’Reilly traveled to the United States as an emissary from the peninsula’s beleaguered ruling class, to ask for aid in subduing the rebels and offer sovereignty over Yucatán to U.S. President James K. Polk, whose government would soon annex the entire northern territory of Mexico. Several times over the course of the nineteenth century, alliances of wealthy Cubans urged the United States to buy Cuba from Spain, sometimes promising to reimburse the purchase, so convinced were they that their interests and the institutions from which they derived their wealth would be better protected under U.S. rule. “Wealthy sugar planters saw incorporation into the United States as their salvation—their bulwark… Joining the American Union—as a slave state, or two, or three—would guarantee the future of slavery in Cuba,” writes Ada Ferrer of one such initiative made in 1849 (112). Following the U.S. Civil War, annexation continued to remain an appealing alternative to many Cubans, and still does today on Miami’s Calle Ocho, where shops sell postcards showing Cuba as the fifty-first U.S. state. In Martí’s time, Cuban sugar barons held their assets in Wall Street “counting houses,” and often owned property in the United States and held U.S. citizenship—at the time rather easy to come by. In response to this attitude, Martí’s “Nuestra América”—written in 1891 and initially published in La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York and the Mexico City newspaper El partido liberal—was an urgent appeal to the region’s ruling, literate elites for Latin American unity and solidarity in the face of the threat represented by the United States. Published three years earlier, Ramona novela americana paved the way for “Nuestra América,” as a highly effective demonstration of that same threat. The novel’s origin and enthusiastic reception within the cultural and linguistic sphere of the United States made it a more powerful propaganda tool than anything Martí himself could have written, compellingly demonstrating that the tragically unjust treatment of those who inhabited California prior to U.S. annexation was acknowledged even by the Anglo community that perpetrated the injustice. Moreover, Jackson casually describes both Natives and the “white Mexican” Moreno family in racist terms that generations of Latinx and Native readers 59

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and critics of the novel have deplored. Señora Morena, the matriarch, for example, is evoked as “indolent, like her race;” the life at the Moreno hacienda is “half-barbaric.” Martí’s translation does nothing to attenuate the unpleasant impression such clichés were likely to have on readers who came to the novel in Spanish. His Señora Moreno is “indolente como su raza” and the Moreno hacienda “medio bárbara.” While this may look like faithful equivalence, it is in fact radical counternarrative (Obras completas 24: 202). Desdén is a key term throughout “Our América,” and never more urgently than in the call issued in its resounding concluding paragraphs for united action to confront the threat of the United States: “The disdain of the formidable neighbor who does not know her is the greatest danger our America faces” (Martí 2002, 295, tr. Allen). Having asserted in his translator’s preface that Jackson knew Spanish America well as a result of her research, and was sympathetic to its peoples, Martí understood that the readers of Ramona novela americana would find that the book was nevertheless tinged with a certain disdain—a valuable lesson in what they could expect even from those in the United States who presented themselves as allies. There were many other books about the settlement of California, but none would have done what Martí wanted Ramona to do. Only a year after Jackson’s novel was published, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton—a woman of the Mexican landowning class that was promised full U.S. citizenship under the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the U.S.-­ Mexican War—published The Squatter and the Don: A Novel Descriptive of Contemporaneous Occurrences in California. It came out in San Francisco and did not create much of a stir in the national media; Martí, who followed U.S. literature closely and would certainly have taken enormous interest in the first book written in English by a Mexican-American woman, never mentions it and likely never heard of it. The Squatter and the Don may appear to take up much the same subject as Ramona: the injustices done to California’s inhabitants in the wake of U.S. annexation. But had Martí come across it, it is improbable he would have wanted to translate it. Its romantic racialism, of an entirely different order than Jackson’s, expressed values very different from his, that would not have served his purposes. The Squatter and the Don includes Native characters but is so disdainful of them that none even has a name. Its Indians are lazy and thieving, there only to be ordered about by the members of the two powerful families on whom the plot centers, the Alamars, Mexican landowners in Southern California, and the Darrells of Massachusetts, squatters on the Alamars’ land. There is, of course, a love story, between a son of the Darrells and an Alamar daughter. While violent conflict and dispossession do occur, what the novel advocates, as David Luis-Brown succinctly puts it, is the conciliatory approach adopted by the Don of its title, Don Mariano Alamar: a “peaceful coexistence” that “represents a shrewder, more rational capitalism than that enacted by the squatters, a capitalism that avoids conflict to ensure higher productivity” (817). María Amparo Ruiz, granddaughter of a governor of Baja California, met her future husband, Captain Henry S. Burton, when she was fifteen and troops under his command invaded and occupied her hometown. Though it describes injustice and conflict, the goal her novel strives for is full participation for those of her own class in the rights and privileges of Anglo whiteness within the United States. Her novel would have been unpleasant to Martí for its assimilationism and treatment of Natives, and of little use as a tool for rallying solidarity and support among Latin American elites as a bulwark against imperial aggression by the United States. Ramona was intended to be about Indians, intended as an appeal for empathy and justice for them and for the Californios—a justice Jackson hoped to bring about through mass popular sentiment. Martí’s strategic repositioning of Jackson’s novel into Ramona novela americana was intended to be about the particular and intractable nature of white supremacism in the United 60

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States; it was an appeal for extreme wariness of the United States from Latin Americans, including those who considered themselves white, and for political solidarity with other Latin Americans who were, or were about to be, in conflict with the United States. Rather than empathy, Ramona novela americana hoped to arouse anger and solidarity in readers whose relationship to Jackson’s sources was entirely different from that of the Anglo readers she wrote for. Martí paid out of his own pocket to publish the translation and have it distributed in Mexico, the nation that had lost half of its national territory to war with the United States just before the story of Ramona begins. The political solidarity and united front against the United States that it was meant to evoke was reiterated in the letter he wrote on the last full day of his life, May 18, 1895, from a rebel encampment in Eastern Cuba, to Manuel Mercado, the friend who had helped with the distribution of Ramona novela americana in Mexico. His cause was Mercado’s cause, Martí explained, and the cause of all Latin America, and he was at risk each day of giving his life, “to prevent, by the timely independence of Cuba, the United States from extending its hold across the Antilles and falling with all the greater force on the lands of our America” (Martí 2002: 347, tr. Allen).

Conclusion: Transculturation Raúl Coronado astutely proposes that in making Ramona novela americana, “Martí does not see the process as translating from English to Spanish as much as, to use the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s term, transculturating a novel from an anglophone US back to its original hispanophone Spanish America.” In the landmark 1940 study Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar that first proposed the term, Ortiz defines transculturation as a painful, intense, and complex process involving, but not limited to, acculturation and deculturation, assimilation and erasure. Ortiz sees it as the fundamental mechanism of Cuban history, an unending process that continually results in the creation of new forms of culture. When applied to literary translation, the framework of transculturation invites readers to view any text—whether its claimed status is original or translation—as an ongoing and open-ended process of remix. All the text’s sources—the places, time periods, historical events, cultures, and languages it is drawn from—as well as the audiences it eventually reaches, and that audience’s relationship to those sources, are fundamental to the meaning it creates. Transculturation offers us, in other words, a chance to understand texts as no more static or fixed than the languages they are written in. To study the macrotext of any given work is to study what transculturation can do. Maori anthropologist Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes that …the process of translation into other languages and contexts has been instructive. It has revealed the layers of complexity, nuances of language and everyday acts of being indigenous that make the indigenous story a profoundly rich global story of human experience. (xi) The complex cycle of transculturation across languages proposed here begins and ends in indigeneity. Jackson listened to Standing Bear, speaking in Ponca, to protest his tribe’s eviction from their ancestral homeland near the confluence of the Niobrara and Missouri rivers in what is now northeastern Nebraska and his own arrest and imprisonment following an attempt to return there to bury the bones of his sixteen-year-old son. She listened to Standing Bear’s interpreter Susette LaFlesch, herself also subject to the injustices he described. She rewrote and transculturated their story into terms she thought would move and compel audiences of Anglo voters, legislators, and political leaders, to aid Natives across the United 61

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States—and, eventually, californios as well—in their quest for justice. Ramona was intended as a counternarrative to the twinned but contradictory U.S. founding mythologies of terra nullius and endemically violent, lazy, and mendacious Natives, though its Anglo readers did not see it that way. Instead, they focused on the lovely young woman, the handsome man, and the vast landscape spreading out behind them. The “sugar-coating” (her term) that Jackson hoped would lead her readers to confront the dire realities her novel revealed was instead all that many of them took in. Martí, for his part, deliberately transculturated Jackson’s novel into a Latin American work that revealed the extent of Anglo white supremacism, even among those, like Jackson, who saw themselves as allies. He attempted to make it part of the groundwork for a Latin American political and military solidarity that did not, in the end, come to the rescue of Martí’s project for Cuban independence. If Vallejo was reworking, reinventing, and recreating a passage from Martí’s Ramona novela americana in “Los heraldos negros,” he did not establish any overt connection, or situate his poem in relation to the macrotexts of either Martí’s or Jackson’s work. Vallejo’s poems generally cover their tracks, rarely revealing their sources, which makes for both visceral immediacy and complex puzzles of interpretation. If he was responding, in “Los heraldos negros,” to Ramona, Vallejo stripped away both Martí’s and Jackson’s intentions, and radically condensed their narrative into a single cry of sorrow and horror so intense the reader of the poem experiences it almost physically. Born almost four centuries after an initial period of conquest whose continued impact was all around him during his childhood and young adulthood, Vallejo would have seen, first and foremost, in Ramona novela americana a description of the moment of conquest, the moment when an entire way of life was trampled and destroyed within just a few years. “Los heraldos negros” ignores the separate struggles for justice that animate Martí and Jackson to voice only the searing agony of the member of a community whose lifeways and language have been despoiled. A reading that situates Vallejo’s poem within the macrotext of Ramona transculturates it into a document of the global indigeneity Smith speaks of, linking the ravages of imperial Spain to those of the imperial United States, and connecting Vallejo’s work to that of later U.S. poets such Gloria Anzaldúa or Natalie Diaz. Viewed in this context, Vallejo’s poem invites us to read all three of the texts considered here as part of an ongoing transculturation that evolves from the Ponca words of Standing Bear that inspired Jackson, through the Luiseño terms that Jackson and Martí included, and the Quechua that Vallejo himself spoke and used in his poetry, to the current efforts of the Luiseño people to revitalize Cham’teela. Ramona continues to be performed annually in Hemet, California, in an outdoor festival, the Ramona Pageant, marred throughout its initial decades by whiteface casting and a host of other colonizing practices. The Pageant itself has undergone a long process of transculturation to become in recent years something of a showcase for Native Californian and Chicano cultures. Generations of local families have participated, and the Pageant has become part of the hybrid local community’s way of life, dense with memories and intricate personal connections, even as interest has faded among the tourists who once flocked to it. Fallen on harder times, even as it ceased pandering to the mainstream in order to embrace the marginalized cultures it represents (and those two facts may well be connected), the Pageant now receives financial support from nearby tribal communities. Rose Salgado, a council member of the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians, which contributes funding, explained to Christopher Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times, “We want to preserve the story,” adding, in a statement that affirms Jackson’s intentions for her work, “[Ramona] depicts all of the injustices, and it makes people realize what has happened” (Reynolds 2009).

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Perhaps the genealogy traced here can lead to further transculturation. Imagine the audience seated in the Ramona Bowl, facing the empty stage. An actor playing Alejandro steps into the light, lifts his eyes to the audience, and says “Hay golpes en la vida tan fuertes… yo no sé!” But the line has been rewritten, reinvented, and repurposed: he speaks it in Cham’teela.

Works Cited Allen, Esther and Sean Cotter. “Kleptomaniac Classic: Ramona.” This Is a Classic: Translators on Making Writers Global, edited by Regina Galasso. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023. Brock, Geoffrey. “Exhuming Vallejo.” Poetry, 3 November 2014. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poetrymagazine/articles/70171/exhuming-vallejo Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Buckley, Christopher, editor. Homage to Vallejo. Santa Cruz: Greenhouse Review Press, 2006. Castro, Fidel. José Martí: El autor intelectual. Havana: Editora Política, 1983. Cole, Teju. “The White Savior Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic, 21 March 2012. Coronado, Raul. “The Aesthetics of Our America: A Response to Susan Gillman.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 1–2, 2008, pp. 210–216. Davis, Carlyle Channing and William A. Alderson. The True Story of Ramona: Its Facts and Fictions, Inspiration and Purpose. New York: Dodge Publishing, 1914. Emmerich, Karen. Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. Ferrer, Ada. Cuba: An American History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021. Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. 1884. New York: Modern Library, 2005. Luis-Brown, David. “‘White Slaves’ and the ‘Arrogant Mestiza’: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 4, 1997. O’Neill, Patrick. Transforming Kafka: Translation Effects. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2014. Prismatic Jane Eyre. Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation. https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/. Mariátegui, José Carlos. “El proceso de la literatura, XIV: César Vallejo.” 7 Ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. 1928. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1995. Martí, José. Obras completas. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991. ———. Selected Writings. Edited and translated by Esther Allen. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002. ———. Introduction. Translated by Esther Allen. Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson, 1884, New York: Modern Library, 2005, pp. 355–359. ———. “Our América.” Newly revised translation by Esther Allen. Havana: Centro de Estudios Martianos. http://www.josemarti.cu/publicacion/nuestra-america-version-ingles/. Marx Aveling, Eleanor. Introduction. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, 1892. London: W.W. ­Gibbings, pp. vii–xxii. Phillips, Kate. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Reynolds, Christopher. “On the Trail of Ramona in California.” Los Angeles Times, 11 January 2009. https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-trw-ramona11-2009jan11-story.html. Ruiz de Burton, Maria Amparo. The Squatter and the Don. 1885. Edited and introduced by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatriz Pita. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997. Schuster, Cindy. Commentary on translations of “Los heraldos negros” by Clayton Eshleman, Rebecca Seiferle and Barry Fogden. Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. Minneapolis: Gray Wolf, 2017, pp. 99–105. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2012. Vallejo, César. El romanticismo en la poesía castellana, edited by Juan Mejia Baca and P.L. Villanueva. Lima: Letras, 1954. ———. Los Heraldos Negros. Lima: Editorial Perú Nuevo, 1959. Vallejo, Georgette de. ¡Allá ellos, Allá ellos, Allá ellos! Lima: Zalvac, 1978. Vitier, Cintio. “Vallejo y Martí.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 7, no. 13, 1981, pp. 95–98.

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Further Readings DeLyser, Dydia. Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Exploring historical and physical intersections between fact, fantasy, business, and literature, this fascinating study by a feminist geographer, structured around several locations that claim to be “Ramona’s real home,” assesses the ongoing impact of Jackson’s novel on social memory in the region it describes, even in the present day, when US readers, tourists, and business entrepreneurs have largely forgotten about it. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. 1940. Translated by Harriet de Onis. Introduction by Bronislaw Malinowski. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. In this cornerstone of Latin American studies, Ortiz coins the term “transculturation.” The entry for that term in the Oxford English Dictionary offers the opposite of transculturation, incorrectly attributing the word to Bronislaw Malinowski and incorrectly defining it as a synonym of acculturation—precisely what Ortiz emphatically says it is not. Brilliantly translated by the great Harriet de Onis, doyenne of twentieth-century US translators of Latin American literature, Ortiz’s study offers in-depth understanding by showing transculturation at work throughout the history it proposes of the formation of Cuba’s national culture—a history in which José Martí is a constant presence. Vallejo, César. The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. With a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa, a panoramic introduction by Efraín Kristal, and a thorough chronology by Stephen M. Hart, this volume represents the apogee of the late poet Clayton Eshleman’s lifelong engagement with César Vallejo, the culmination of a dozen or more works of Vallejo translation published by Eshleman over more than four decades.

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4 José María Arguedas Decolonizing Translation Fanny Arango-Keeth

Introduction As a cultural and literary translator, José María Arguedas (Peru, 1911–1969) resisted, defied, and transformed the idea of a culturally and linguistically homogeneous identity that was prolonged by the hegemonic Peruvian historical, cultural, and literary paradigms sustained since the nation-state was consolidated during Peru’s independence from the Spanish colonial rule, following the Battle of Ayacucho (1824). These paradigms, which were strongly rooted in the perception that the Spanish language was the “official” and “dominant” linguistic medium of expression, systematically suppressed all verbal discourses in any of the native and ancestral languages spoken in the country, languages that, despite this repression, still prevail in the twenty-first century. Advocating for the need to recognize cultural and literary productions independent of these paradigms, particularly those in Quechua, Arguedas, as a translator, a writer, an anthropologist, and an ethnologist, committed himself to the arduous task of translating into Spanish the cultural and artistic products of the Quechuan subject. His objective was to stress Quechuan cultural visibility and to inscribe the Quechuan subject as a citizen, who participates in the construction of the nation-state. For the purpose of interpreting and explaining Arguedas’s positionality as a translator, it is imperative to analyze a representative corpus of his translations, as well as establish correlations between these translations and the essays, annotations, and notes that accompany them. Connecting this evidence to other intertextual references will allow us to establish his translation paradigm, following a theoretical and methodological approach based on Gerard Genette’s proposal in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997) and a postcolonial framework derived from the works of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Tejaswini Niranjana. Mona Baker’s study Translation and Conflict validates the need to assess translators’ practice by addressing their “positionality,” a term that within the realm of translation criticism makes reference not only to the assessment of the target text as a resulting product, but also to an extensive examination of peritexts (prefaces, notes, translator’s notes, glossaries, etc.) and epitexts (Genette 1997). All of these types of paratexts facilitate one’s understanding of the ideological stance of translators, their ethical choices, and their translation strategies and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-6

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techniques, especially those used to avoid the discursive acculturation of one culture by another through strategies of discourse containment: Translators and interpreters face a basic ethical choice with every assignment: to reproduce existing ideologies as encoded in the narratives elaborated in the text or utterance, or to dissociate themselves from those ideologies, if necessary by refusing to translate the text or interpret in a particular context at all […] Beyond this basic choice, translators and interpreters can and do resort to various strategies to strengthen or undermine particular aspects of the narratives they mediate explicitly or implicitly. These strategies allow them to dissociate themselves from the narrative position of the author or speaker or, alternatively to signal their empathy with it. (Baker 2006: 105) The ethical positionality that Arguedas assumed as a translator and how he regarded the representation and inscription of the Quechua subject has been well described by Gustavo Gutiérrez in Entre las calandrias, where he states: Arguedas es el escritor de los encuentros y desencuentros de todas las razas, de todas las lenguas y de todas las patrias del Perú. Pero no es un testigo pasivo, no se limita a fotografiar y a describir, toma partido. (2011: 2) [Arguedas is the writer of the reunion and antagonism of all the races, of all the languages and of all the nations from Peru. But he is not a passive witness, he does not limit himself to photographing and describing this reality, he takes a side].1 By “taking the side” of the Quechuan subject, Arguedas reveals a revolutionary positionality, one that allowed him to assume the possibilities and challenges of the translation practice with one clear goal: inscribe not only the cultural and artistic past of the Quechua culture and language, but also (and of utmost importance) the cultural and artistic present of the contemporary Quechuan subject within the national official discourses. Indeed, Arguedas’s translation practice was guided by his political and ideological convictions, which situated him as an active social and political agent, an agent committed to the inclusion of one of the multiple cultures and languages that co-exist in Peru beside the dominant one ­(Arango-Keeth 2012). Because Arguedas was born in Andahuaylas, Apurimac on January 18, 1911, it is of special interest to examine his bilingual background. According to the testimony of historian and writer Luis E. Valcárcel (1891–1987), the translator’s first language was Quechua, until he “learned and mastered” Spanish around nine years old: El desarrollo de su infancia en una comunidad indígena fue un elemento esencial en la vida de Arguedas. De aquel ambiente nació su profundo amor por la sierra y su gente. Convivió con los indígenas llegando a una profunda identificación con ellos. Aprendió a hablar quechua antes que castellano, que solo llegó a dominar a los 9 o 10 años. Llegó a Lima a los 19 años (Valcárcel 1981: 371) [He spent his childhood in an indigenous community, which became an essential element in Arguedas’s life. He had a profound love for the Peruvian Andes and for its 66

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people. He lived within an indigenous community and strongly identified as one of its members. He learned Quechua before he learned Spanish—a language that he mastered when he was around 9 or 10 years old. He arrived in Lima when he was 19 years old]. This type of linguistic and cultural upbringing allowed Arguedas to be a fully coordinate bilingual translator, an aspect that distinguished him from the rest of the Peruvian writers, translators, and scholars of his time. They mainly represented the voice of the Quechuan subject from “outside” its cultural formation, usually as subjects from within the hegemonic and “oppressive walls” that shaped and confined their production. In his memoirs, Valcárcel emphasizes the fluidity of Arguedas’s intercultural competence, a competence that showed no imposition of one language or culture over the other. Regarding his ethnolinguistic profile, Alberto Escobar, in Arguedas o la utopía de la lengua, highlights three informative facts: (1) Arguedas relied upon his strong belief in the multilingual and multicultural nature of the Peruvian nation; (2) he was fluid and diverse in the use of both Quechua and Spanish; and (3) his translations showed a constant reflection on the sociolinguistic features of a given language, along with a renewed assessment of the languages and cultures in contact (either in harmony or in conflict) (1984: 69–73). Ricardo González Vigil corroborates this observation; he considers Arguedas an intellectual who re-envisioned the scope of the Indigenista project in Peru with a more inclusive approach, an approach that acknowledged the multicultural identity of his nation (1991: 272–277). When Arguedas was 19 years old, he moved to the Peruvian capital and started his ethnology studies at the National University of San Marcos. The academic and political atmosphere that he witnessed at San Marcos helped the writer catalyze and embrace with fervent passion his role as a cultural translator from Quechua into Spanish. In fact, Arguedas openly recognized his stance as a translator when he received the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega literary prize in 1968: Infected forever by the songs and myths, by good fortune taken to the University of San Marcos, a Quechua speaker all my life, a joyful visitor of great foreign cities, I attempted to transform into written language what I was as an individual: a strong living link, capable of being universalized, between the great, walled-nation and the generous, humane side of the oppressors. (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below 269, tr. Horning Barraclough) As one can understand, the historical and cultural context in which Arguedas adopted his translation stance and practice was unique. The Peruvian Indigenista Movement was in its most salient apogee, following the publication of “El problema primario en el Perú” by José Carlos Mariátegui in 1924 (Chang-Rodríguez, 103). This cultural and literary movement strove to inscribe and validate the past and present historical, cultural, and artistic contributions of the ancestral native cultures of Peru. In addition, similar revolutionary political movements housed at the National San Marcos University around 1931 aimed at social transformation. When Arguedas started his studies in ethnology, this sociopolitical environment was instrumental for the translator. He became acquainted with other influential indigenistas outside the political and literary spheres of reference. In particular, Arguedas actively participated in the activities sponsored by the arts center, Peña Pancho Fierro, founded by Alicia and Celia Bustamante Vernal. Peña Pancho Fierro frequently housed a representative exhibit of native artistic artifacts and products. It also helped to organize gatherings with national and international intellectuals. In their discussions, these intellectuals tried to elaborate a sociopolitical agenda that would help change the still-prevalent notion of a static monolingual 67

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colonial state. They advocated for a new cultural and linguistic policy with a more dynamic perception of the multilingual and multicultural nation,2 one based on the principle that the most salient feature of a language is its capacity to generate imagined communities and build in effect particular solidarities (Anderson 2006: 136). Alicia Bustamante Vernal was a painter strongly committed to the Indigenista Movement that was taking place at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, then directed by José Sabogal—the leading representative of the movement. Bustamante, along with her sister Celia, was able to attend the Institute of Peruvian Studies, a social science research center created and directed by Valcárcel. At this research institution, José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) used to deliver presentations and openly discuss the need to forge a new and more inclusive Peruvian nation. While studying and living in Lima, Arguedas became aware of how the presence of Andean communities that had migrated from the countryside to the capital city began shaping and redefining the contemporary mestizo identity. They helped create an urban mestizo: Pero cuando llegué a la capital, el movimiento de defensa del indio había crecido mucho y se iba convirtiendo en fuerza nacional. Ya en Lima encontré un grupo de escritores y artistas que se preocupaban del indio: unos estudiando el aspecto político y económico; otros sólo del indio como creador de arte. (Canto Kechwa 12) But when I came to the capital, the movement in defense of the Indian had grown a great deal and was becoming a national force. In Lima I found a group of writers and artists working on the Indian problem, some studying its political and economic aspects, and others only interested in the Indian as a creator of art. (The Singing Mountaineers: Songs and Tales of the Quechua People 30, tr. Stephan) According to several accounts, in particular those recorded by Valcárcel in his memoir, Arguedas continuously participated in the cultural, literary, and artistic celebrations of the Quechuan communities that had already settled in the outskirts of the capital (1981: 373). Due to the strength of his observational skills and his ethnological and anthropological academic training, Arguedas was able to recognize that any linguistic and cultural appropriation and imposition by either the Spanish or the Quechua languages could only widen the gap between the two worlds that were already living together. His awareness of this reality can be observed in an excerpt from his prose-poem in Quechua written in 1962, “Tupac Amaru Kamaq taytanchisman”. Arguedas himself translated this prose-poem into Spanish as “A nuestro padre creador Túpac Amaru”: Estoy en Lima, en el inmenso pueblo, cabeza de los falsos wiraqochas. En la Pampa de Comas, sobre la arena, con mis lágrimas, con mi fuerza, con mi sangre, edifiqué una casa. El río de mi pueblo, su sombra, su gran cruz de madera, las yerbas y arbustos que florecen, rodeándolo, están, están palpitando adentro de esa casa; un picaflor dorado juega en el aire, sobre el techo. (…) Al inmenso pueblo de los señores hemos llegado y lo estamos removiendo. Con nuestro corazón lo alcanzamos, lo penetramos; con nuestro regocijo no extinguido, con la relampagueante alegría del hombre sufriente que tiene el poder de todos los cielos, con nuestros himnos antiguos y nuevos, lo estamos envolviendo (Temblar, el sueño del pongo 19) 68

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[I am in Lima, in the immense town, nerve center of the false wiraqochas. In the pampa of Comas, on the sand, with my tears, with my strength, with my blood, I built a house. My hometown river, its shadow, its big wooden cross, the herbs and bushes that bloom, encircling it, are, they are palpitating inside that house: a golden hummingbird plays in the air, over the roof. (…) To the noblemen’s immense town, we have arrived, and we are agitating it. With our heart, we reach it, we penetrate it; with our unextinguished elation, with the lightening flash of happiness of suffering men who have the power of all mighty skies, with our old and new hymns, we are encircling it]. When examining Arguedas’s prose-poem, it becomes clear that the Quechuan translator faced the urgent need to create cultural and linguistic bridges that would channel the Quechuan identity and validate its past and contemporary cultural and artistic contributions. He recognized that a new historical context needed to be created. In his essay, “Entre el kechwa y el castellano: la angustia del mestizo” (“Between Spanish and Quechua”), the translator elaborates on this paradigm more explicitly: En nosotros, la gente del Ande, hace pocos años ha empezado el conflicto del idioma, como real y expreso en nuestra literatura; desde Vallejo, hasta el último poeta del Ande. El mismo conflicto que sintiera, aunque en forma más ruda Guamán Poma de Ayala. Si hablamos en castellano puro, no decimos ni del paisaje ni de nuestro mundo interior; porque el mestizo no ha logrado todavía dominar el castellano como su idioma y el kechwa es aún su medio legítimo de expresión. Pero si escribimos en kechwa hacemos literatura estrecha y condenada al olvido. (Indios, mestizos y señores 267) In us, the people of the highlands, the language conflict, as a conscious problem, explicit in our literature from [César] Vallejo to the last Andean poet, began a few years ago. It was the same conflict felt—though more crudely—by the sixteenth century chronicler and poet Huamán Poma de Ayala. If we speak pure Spanish, we say nothing of our landscape or inner world; because the mestizo has not yet mastered Spanish as his own language and Quechua is still his legitimate means of expression. But if we write in Quechua the result is a narrow literature condemned to neglect. (“Between Spanish and Quechua” 15, tr. Harss) Clearly, Arguedas’s positionality as a translator aims to build a “living link” of communication between the two worlds in order to free the Quechua culture from the oppressive corralling walls of the dominant Hispanic culture. This guiding paradigm for his translation stance and practice was recognized and stressed by the translator himself when he received the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Literature Prize and stated: “I am not an acculturated man; I am a Peruvian who, like a cheerful demon, proudly speaks in Christian and in Indian, in Spanish and Quechua. I longed to transform this reality into artistic language” (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below 269, tr. Horning Barraclough). As a writer, Arguedas also confirmed his own Quechuan identity as a “living link.” His master novel The Fox from Right Above and the Fox from Down Below, published posthumously in 1971 both in Quechua and in Spanish, exemplifies his literary approach. His approach becomes vividly clear when one analyzes the hybrid nature of this novel. Arguedas’s writing 69

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demonstrates a grammatical and lexical imbrication of both languages, as well as the embedding of various types of textual forms. In order to explain this new literary proposal, Ángel Rama coins the term “transculturation” in his book Formación de una cultura nacional indoamericana (1975). In a more contemporary study, Raúl Bueno reexamines the meaning of transculturation and its scope, especially as it is applied to the most salient features of the novel. Bueno does not consider this concept capable of describing all of the interlinguistic and intercultural literary contact inscribed in the Andahuaylian writer’s master novel. He proposes that Arguedas was politically committed to exercising the role of a cultural translator (2012: 24). Both a careful examination of Arguedas’s sociopolitical and cultural background and an understanding of his multidisciplinary academic training help determine how his practice as a translator set out to “reclaim the notion of translation by deconstructing it and reinscribing its potential as a strategy of resistance” (Niranjana 1992: 6). Arguedas assumed the challenge of exercising his translation practice within a historical context in which the Quechuan subject was still considered “subaltern” by the official and dominant Spanish culture that prevailed in his country. What is more, he was able to create artistic and literary translations that transcend the realm of a “regional literature.” His translations helped the original works become recognized as universal objects of art and culture. As a translator, his stance balanced the asymmetric relations of power between the dominant culture and the one considered “subaltern.” Moreover, he resisted and transformed the hegemonic paradigms that confined the Quechua language’s cultural contribution strictly to the grandiose Inca past. He envisioned inscribing the voice of the contemporary Quechuan subject as one of “its multiple voices,” both from the past and in the present. At a time when the Quechua dialectal variation spoken essentially in Cuzco was considered the only linguistic norm, Arguedas advocated for the recognition of all the Quechua dialects spoken throughout the country. As part of his ethical positionality as a translator, he considered Quechua both a language of prestige and a language of a cultural alterity. For the Andahuaylian translator, Quechua, like any other oral and/or written language, could offer a reader a unique interpretational experience, one that transcends the “local,” “vernacular,” and/or “regional” labels and provides a more universal understanding. What is more, Arguedas creatively approached translation from a sociopolitical stance where he was able to envision a translation method capable of allowing translators to directly transfer a source text in Quechua to another language without anchoring the interpretation of the text in an existing Spanish translation. In the fourth volume of the bilingual journal Haravec,3 Arguedas and Maureen Ahern (editor/translator) used a strategy that he called “translating by oral images” to translate the Quechua song “Ijmacha” directly into English. Ahern describes this particular translation method in an interview conducted by Juan Zevallos in 2003 and published in Hostos Review. Arguedas and Ahern translated “Ijmacha” together for a special edition of Haravec, one that included a trilingual section of Quechua poetry. Arguedas would describe the images from the source text in Quechua while Ahern would transfer these images into English without resorting to Arguedas’s Spanish translation (Hostos Review 2003: 347). This particular translation method shows an astounding awareness about the risks of cultural appropriation. Finally, in his acceptance speech of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Prize, Arguedas once again examined the ways contemporary Quechuan people combated the isolating and oppressive walls that suppressed their autonomous cultural representation. He called attention to the means by which they questioned their subaltern identity imposed on them by the hegemonic culture. In this respect, Arguedas’s translation positionality 70

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mirrors the postmodern positionality that Homi Bhabha describes in The Location of Culture: “[w]hat is interrogated is not simply the image of the person, but the discursive and disciplinary place from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed” (1994: 47).

Methodological Approach Substantiating Arguedas’s positionality as a translator in a representative corpus of his translations requires an interdisciplinary approach. Like any other exercise of translation criticism, it should evaluate and examine the target texts as products. In order to do so, the researcher needs to cohesively align three levels of critical interventions: (1) determining the theoretical framework most suitable to explain the ideological paradigm of the translator’s role as a cultural mediator; (2) establishing a method of analysis that can validate the interpretation of evidence extracted from a specific corpus of study—evidence that will confirm the translator’s role as a cultural and political agency, and (3) selecting a body of evidence that establishes the translator’s ideological paradigm of translation, weighing the impact of his or her translation decisions. As for a theoretical basis, this study lies within the framework of postcolonial studies and has been influenced by the work of Gayatri Spivak and Bhabha. Also, Tejaswini Niranjana’s book Siting Translation has been instrumental while analyzing the role that translation has in fixing the representation of cultural alterities. Any assessment of the dynamic historical and cultural nature of translation, as well as its ideological stance, requires one to recognize and evaluate translation practice in terms of the translator’s “socio-political positionality.” In Arguedas’s case, this is crucial: it helps assess the translator’s historical practice as an active and dynamic subject committed to social transformation. Arguedas’s positionality can be assessed in both his paratextual discourse about translation and his body of translations. In fact, the whole paradigm surrounding the historical idea of “silent scribes”—translators who translate from one language into another, exercising their work from a fictitious degree zero of ideological viewpoint—has been drastically modified. Peter Fawcett indicates that with the advent of both deconstruction and postcolonial studies, the subject of ideology, or, more specifically, the role of ideology in setting or subverting relations of power, has become an important object of study in different disciplines of the humanities (1998: 106). The practice of translation becomes an active arena where translators inscribe their cultural and political agencies. Translation then can resist and subvert hegemonic practices or can help perpetuate them. The method of analysis that will be utilized in this chapter involves observing the body of discursive sequences that form the peritexts and epitexts that are either intratextually or intertextually connected to each of the actual three translation projects that form the translation corpus. Following Genette’s approach in Paratexts (1997), the paratextual information will then be compared with a corpus of translation sequences4 in both Quechua and Spanish, which were extracted from the translation for which the peritext is ascribed. In order to assemble an initial body of evidence in which one can recognize the sociocultural and political context that shaped the translator’s ethical and political positionality, one must examine a comprehensive body of primary sources. These sources should include not only Arguedas’s translations, but also the literary criticism, anthropological, and ethnological articles and essays published by the author in books and in academic journals. In addition to the biographical context already elaborated, special attention should be paid to the writer’s literary works, as well as to his epistolary correspondences with French historian 71

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Pierre Duviols (1928–), with Romanian-American anthropologist John Murra (1916–2006), and with Peruvian poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen (1911–2001), since these sources can help identify the discourse of the autobiographical subject regarding his translation projects. An examination of all these sources helped delimit the corpus. Three specific translations from Quechua into Spanish become the most salient to analyze: Canto Kechwa (1939), “Dos cuentos quechuas,” published in the literary journal Las Moradas (1947), and Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí (1966). This corpus is representative, albeit limited due to the nature of this study. In this corpus, Arguedas adds paratextual information to each translation, which thoroughly explains his translation decisions, making it ideal for the purpose of analyzing the translator’s positionality. On preliminary inspection of Arguedas’s translations, it becomes evident that the translator clearly presents his translation decisions, reflects upon his translation methods, strategies, and techniques, and provides details about the philosophical and ethical ethos that accompanied his translation decisions. He carefully anchors the representation of the cultural alterity by avoiding any degree of textual acculturation and alerts the reader to this anchoring in his paratexts.

Corpus Canto Kechwa constitutes the first translation project that Arguedas accomplished and published in 1938. The translator included an essay about the creative ability of the Quechuan subject and a collection of twenty-one Quechua songs with the corresponding translations into Spanish. In the introductory essay that functions as a peritext, he explains the scope of this project: Hace tiempo que tenía el proyecto de traducir las canciones quechuas que había oído y cantado en los pueblos de la sierra. En mis lecturas no encontré ninguna poesía que expresara mejor mis sentimientos que la poesía de esas canciones. Además, tenía dos razones poderosas para realizar ese proyecto: demostrar que el indio sabe expresar sus sentimientos en lenguaje poético; demostrar su capacidad de creación artística y hacer ver que lo que el pueblo crea para su propia expresión, es arte esencial. Porque yo también creo que, si bien la creación individual, la expresión íntima y profunda de un hombre, logra realizar, a veces, una gran obra de arte, el arte aquel en que se reconoce y se siente toda el alma y la sensibilidad de un pueblo, es el que perdura y el verdaderamente universal. (Arguedas 1983: 21) [For a long time, I have had in mind the project of translating the Quechua songs that I had heard and sung in Andean towns. In my readings, I did not find any type of poetry that would better express my feelings than the poetry that I found in these songs. Also, I had two powerful reasons to complete this task: to demonstrate that the Quechuas were able to express their feelings using a poetic language; to demonstrate their capacity for artistic creativity and make it evident that what common people create as a means of self-expression, is essential art. I also believe that, if a great work of art is able to express individual creativity, the intimate and profound expression of a man, the art in which one can recognize the soul and sensitivity of a given community, then it is the art that prevails, the art expression that is truly universal].

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Arguedas clearly emphasizes the fact that the twenty-one songs he has included in the selection are not “archaic,” but rather represent the “current Quechua” spoken in Peru, a language that has incorporated lexical borrowings from Spanish: No son canciones arcaicas, transmitidas de generación en generación; casi todas son creaciones del pueblo indio y mestizo de hoy, compuestas en su idioma actual, kechwa, con muchas palabras castellanas—van subrayadas—; son pues, la expresión de la vida del pueblo indio y mestizo actual. (1938: 22) [They are not archaic songs, passed down from generation to generation; almost all of them are creations of today’s Quechua and Mestizo people, created in their current language, Quechua, with many words in Spanish—underlined—; they represent, then, the life of the current Quechuas and mestizos]. Addressing the challenges posed by the figurativization strategies observed at the symbolic level in the deep structure of the Quechua songs, the translator explains in his introduction that he has opted for a more communicative translation approach rather than a semantic one. He attempts to avoid either a loss in translation or a loss of the poetic expression. By describing his translation approach, he reveals the form in which the target text aims to be perceived. He even tries to avoid how it will be framed by the traditional Quechua purists, since they would constantly advocate for the superiority of the dialectal variation of the native language spoken in Cuzco. In both his introduction and the bilingual presentation of the songs, Arguedas inscribes the new mestizo identity that the contemporary Quechuan poets/ songwriters occupy. He also addresses the impact that the Spanish part of his identity could have in his translation decisions: Insisto pues en decir que no son traducciones rigurosamente literales, son traducciones un tanto interpretativas, que quizá desagradarán un poco a los filólogos, pero serán una satisfacción para los que sentimos el Kechwa como si fuera nuestro idioma nativo. Me falta sólo decir que en esas versiones se encontrará, sin duda, la influencia de la parte que tengo de español, eso no lo podía evitar. (1938: 23) [I insist that the translations are not rigorously literal, they are a little bit interpretative and this might become unpleasant for the philologists, but they will be appreciated by those of us who feel Quechua as if it were our native language. I only need to add that in these versions, the reader will find with no doubt the influence of my Spanish identity, something I could not avoid]. As one can see, Arguedas’s preface to his translation corresponds also to his ethical positionality regarding his interventions in the production of the target text. Facing the limits of “untranslatability,” he explains that he resorts to freely “recreating” or “rewriting” three of the songs, “Sin nadie, sin nadie…,” “Díle que he llorado…,” and “Raki-Raki,” with the objective of interpretatively transferring the poetic meaning of the source texts. In the case of “Díle que he llorado,” he even explains the reason for including two target versions and his preference for the more poetic one:

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No he hecho traducciones literales, he hecho versiones poéticas, el tema de las canciones está puro y entero. En “Sin nadie, sin nadie…” me he tomado la libertad de crear una metáfora—subrayada—que no está expresa en el verso kechwa, con el objeto de igualar a la fuerza poética del último cuarteto de esa canción. En “Dile que he llorado…” he aumentado el primero y el último pie, para describir al picaflor siwar que es el tema de la canción. Publico dos traducciones de la canción del incendio porque creo la segunda es más fiel. Por último, el segundo pie de “Raki-raki” es una interpretación del tema y del símbolo, porque esos versos son casi intraducibles. (23) [I have not done literal translations, I have done poetic versions, the original themes found in the songs remain pure and intact. In “Sin nadie, sin nadie…” I took the liberty of creating a metaphor—underlined—that is not included in the Kechwa verse, with the objective of balancing the poetic force of the last quartet of this song. In “Díle que he llorado…” I have added the first and the last foot in order to be able to describe the siwar hummingbird that is the theme of this song. I publish two translations of “He prendido fuego” because I believe that the second one is more faithful to the original text. Finally, the second poetic foot in “Raki-Raki” is an interpretation of the theme and the symbol, because those verses are almost untranslatable]. Source text

Target text-First version

Ischu kañask’ay Ork’opi ischu kañask’ay, k’asapi ischu kañask’ay ¡jinallarak’chus rupachkan jinallark’chus rauracchkan!

He prendido fuego…

Jinalla, raurariptink’a, jinalla rupariptink’a ¡Warma wek’echaykiwan Challaykuy! ¡Warma wekéchaykiwan Tasnuykuy! (26)

He prendido fuego en la cumbre, he incendiado el ischu en la cima de la montaña. ¡Anda pues! Apaga el fuego con tus lágrimas, llora sobre el ischu ardiendo. Corre y mira la cima de la montaña si ves fuego, si arde todavía el ischu, corre a llorar sobre el incendio ¡Apaga el fuego con tus lágrimas! (27)

Canto Kewcha helps demonstrate the prevalence and continuity of the Quechua culture and allows Arguedas to continue translating oral and written texts and to publish them in national and international literary journals. The next two translations in the corpus appeared later in a 1947 issue of Las Moradas, a literary journal directed at the time by Emilio Adolfo Westphalen (1911–2001). Arguedas translated two short stories, “El negociante en harinas” and “La amante de la culebra,” from Quechua into Spanish. The stories were taken from oral accounts that the Catholic priest Jorge A. Lira (1912–1984) collected from native speakers in Marangani, a district from the 74

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Canchis province in Cuzco, and transcribed in Quechua. In the introduction to Arguedas’s “Dos cuentos quechuas del Alto Vilcanota,” one can observe how this project correlates with the translator’s visionary commitment to revealing the diversity of the contemporary Quechuan subject’s cultural and artistic manifestations. In this introductory presentation of his translation, Arguedas carefully explains the oral approach that he uses as a translation method. It consists of Lira reading the account as if he were telling the story and Arguedas translating it as exactly as possible (125). In the same introduction, the translator also examines the complexity of the source texts. His analysis outlines their phonetic and phonological features that significantly determine the overall meaning of each text. For Arguedas, avoiding a sudden adulteration of the intended meaning of each story poses the main translation challenge. The introduction serves as a metadiscourse about translation and also demonstrates Arguedas’s knowledge of translation techniques, such as semantic equivalence and modulation: ¿Cómo verter la intención el verdadero contenido del lenguaje puramente fonético? La interpretación, por más aproximada que fuera, contenía el peligro de una adulteración del exacto sentido de la voz original; sin embargo, en la mayoría de los casos me vi precisado a buscar una frase castellana, y en rarísimas ocasiones una oración equivalente. En otros casos fue preciso conservar la voz quechua pura, que en virtud de su significación onomatopéyica tenía una especie de valor universal. (“Dos cuentos” 25–26) [How to pour back in the exact sense of a purely phonetic language? The interpretation, as close as it could be, runs the risk of adulterating the exact meaning of the source text; however, in the majority of cases I found it necessary to look for a phrase in Spanish, and on rare occasions for an equivalent sentence. In other cases, it was necessary to maintain the pure Quechua voice since its onomatopoeic meaning held a kind of universal value]. Perhaps the most outstanding source of information to observe and study Arguedas’s translation praxis would be his most voluminous translation from Quechua into Spanish, the Huarochirí manuscript attributed to the Catholic priest and extirpator of idolatries Francisco de Ávila (1571–1647), which the Andahuaylian writer entitled Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí, published by the National Museum of History and the Institute of Peruvian Studies in 1966. This translation will be the last one included in this study. The first part of this voluminous translation project includes three peritexts: “La colección de fuentes e investigaciones”—a presentation of the research series by Valcárcel and historian Carlos Araníbar (1928–2016); “Introducción a Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí” by Arguedas; and the bilingual presentation of the source texts transcribed from Quechua with their corresponding translated versions into Spanish. The subsequent fifteen chapters of the manuscript present the actual translation of the myths, religious beliefs, customs, and traditions of the Quechua subject in the Huarochirí province of the department of Lima. The second part of the translation consists of six closing peritexts: “Los suplementos” [Two Annexes]; “Estudio biobibliográfico” [Biobibliographical Study about Ávila] by Duviols; “Los manuscritos” [A Note about the Manuscripts]; “Documentos” [Documents]; “Acotaciones a la traducción” [Marginal Notes about the Translation]; and, “Índice analítico” [Analytic Index]. The inclusion of these sections demonstrates the translator and editor’s intention to establish the content correlations that would enrich the reading experience. 75

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The translation in and of itself contributed to the decolonization of the Quechua language by restoring the scope of the manuscript. Arguedas chooses to translate this text despite the diachronic distance between the context in which the source text was produced and the translational context. The sociopolitical context in which Arguedas reaches his decision corresponds to the cultural reassessment and renovation of the Indigenista movement. In particular, it responds to the need to academically and scientifically study the Peruvian Andean history and mythology. At the time, this sociopolitical movement had already found a fertile ground in academic circles. In 1963, Valcárcel, the historian and anthropologist who Arguedas admired for having initiated the systematic study of the Peruvian culture (Indios, mestizos y señores, 14), had become the director of the National Museum of History. This distinguished scholar requested that Duviols, then a professor at San Marcos University and a researcher at the French Institute of Andean Studies, elaborate an editorial project that would include the publication of the most consequential ancestral historical sources. Around the same time, Murra—also a professor at San Marcos University and founder of the Institute of Peruvian Studies along with Valcárcel and anthropologist José Matos Mar (1921–2015)—had already started discussing with Arguedas the unpostponable importance of translating into Spanish the Huarochirí manuscript.5 In “The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration,” Mary Louise Pratt explains that translators generally establish rational and at the same time emphatic connections with a text before even engaging themselves in the translation process: “The translator is always connected to the imaginative production to be translated; some relation across (historical or cultural) distance has brought the original into the translator’s purview, into the space of the translator’s desire. The scene of translation already possesses a meaning or meanings in the translator’s world” (2002: 30). By establishing peritextual connections between the information included in the other sections of Dioses y hombres that accompany the translation with information covered in other intertexts, it is evident that the Huarochirí accounts had already been part of Arguedas’s own translational projects for some time, clearly before starting the translation itself. Convinced that the translation of this manuscript would be aligned with his own principles about translation as a political act of cultural restoration, Arguedas must have examined the reasoning and values latent in this particular narrative and designed translation strategies that could assure that his role as a translator would maintain the manuscript’s cultural and political agency. Baker describes this stage as “the framing function of translation”: Whatever local strategies a translator or interpreter opts for, their cumulative choices always have an effect beyond the immediate text or event. Individual textual narratives do not exist in isolation of the larger narratives circulating in any society nor indeed of the meta-narratives circulating globally. As social actors, translators and interpreters are responsible for the narratives they help circulate and for the real-life consequences of giving these narratives currency and legitimacy. (2006: 139) The translator could have understood that his translation decisions from Quechua into Spanish would potentially help fix the identity of the cultural alterity and perpetuate the subaltern condition of the Quechua subject, reinforcing stereotypical representations.6 This is the reason why he always meticulously examined each and every translation project he would become involved in. As we have outlined earlier, Arguedas also pursued each project with 76

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the intention of modifying the cultural and literary canons firmly rooted in Spanish, the language of the hegemonic culture. In the case of Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí, the writer knew from the very beginning that the translation project was going to demand extensive research. As a result, he opted for a semantic-communicative translation approach and included detailed peritexts that would improve and facilitate the reading experience of the target text. He tried to systematically avoid acculturating and diluting its intended meaning. Valcárcel reflects on the scope of Arguedas’s translation of Dioses y Hombres de Huarochirí in his memoirs: Se interesó por la traducción de ciertos documentos sobre las idolatrías en Huarochirí, atribuidos a Francisco de Ávila. Resultado de ese interés se editó un texto de gran valor, Dioses y Hombres de Huarochirí, publicado por el Museo Nacional de Historia y el Instituto de Estudios Peruanos en 1966. José María se abocó a esta obra con el entusiasmo y fervor que ponía siempre que se interesaba en cumplir a cabalidad con una determinada empresa intelectual. En este libro puso muchísimo de su interés y entusiasmo por el quechua y, sobre todo, por salvar este documento precioso que nos ofrece un cuadro muy completo de la mitología de Huarochirí. (1981: 376) [He was interested in the translation of various documents about idolatries in Huarochirí, documents that were attributed to Francisco de Ávila. As a result of this interest, the National Museum of History and the Institute of Peruvian Studies published a volume of a great value Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí in 1966. José María embraced this work with the enthusiasm and fervor that he would place in every single project that he would pursue and that would demand a significant intellectual challenge. In particular, he was extremely interested and enthusiastic about this book because of the Quechua language and because he wanted to save this precious document since it depicts a complete reference to the Huarochirí mythology]. Due to the complexity of the translation task envisioned, Arguedas originally conceived the project as the work of a multidisciplinary team. Murra would work on the anthropological introduction, Duviols on the historical one, Peruvian linguist and anthropologist Alfredo Torero (1930–2004) would assist as a Quechua/Spanish consultant, and Arguedas would conduct the translation. As the project started, however, both Murra and Torero rescinded on the initial agreement—Murra due to previously contracted academic obligations and Torero due to health problems. In the end, Duviols and Arguedas committed themselves to the completion of the project. It was destined to become the inaugural volume of the Fuentes e Investigaciones para la Historia del Perú series, the title eventually given to Valcárcel’s publishing series. According to Duviols’s testimony in Itinerarios personales: La Amistad de José María Arguedas y Pierre Duviols, Arguedas was aware of the complexity that the diachronic distance between the time when the manuscript was produced and the time when the translation process would take place was going to present in the process of producing the target text (Pinilla 2011: 16). In fact, in “Introducción a Dioses y Hombres de Huarochirí,” Arguedas includes four particular subsections: “El contenido y el estilo de la obra” [Content and Style], “La edición” [This Edition], “El problema de la traducción” [The Translation Challenge], and “La traducción incompleta de Ávila y algunas otras observaciones” [Ávila’s Incomplete Translation and Some Observations]. The first subsection provides a detailed source text analysis by Arguedas that stresses the canonical importance of the manuscript as a master narrative. The translator compares it with the Popol-Vuh: 77

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Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí es la obra quechua más importante de cuantas existen, un documento excepcional y sin equivalente por su contenido y por su forma. Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí es el único texto quechua popular conocido de los siglos XVI y XVII y el único que ofrece un cuadro completo, coherente, de la mitología, de los ritos y de la sociedad en una provincia del antiguo Perú. […] Es el lenguaje del hombre prehispánico recién tocado por la espada de Santiago. En este sentido es una especie de Popol Vuh de la antigüedad peruana…. (1966: 9) [Gods and Men of Huarochirí is the most important Quechua work from all the existent ones, an exceptional document with no equivalent due to the nature of its content and form. Gods and Men of Huarochirí is the only Quechua text known from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the only one that offers a complete, coherent view of the mythology and rites and of the society from a province in ancient Peru. […] It represents the language of a prehispanic subject recently touched by Santiago’s sword. In this sense, it is a type of Popol Vuh of the Peruvian antiquity...]. In the second subsection, the translator explains the other sections that accompany the translation, and in the third subsection he examines the first seven chapters and concludes that since Ávila’s Spanish was so flowery and coherent, he could not have been the author of the manuscript. Instead, he states that the manuscript recreated the voice of the cultural alterity: No es Ávila el que cuenta, es el practicante de la antigua religión, el creyente en los antiguos dioses y héroes. Aunque las declaraciones se sientan, en algunos pasajes, como teñidas de reproche o de cierto temblor que causa el miedo, el narrador cuenta lo suyo y no lo ajeno y muy frecuentemente maravillado y con regocijo. (1966: 13) [It is not Ávila the one telling the accounts, it is the practitioner of the old religion, the believer in the ancestral gods and heroes. Even though the statements in some passages seem tainted with certain reproach, or even by a certain tremor caused by fright, the narrator recounts his story and not someone else’s, frequently amazed and joyful]. In the fourth subsection, “El problema de la traducción,” Arguedas states and describes some of the manuscript’s specific linguistic and semantic features that present translation challenges due to the oral nature of the source text and the cultural and historical context in which it was originally produced and transcribed. One challenge is related to the way Spanish words are introduced in the same form and with the same intentionality as they are used by contemporary monolingual Spanish speakers. A second challenge is related to the Quechua dialectal variation and the orthographic rules found in the transcribed text. Arguedas reminds the reader that at the time the manuscript was written, the orthographic rules were not even fixed for the Spanish language. Therefore, the application of the Spanish alphabet to transcribe the texts in Quechua presents a paramount translation challenge (1966: 14). Recalling Spivak’s assertion in “Translating into English,” it is clear that Arguedas was able to enter “the protocols of the text—not the general laws of the language, but the laws of [this] particular text” (2005: 94). To the same extent, he was able to recognize that despite being able to identify and understand the particular protocols found in the source text, as a final product his translation could present, in some instances, semantic deviations. His remarks inserted in the fourth subsection 78

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align themselves with the translator’s ethical positionality; Arguedas never considered his translations as definite. Instead, he regarded them as “constant works in progress”: Debemos advertir, finalmente, que esta traducción no es ni puede ser la más perfecta posible. […] Consideramos que la presente traducción habrá de ser perfeccionada, si quien la hizo puede alguna vez tener la oportunidad de trabajar en equipo y a dedicación exclusiva con un dialectólogo del quechua tan bien informado como el Dr. Alfredo Torero, o con la participación de otro equipo de composición equivalente. (1966: 14) [The reader should be forewarned that this translation is not and cannot be the most perfect one. […] We consider that the translation will have to be improved, especially if the one who completed it has the opportunity to sometime in the future work on a team and dedicated exclusively to it with a Quechua dialectologist as well-informed as Dr. Alfredo Torero, or with the participation of another team with similar academic preparation]. In the section “Conventional Symbols Used,” the translator carefully describes the purpose of the punctuation marks that he used in the process of translating the manuscript. He alerts or explains to a general reader the nature of his interventions as a translator. Also, the footnotes included in the target text form a body of references through which Arguedas provides information about his translation decisions. For example, in “Capítulo 14” [Chapter 14], related to Cuniraya Huiracocha, Arguedas finds the Quechua sememe “pachac” in the source text and decides to leave it untranslated in the target text: “Y así, antes de que abriera (la caja), Cuniraya dijo: ‘Inca: sigamos este pachac (*). Yo, sí, yo entraré a este pachac; y tú entra a ese otro pachac, con mi hermana’” [And then, before opening (the box), Cuniraya said: ‘Inca, let’s follow this pachac (*). I, yes, I will enter in this pachac, and you enter the other pachac with my sister] (1966: 93). He recognizes that in the context in which it was used, the direct meaning normally associated with the word would not make any logical sense: (*) Si bien pachac corresponde exactamente al número cien, esta significación no concuerda con el contexto que parece dar a esta palabra el sentido de dirección, área geográfica o agrupación social; por tal razón no la hemos traducido. (1966: 93) [(*) While pachac normally corresponds to the number one hundred, this meaning does not agree with the context in which the word is used. In this context, the word seems to mean a sense of direction, geographical area, or social group; this is the reason why we have left it untranslated]. The final section that closes the manuscript contains “Acotaciones a la traducción” [Marginal Notes about the Translation], in which the translator introduces five notes. These notes allow him to correct semantic departures from the source text, departures that occurred either because of mistranslations or because of unintended deviations in the paleographic transcriptions. Although the translation and publication of the manuscript was challenging, Arguedas remained committed to completing it, envisioning that it would “illuminate with a penetrating light the penumbra in which the Peruvian prehispanic past still remained” (1966: 15). 79

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It is evident that a careful analysis of the peritexts in the target text affirms how the translator’s positionality was based on the principle of avoiding any type of alienation of the historical, cultural, and linguistic products of the Peruvian ancestral culture. Arguedas recognizes the linguistic borrowings and adaptations that took place when the two languages and cultures came into contact. For the Andahuaylian writer, the fact that the Huarochirí manuscript presented sememes in Spanish within the Quechua texts confirmed the existence of a linguistic and cultural contact between the two languages in both tolerant and conflictive contexts. In addition, the translator does not find that this particular feature of lexical incorporation subordinated Quechua to Spanish by any means. By explaining choices and errors, Arguedas has emancipated the ancestral culture and more closely connected it to its contemporary continuity. This ideological decision represents his “ethical work at translation,” as Sandra Bermann suggests in Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation: If we must translate in order to emancipate and preserve cultural pasts and to build linguistic bridges for present understandings and future thought, we must do so while attempting to respond ethically to each language’s contexts, intertexts, and intrinsic alterity. This dual responsibility may well describe an ethics of translation, or more modestly, the ethical at work in translation. It can at least provide a moment of reflection in which an ethical relationship with the others and to the self, to language and its international dissemination and transformation, might be conceived. Such reflections have, in fact, already led to new modes of literary and cultural analysis. (2005: 7)

Conclusion As has been observed throughout the analysis of the corpus studied, Arguedas firmly believed that his translation practice encompassed a political and ethical act of representation. He recognized that translating ancestral and contemporary discourses from Quechua into Spanish could help inscribe a more comprehensive representation of the Quechua subject and help circumvent the strategies of containment, prevalent in Peru at the time. Contrary to “westernized” traditional practices, his translation decisions methodically avoided any type of hegemonic assimilation of the Quechua texts. In addition, he advocated for the institutional recognition of the Quechua language as spoken by the ordinary people in everyday situations and promoted the idea that cultural and literary texts in Quechua could not only portray a regional value but also a universal one. Despite the regional importance attributed to the dialectal variation spoken in Cuzco during his times, Arguedas categorically disputed this belief and firmly advocated for the recognition and inscription of all Quechua dialects spoken in Peru. Conscious of the still-pervading colonial context and discourse,7 Arguedas changed the discourse about translation in his own country by helping both readers and translators be more aware that paradigms claiming a “total correspondence or equivalence” among languages and the “existence of an equalitarian dialogue” were completely inconsistent. His translations helped change the readers’ horizon of expectations as much as they helped enhance their awareness of cultural difference. For Arguedas, many translation paradigms were questionable because they constantly limited linguistic and cultural translatability. This is significant since his translation context was permeated by a protracted historical, cultural, and linguistic conflict between the ancestral languages and the colonial one. Within this

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unnerving context, Arguedas resisted and subverted the asymmetrical relations of power through his translations and positioned himself as an active and dynamic agent of historical, social, and cultural transformation. By practicing translation as a political subject, Arguedas, the translator of Canto Kechwa, “Dos cuentos del Alto Vilcanota,” and Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí, contributed to rewriting Peruvian history. He inscribed the voice of the Quechua subject that had been systematically suppressed by the dominant hegemonic and patriarchal culture and simultaneously altered “the complicitous relationship of translation and the imperialistic vision” (Niranjana 1992: 61). In addition, he advocated for the need to systematically study and reexamine the contact between the two languages and cultures in order to be able to inscribe new dimensions and complexities of the Peruvian mestizo identity. According to Arguedas, this approach would lead to a more comprehensive and inclusive appreciation of the country’s cultural and linguistic richness and diversity. The analysis of Arguedas’s metadiscourse on translation, his translation decisions and practice, and the translations as final products confirms that there is a solid coherence between the writer’s translation practice and his cultural and political ideology. The sincere cultural fidelity he strove to demonstrate between the two different worlds he lived in unfolds in the most challenging and significant translations he made from Quechua into Spanish.

Notes 1 All translations are mine unless specifically noted in the text. 2 It was not until 1975 that the Quechua language was recognized as one of the official languages of Peru by Decree-Law No. 21156. In Article 48 of the Peruvian Constitution of 1992, Quechua, Aymara, and all the other native languages were finally recognized as official. 3 Haravec was an influential bilingual magazine in Spanish and English that was published quarterly in Lima, Peru from 1966 to 1968. It was founded and directed by Maureen Ahern, Alita de Lomellini, Mathew Shipman, Marisa Valencia, David Tipton, and Richard Wrangell. In the fourth volume of 1967, the editors included “a trilingual selection of Quechua Poetry.” Aside from “Ijmacha,” the other poems were “Waqay Qiwayllu” by Salvador Palomino, translated into Spanish by Palomino as “Llora Qiwayllu” and into English by C.A. de Lomellini and Escobar as “Weep Horn,” and an anonymous song from Ayacucho collected by Teodoro L. Meneses—with no title in Quechua—translated into Spanish as “Araña gigante” and into English as “Spider Song” by both Lomellini and Escobar (1–12). 4 Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés in Semiótica. Diccionario razonado de la teoría del lenguaje describe a discourse sequence as a textual unit obtained by segmentation (1982: 347). For this project, a translation sequence represents a complete unit of content extracted from the source together with the corresponding unit extracted from the target text. Both sequences are paired and analyzed. 5 In a letter addressed to Murra in 1962, Arguedas mentioned that he wanted to continue translating the manuscript (Murra and López Baralt 1996: 84), which would indicate that he had been considering the translation two years prior to the official opportunity presented by Valcárcel. 6 Bhabha states that fixating an identity constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject: The stereotype is not a simplification because it is false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations. (1994: 27) 7 Niranjana defines “colonial discourse” as the “body of knowledge, modes of representation, strategies of power, law, discipline, and so on, that are employed in the construction and domination of “colonial subjects” (1992: 7).

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Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London-New York: Verso, 2006. Arango-Keeth, Fanny. “El discurso traductor de José María Arguedas.” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, no. 75, 2012, pp. 183–204. Arguedas, José María. “Dos cuentos quechuas del Alto Vilcanota.” Las moradas, vol. 1, no. 2, 1947, pp. 124–134. ———. The Singing Mountaineers: Songs and Tales of the Quechua People. Translated by Ruth Stephan, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957. ———. Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1966. ———. “Ijmacha.” Haravec, vol. 4, 1967, pp.1–3. ———. Temblar. El sueño del pongo. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1976. ———. “Between Spanish and Quechua.” Translated by Luis Harss, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, vol. 14, no. 25–26, 1980, pp. 15–16. ———. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1983. ———. Canto kechwa con un ensayo sobre la capacidad de creación artística del pueblo indio y mestizo. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1989. ———. Indios, mestizos y señores. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1989. ———. The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. Translated by Frances Barraclough, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Baker, Mona. Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. New York: Routledge, 2006. Bermann, Sandra and Michael Wood. Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bueno, Raúl. “Poética narrativa y traducción cultural en José María Arguedas.” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, no. 75, 2012, pp. 11–25. Chang-Rodríguez, Eugenio. “José Carlos Mariátegui y la polémica del indigenismo.” América sin nombre, no. 13–14, 2009, pp. 103–112. Escobar, Alberto. Arguedas o la utopía de la lengua. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1984. Fawcett, Peter. “Ideology and Translation.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 106–11. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Levin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. González Vigil, Ricardo. El Perú es todas las sangres. Lima: Fondo editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica, 1991. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Joseph Courtés. Semiótica. Diccionario razonado de la teoría del lenguaje. Translated by Enrique Ballón-Aguirre and Hermis Campodónico. Madrid: Gredos, 1982. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Entre las calandrias. Un ensayo sobre José María Arguedas. Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas and Centro de Estudios Peruanos, 2011. Murra, John, and Mercedes López Baralt. Las cartas de José María Arguedas. Lima: Fondo editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1996. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Pinilla, Carmen María. Itinerarios epistolares. La amistad de José María Arguedas y Pierre Duviols en dieciséis cartas. Lima: Fondo editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2011. Pratt, Mary Louise. “The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration.” Profession, Fall, 2002, pp. 25–36. Rama, Ángel, editor. Formación de una cultura indoamericana. México: Siglo XXI editores, 1975. Spivak, Gayatri. “Translating into English.” Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 93–110. Valcárcel, Luis. Memorias. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1981. Vargas, Rafael. El río y el mar. Correspondencia entre José María Arguedas y Emilio Adolfo Westphalen ­(1939–1969). Mexio City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013. Zevallos, Juan. “Entrevista a Maureen Ahern sobre la revista Haravec.” Hostos Review/Revista Hostosiana, vol. 3, 2005, pp. 337–350.

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Further Readings Arguedas, José María. Apu Inca Atawallpaman. Elegía quechua anónima. Lima: Juan Mejía Baca and P.L. Villanueva, 1955. This edition contains an introduction written by Arguedas and his translation from Quechua into Spanish of the elegy collected by José M. B. Farfán. Arguedas, José María, and Francisco Izquierdo. Mitos, leyendas y cuentos peruanos. Madrid: Siruela, 2020. A new edition of the collection of myths, legends, and Peruvian short stories collected from the three geographic regions of Peru. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. Los universos narrativos de José María Arguedas, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1973. Cornejo Polar suggests that a comprehensive study of Arguedas’s work will contribute to a renewal of Latin American literature. Lienhard, Martin. Cultura popular y forma novelesca: Zorros y danzantes en la última novela de Arguedas. Lima: Tarea & Latinoamericana editores, 1988. Innovative analysis of Arguedas’s last novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Rowe, William. Mito e ideología en la obra de José María Arguedas. Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1979. Re-evaluation of the term indigenismo and an integrated analysis of myth, history, ideology, and language in Arguedas’s narrative works.

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5 The Woven Threads of ­Literary Translation in the Greater Caribbean Mónica María del Valle Idárraga

Introduction: A Colonial Legacy Embodied by Language The process of colonial formation left a lasting footprint on what is today studied as the “Greater Caribbean.” The manifestations of this legacy are unlike any others the world has seen, both perpetuating elements of the past and acquiring new forms as time goes on. Without a doubt, it can be said that the characteristics of the literary and literary translation fields in this geographic area are the result of this unique footprint, in which connections and tensions between languages of all kinds play a central and decisive role. In other words, in the Greater Caribbean, literature and literary translation are interwoven, inseparable phenomena. Four basic facets of this footprint are: (1) the marginalization of non-imperial languages at the national level, where imperial languages were converted into official national languages after independence (obtained by some countries as early as 1810 and by others as late as 1950); (2) the naturalization of an idea of literature strictly associated with written production in these official languages; (3) the territorial fragmentation associated with linguistic differences, a challenge to mutual intelligibility on both a national and circum-Caribbean scale (see Stevens 2004), and, lastly, (4) the cultural and linguistic dispersion associated with transnational migration and the reverse diaspora, or the movement of Caribbean people to the countries that were previously colonial metropolises. In this sense, it is fair to say that the Greater Caribbean is a history, or a conglomeration of processes, more than it is a geographical setting. However, in order to meet the theoretical demands of this chapter, this notion will be used as a strategic essentialism (Spivak 1988: 16): namely, as a theoretical fiction or methodological presupposition needed to advance certain general premises. In other words, despite acknowledging that no territorial, cultural, or linguistic homogeneity exists among places as diverse as Bonaire and Saint Andrew, Colombia, or Sint Maarten, Haiti, and Cuba, this chapter will treat the Greater Caribbean as though such a geographical and cultural unit did in fact exist. The scope of this chapter is defined by the questions and attributes that stem from the four key ideas described as characteristics of literature and literary translation in the Greater Caribbean. The sections are structured around long-term questions and pressing or noteworthy issues in these fields, despite the loosely chronological framing of the topics discussed. For

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example, while characteristics one and two—the marginalization of nondominant languages and the naturalization of a specific idea of what is literary—are fundamental to the concerns addressed in the first section because these issues did not end with independence and, on the contrary, their presence and impact continue, it would be misleading to ascribe them to a specific time period. The purpose of each section is to broadly illuminate the issue in question and clearly indicate certain gaps in the research conducted thus far, or, when that is not possible, describe some of the work currently being developed in the fields of literary studies or literary translation studies in the Greater Caribbean. Truly accounting for the enormity of the literature produced over approximately 300 years—on a colonial timeline, beginning the moment Hernán Cortés stormed into ­Tenochtitlán—in around thirty countries either surrounded by or with coastlines along the Caribbean Sea would require a team of researchers and multiple volumes. This is true due to both the dimensions of the territory in question and the intricate history of the peoples involved, not to mention the quantity and variety of languages used in the geographic area as a whole and in each particular place. To cite just one example, in locations such as French Guiana and Suriname, Caribbean Hindustani, Urdu, a range of Creole languages, and several dozen Amerindian languages are still spoken alongside the hegemonic languages of English, French, or Dutch. The history of the Greater Caribbean is incredibly dense and complex. The indigenous peoples who inhabited, traversed, and stewarded these places over the course of more than fourteen centuries had highly sophisticated cultural histories, as demonstrated by, for example, the stories of surviving Maya, Wayúu, and Kalinago people. With the arrival of ­colonialism—the process that began in the fifteenth century and continues to have an impact today—these indigenous groups were forced, under threat of disappearance, to enter their languages, beliefs, ways, and customs into a cultural give and take. The same can be said of the millions of enslaved people brought over beginning in the seventeenth century from various kingdoms in Central and West Africa (Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, Akan, Makua, and others), each carrying their own languages. This also applies to the indentured servants, or “coolies,” brought in the eighteenth century from places as diverse as China, Java, and India. All these people of different cultural backgrounds, along with soldiers, merchants, colonizers, and explorers from Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Spanish, French, English, and Portuguese empires, ended up adding their numbers to the already immense and diverse indigenous population. More recently, U.S. imperialism has changed the landscape of many countries in the Greater Caribbean, from Grenada and Trinidad to Haiti and Panama. The continuous flow of Caribbean people into neighboring countries has also contributed to the latest changes in cultural morphology. The Haitian populations that live on islands such as Sint Maarten or the Bahamas, the undeniable presence of Dominican women on islands, such as Martinique, and the steady waves of Venezuelans who have traveled to provide labor in places, such as Curaçao or Trinidad and Tobago are all well-known examples of this phenomenon. Currently, the economic, ecological, and social transformations occurring in the Greater Caribbean are the result of tourism, and, as such, people from diverse cultural, linguistic, racial, and social backgrounds are once again meeting face to face in the unequal exchanges of daily life. Despite this monumental linguistic and cultural network that characterizes the Greater Caribbean, the same political dynamics that influenced its shaping means that certain circuits of exchange are privileged over others. It is simpler and more affordable to travel to Suriname from the United States than from Cartagena, Colombia. Similarly, English-speaking U.S. and French-speaking Canadian populations, respectively, have a degree of familiarity with 85

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English- and French-speaking Caribbean authors and publications, and it is therefore quite possible that some of the names referenced in this chapter will be recognizable and accessible for a U.S. audience. A profound imbalance exists, however, between the number of Caribbean titles produced in English and the enormous number of French-speaking, and especially Spanish-speaking, Creole-speaking, or even Dutch-speaking, authors not translated into English. Amerindian languages are almost never translated into hegemonic languages, with the exception of indirect translations of local myths and legends that some writers may have undertaken in their own work (van Kempen 2011). In contrast, appreciable interest does exist in the translation of French- and English-speaking authors into Caribbean and Latin American Spanish. Given this situation, much of this chapter’s novelty stems from its focus on topics and issues in literary translation experienced throughout the circum-Caribbean world; that is to say, its focus on literary and translation exchanges between the French-speaking, English-speaking, and Spanish-speaking islands and continental coastal territories, where Creole languages and myriad vernacular languages also ring out.

Beyond Colonial Monolingualism, a Literature Born in Translation The Greater Caribbean was forced to translate from the very beginning. It is safe to assume that in the fifteen centuries prior to European colonization, the original inhabitants of the islands and territories bordering the Caribbean Sea found a way to communicate among themselves despite the vast and distinctive linguistic diversity of the area. After the colonial invasion, from the fifteenth century onward, the forced coexistence of populations with different languages and worldviews rendered translation unavoidable. The Crónicas de Indias contain allusions to “lenguas forzadas,” captive indigenous interpreters. Their stories are as famous as that of Doña Marina, or La Malinche, in New Spain (what is today Mexico) (Valdeón 2013) or as overlooked as those of the dozens of people kidnapped and transported on ships and galleons who first facilitated one-off intercommunications against their will. Translators and interpreters were indispensable for the colonial administration, and the hybrid nature of both these actors and their work, some of it literary, is beginning to be studied, especially where it concerns the Spanish-speaking world (Valdeón 2014). At this present moment in the literary field, it is difficult to argue that what the West understands as literature is a unique form with universal, invariable traits. Many of the struggles taken up by Caribbean writers and intellectuals, inspired in part by decolonization movements and subsequent postcolonial theories, have signaled the need to relativize this notion. In this realm, the efforts of the Cuban writers Roberto Fernández Retamar (1995), to think of literature as a local product that responds to the needs of each community, and Miguel Barnet (1968), to establish the disputed Latin American testimonio as a literary genre, join forces with affirmations like those of Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (2012), who convincingly argues that literature is what is taught as literature and, as such, literary translation will have to mold itself to the goals of that teaching. This reflection proves critical in the context of this discussion because critics and academics have perhaps expected to find the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century literary translation of the Greater Caribbean in familiar formats: exclusively written texts with “aesthetic function.” They would do well, however, to look elsewhere: in oral, pictorial, and performative texts, perhaps with prophetic or religious function, possibly expressed in codices, on rocks, and through landscape modifications, on urns and metal objects, or in songs. After a long and difficult battle waged against the Western literary canon by intellectuals such as Miguel León Portilla (2003) in Mexico or Antonio Cornejo Polar (2003) in Peru, 86

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books like the Chilam Balam and the Popol Vuh have been accepted under the marker of “colonial literature,” as have poems and dramatic works that previously did not fit within this definition. It is unknown whether these codices were translated into the languages of neighboring communities. But to assume that they were not translated is absurd if one considers that dominant groups seek to subjugate other communities, a process that includes imposing cultural norms. Thus, this murky piece of literary and literary translation history remains largely unwritten. What is more clearly understood is that the Spaniards relied on the educated elite of the kingdoms they subdued to translate books. For example, the extraordinary work of Frier Bernardino de Sahagún (1938) containing three columns—one in Spanish, one in Latin, and one in Nahuatl—makes room for mentioning some of the individuals who worked on this trilingual text. It also provides a glimpse into both the challenges caused by the disparateness of cosmovisions (to cite an example from Catholicism, Spanish does not distinguish between the soul and the spirit, while Nahuatl does) (Labriola 2014) and the maneuverings of local people to prevent the silencing of their entire worldview in the process of translation, as Gruzinski (1991) has studied. The combination of the context of the exchanges that took place before colonization, the relations between indigenous populations and the Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch during colonization itself, the added communication needs of enslaved people brought from Africa and indentured servants brought from Asia, and the meeting of religious cosmologies, languages of worship, and objects of devotion and contemplation presents an entire universe of possibilities in which to explore the mechanisms, sources, and resources basted together in the bustling colonial world as of the nineteenth century. Some aspects of this patchwork are interpreted in Caribbean literature and essay by writers as illustrious as Sylvia Wynter (1994), Kamau Brathwaite (1986), Derek Walcott (2000), and Wilson Harris (1967), outstanding minds of the Greater Caribbean whose works exude a fundamentally Caribbean poetics. This does not manifest in an essentialist defense of identity, but instead moves beyond simple didacticism to find a poetic expression where all the elements of this world become inextricably intertwined. What occurred in the Greater Caribbean is characterized by the survival of indigenous languages (non-European languages that existed at the time of European arrival), their coexistence alongside dominant languages, and the appearance, creation, or consolidation of languages that persisted despite the disdain with which they were treated: Creole languages based on English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish (in the case of Palenquero in Colombia) and mixtures of indigenous and dominant languages. The relationship between these languages and the transitions from one to another brought about significant challenges. Palpable examples of these difficulties include the Spanish-language versions of religious notions that did not exist in the Catholicism of the colonizers (as mentioned in the case of Sahagún), which can still be seen in the unavoidable paraphrasing of notions from Haitain Vodou, such as petit anj or gwo anj, where anj gets automatically rendered as “ángel” [angel] without discussion regarding the suitability of this term. An interesting example of these interventions is the case of the Popol Vuh, where the writer José Lezama Lima draws attention to the presence of ideas and tropes familiar to the Jesuit priests who had come from Macau and interspersed throughout the text translated into Spanish by members of the same order (1977). These translation experiences are so violent in nature that, in extreme cases, more recent subaltern groups did away with those who sought to force upon them the translation of the Bible into their language, as this was understood as an imposition of cosmovision. One contemporary and secular manifestation of this incommensurability or lack of common ground between cosmovisions would be the versions of national constitutions rendered 87

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in the languages of indigenous groups recognized by policies advertised as multicultural. Here the difficult negotiation between modernocentric visions of government models such as democracy and indigenous visions of life and behavior as collective becomes clear. Through detailed analysis of four vernacular language versions of the 1991 Colombian constitution, Sarrazin explains, for example, the incredibly forced nature of notions like democracy or constitution in the languages of communities governed by non-written principles that exist in part outside of the Western legal system (2014). Potential areas for literary translation research within this extensive historical time frame are thus related to two concepts. One, the manifestations and productions of historically marginalized groups, which fall outside of what is traditionally considered literary and do not necessarily exist in book form. And two, the forced amalgamations of worldviews expressed in mixed language: linguistic combinations where the native language disrupts the dominant language, the role of translators who worked for colonial agents in codices, stories transcribed and translated by priests and scribes, and more.

Beyond National Language Although the dominant languages (English, French, Dutch, and others) were adopted as the sole official expression of the nascent republics, the largely spoken languages disdained for their supposed imperfect, uncouth, and uncivilized nature continued to reverberate below the surface, taking on new material forms and circulating in a variety of contexts. Generally, despite living in the midst of this national polyphony, writers in the recently formed republics limited their expression to the dominant languages. As a natural result, during this period (more or less the twentieth century) literary translations were produced between prestigious languages. This impulse led to the translation of works where the practices of the groups that spoke subordinated languages or the popular version of the official language were portrayed as inferior or insufficient. It was a costumbrist language, one which revealed, in the eyes of writers situated among the elite, the need for reform and education of the population to which it was attributed. Paradoxically, the work of renowned writers such as the first Caribbean Nobel Prize winner, St. John Perse—born in Guadeloupe but, due to the colonial nature of French overseas territories, billed as a French author—was also translated. The Spanish translation of Perse’s Oiseux was done by one of the celebrated Colombian poets and writers of the day, Jorge Zalamea, who also translated the Haitian novel L’espace d’un cillement (1961). In cases like these, it was understood that the works, with the exception of those produced in Haiti, were not considered Caribbean, but French. It is important to reiterate that this temporal generalization has purely illustrative aims, for there is no chronological simultaneity among moments of independence or postcolonial periods in Spanish-speaking countries (almost all of which achieved independence between 1810 and 1880) and the associated status of countries like Guadeloupe or Martinique, the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao), or Puerto Rico, not to mention islands like Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago. As such, by necessity, the general temporal framework is impossible to maintain here, and one would instead need to examine the situation within each individual country and between countries in the area through questions such as: (1) Where did the literary manifestations of those groups excluded from the national framework of scholarship end up? (2) What role did writers adopt when faced with this wealth of stories in a language not accorded full rights? and (3) What characteristics did literary translation acquire in this period, given the vocal polyphony of the nation? 88

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Figuera (2016) has published an incredibly interesting study exploring the mechanisms through which Trinidadian intellectuals of the nineteenth century recuperated or, rather, absorbed popular Creole tales in the form of stories published in local newspapers and the effect of this absorption on visions of national identity and Trinidadian literature. Creole language advocate Raphaël Confiant did the same in his early work through what he termed the plantation novel (Del Valle 2012). Within this group of strategies for the recognition and recuperation (on occasion idealized or stereotyped) of popular languages, it is important to additionally mention dictionaries or lexicons, which might appear in brief formats such as a glossary included at the end of a novel. One could venture a guess that a colonially rooted ventriloquism (that is to say, permitting a language to be spoken solely within the straitjacket of an official language) also came to dominate in other places within the Greater Caribbean, but more research is required to understand the subtleties and singular characteristics of this phenomenon in each location. In the specific case of Martinique, Glissant explains that Creole seeped into the French spoken on the island in a powerful though inadvertent manner, finding its way through local idiosyncrasies and thereby moving beyond the merely lexical or syntactic dimensions of its appearance (2005). The literature of this period also includes situations such as the Costumbrism of the ­Spanish-speaking space (from Cuba to Colombia), where this marginalized popular voice is sprinkled throughout texts as an inferior form of language and existence. Previous paragraphs have addressed the case of literary intra-translation in the form of cultural translation of Creole or the occasional, partial, and decontextualized insertion of Creole into works written in official languages. As one would expect, literary expression exists in marginalized languages—in other formats. It follows, therefore, that sources for research on this topic must exist not only in literary journals, but also in newspapers and even in mediums as unexpected as women’s embroidery. So far, this journey through Greater Caribbean literature and its translation could be summarized as the several-centuries-long domination of imperial languages later adopted by each country as national languages after independence. In terms of literary criticism and translation criticism, this territory remains almost entirely unexplored: it is necessary to do research on subaltern materializations of literature and reveal the astute mechanisms by which subordinated languages edged into, coexisted with, or absorbed these official languages.

The Voices of Creole and Vernacular Languages Are Heard In the twenty-first century, one characteristic of the literary field in the Greater Caribbean has been a desperate, almost nostalgic, return to these languages that persisted in the social undercurrent and were suddenly reevaluated and recuperated as languages suited for imaginative expression. Such interest and inclination came from the will of individuals, writers who admired the popular or campesino worlds and saw them on the brink of disappearance. This occurred alongside criticism work fueled by postcolonial visions, largely done by individuals who had migrated outside the Caribbean, and an explosion of the limits of what was considered literary (until that point, essentially just written expression) brought on, especially in the Jamaican context (Cooper [1993] 1995), by forms of cultural criticism where performance was accepted as an object of study. Another factor likely influencing this resurgence and increased valuation was the influx of changes in the publishing industry, such as the entrance of African authors into the European and then North American literary markets, which subsequently animated the debate around the right and need of authors whose 89

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native languages coexisted with a colonial language to write in those languages rejected by the market, as articulated by Ng ũ g ĩ wa Thiong’o in particular. The French-speaking creolist writers (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, the three authors of In Praise of Creoleness ([1989] 2011)) extol the role that Sonny Rupaire, born in Guadeloupe, played in connection with the recuperation, revindication, and appropriation of the island’s Creole within the literary sphere. Years after Rupaire, the first writer in the French-speaking space to embrace Creole—in this case, Haitian Creole—as a literary language was Frankétienne ([2005] 2016). The way in which he describes his decision and his consideration of Creole as a literary medium reveals a great deal about the ambiguous social perception with which writers viewed the language: Le défi d’écrire en créole Ayant vécu mon enfance, mon adolescence et une bonne partie de ma vie d’adulte dans un milieu populaire totalement créolophone, je n’avais pourtant jamais écrit la moindre ligne en créole jusqu’à l’âge de 39 ans. J’ai pris, de manière pulsionnelle et fortuite, la grande décision d’assumer les risques de l’écriture créole, après une longue et enrichissante discussion avec le journaliste Jean Dominique qui, à l’époque, était chroniqueur culturel à la radio. [...] Jean Dominique enfonce le bistouri dans la plaie occulte qui me démange, me brûle les entrailles et me dévore les tripes et la cervelle á mon insu en sortant cette phrase cinglante: « On aurait la preuve indéniable d’une grande aliénation si Frankétienne, l’auteur de Mûr à crever et d’Ultravocal, ne peut pas donner au peuple haïtien le premier roman créole. » Je ne réponds mot. Profondément bouleversé. Perturbé pendant des jours et des nuits, après cette inoubliable rencontre, et surtout ce propos. [...] Dezafi est terminé en quatre mois et accueilli à sa parution comme le premier roman moderne de la langue créole. (108–109) [The challenge of writing in Creole During my childhood, my adolescence, and a good part of my adult life, I lived in an entirely Creole-speaking, working class environment, and yet I had never written a single solitary line in Creole until the age of thirty-nine. Fortuitously and instinctively, I made the important decision to take on the risks of writing in Creole, after a lengthy and enriching discussion with the journalist Jean Dominique, who was at that time a culture reporter on the radio. [...] Jean Dominique sunk a scalpel into the hidden wound that was eating away at me, burning my insides, and devouring my guts and my brains by flicking this sentence out like a whip: “We would have irrefutable proof of a great alienation if Frankétienne, author of Mûr à Crever and Ultravocal, cannot give the Haitian people the first novel in Creole.” I didn’t say a word. Thoroughly shaken. Troubled for days and nights after this unforgettable encounter, and above all this declaration. [...] Dezafi was finished four months later and was received, upon publication, as the first modern novel in Creole]. Later, the Martinican Raphaël Confiant (1985) followed in Frankétienne’s footsteps with his first novel, Bitako-a [The Peasants]. One of the author’s anecdotes about the book illustrates the same skepticism projected toward the language by the social aggregate. Confiant describes (Del Valle 2012) how when the novel was published in 1985, the interest Martinicans held for things written in Creole was so minimal that it lingered on bookstore shelves for quite some time, and his friends and family made a point of buying copies. They were 90

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motivated by compassion and concern, for they worried that the writer would be disappointed by the lack of readers. But, above all, they bought this strange book fearing that it was clear proof of Confiant’s insanity. And no wonder: in their eyes, he had set himself the outlandish task of writing and publishing a book in a language that was not considered fit to be a language of instruction in schools, much less a plausible vehicle for literary expression. In the English-speaking world, Creole seems to have arrived at literary legitimacy long before such a thing occurred in Spanish- or French-speaking Caribbean countries. Essays like those in the book Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity (2017, reprint) affirm this trajectory, expressing early praise for and presenting various facets of Creolization. It has taken far longer, on the other hand, for Spanish-based Creole languages—in particular, Palenquero from the Caribbean coast of ­Colombia—to gain recognition and be adopted as a suitable vehicle for literary expression. Moreover, their acceptance as a language into which literary texts should be translated or in which they can be produced is even further delayed. In this context, the following example speaks volumes about the aforementioned power imbalance among languages. The Archipelago of Saint Andrew, Providence and Saint Catherine is located 480 nautical miles off the Caribbean coast of Colombia, the country to which it is adhered and with which it has a tense and ambiguous relationship. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the Colombian government launched a campaign to impose Hispanic culture on the islands’ inhabitants through Catholicism and the Spanish language. Since the country’s multicultural constitution of 1991, the archipelago has been gaining momentum to position itself as having shared roots with the Greater Caribbean (particularly the Cayman Islands and Jamaica) and distance itself from Latin heritage. In these last two decades, writers and poets, beginning with Hazel Robinson and continuing up to the archipelago’s most recent star, Cristina Bendek, have been making their presence known. Nonetheless, as of now, few authors are motivated to write in Creole or in English. Keshia Howard published San Andres: a Herstory (2014), her first novel, with the support of the United States Agency for International Development. And only in 2019 was the first book of poems published entirely in Creole released: Dih Kriole Man, written by Adel Christopher Livingston (2016) and printed by a local publishing house with circulation primarily in Saint Andrew. This state of affairs reveals, on the one hand, the dominance of Spanish as a literary language and the erasure that this implies for other languages that coexist alongside it in the country. On the other, it demonstrates the solipsism in which the authors writing in English or Creole find themselves. And lastly, it emphasizes not only the lack of a publishing infrastructure capable of embracing projects in these languages, but also, and above all, the lack of readers capable of navigating between the three languages (English, Creole, and Spanish) that they would need to consume such projects. It also points to a space in which intra-­national literary translation not only makes sense but would in fact be a requirement of intercultural recognition at the margins of the nation. In the Greater Caribbean, the first defenses of Creole as a legitimate language were raised by writers who explored and used it as a language of expression. The next came from those who translated literary texts into Creole. This trend is less visible, perhaps due to greater interest in first positioning Creole as a language of written literary production rather than as a language in which to access renowned literary works. Despite this, when translations have occurred, they have been of celebrated titles. For example, the young Martinican writer Jean Marc Rosier has translated works such as Albert Camus’s Caligula into Martinican Creole (Kaligoula, 2012, from a publishing house he himself founded). Another example would be The Little Prince, translated by various writers in the French-speaking space, such 91

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as Rosier and the Haitian author Gary Victor, into the Creole languages spoken on their respective islands. For many years, Creole and indigenous or vernacular languages remained trapped within the civilization-barbarism dichotomy that dominated conversations about the national project (at least in the Spanish-speaking world). In these countries, vernacular languages themselves were not viewed as “backwards” or lacking “civilization.” But when their speakers were considered to be “backwards” or “uncivilized,” the languages (with sounds and structures unfamiliar to users of national languages) were disregarded. Vernacular language speakers were taught the national language, but language itself was not the target of attack: rather, it was their way of life that was viewed as “primitive.” The existence of textbooks, often created by missionaries, evangelists, or anthropologists, indicates a certain acceptance of the status of these languages as languages, even if these objects only served as an invaluable tool for entering the indigenous world and expelling its inhabitants. Creole languages, on the other hand, did not acquire linguistic legitimacy until much later. They were seen as a defective form of speech, a poor copy of the dominant language involved in their creation. Therein lies the root of epithets such as “broken English.” And though the populations that spoke these languages were seen—much like indigenous p­ opulations—as ethno-racially inferior, it was believed that their language was in fact “incorrect,” and that their way of speaking indicated a “lack of education.” Today there is academic consensus that Creole languages are indeed languages in their own right, with their own rules and with grammar often of African origins, though part of their lexicon may come from the hegemonic language that corresponds to the space where they developed among dozens of interacting languages. As such, it is understood that the Creole language in Haiti is distinct from that of Martinique or French Guiana, even if speakers from these locations might manage to communicate with one another after a few brief misunderstandings. One of the recurring strategies in contemporary Greater Caribbean texts is Creolization, which presents the distinctive feature of mixing a language traditionally looked down upon with one traditionally considered prestigious. For example, in the context of Spanish-­ speaking migrants in the United States, Spanish intermingles with English, or, in the case of French or English speakers, these languages get combined with the local Creole language. In these works, the languages are inseparable from one another. The result of this contact is unpredictable, and the translation of each text therefore presents significant and specific challenges. Here, what is called transcreation (translation-creation) takes center stage. These translations also pose a challenge to translation criticism—a field yet to find its own identity with regard to literary translation in the Greater Caribbean—for they require the interrogation of certain criteria related to the act of translation itself (and even to publishing). These are works that invariably emphasize the bilingual situation of the speaker-characters who represent a country as migrants or individuals living in exile. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), written by the Dominican author Junot Díaz and translated into Spanish by Achy Obejas, or Raining Backwards, written by the Cuban author Roberto G. Fernández (1997), which respectively reclaim the Dominican and Cuban experiences in the United States, are just two examples of this trend. A passage from Raining Backwards illustrates the situation: Restaurant Friends of the Sea For the Seafood that really tastes like the Ocean… Enjoy the specialties of the House:

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Shrimp at the little garlic. Saw at the oven. Chern at the iron. Flour with Moorish crabs. Seafood sprinkle. Pulp in its own ink. (32)

This advertisement for a restaurant run by one of the protagonists fulfills a satirical function while also showcasing certain adaptations among the Cuban population that began arriving in Miami after 1960. English-speaking readers can sense all the peculiarity of this language in which the Cuban characters attempt to express themselves. Bilingual Spanish speakers can sense it, too. A translation of this novel intended for the rest of the Spanish-speaking world would run into the challenge of expressing in strange terms what would literally sound normal. What underlies all this is the impossibility of putting forth a notion of a single identity. This displacement is what Glissant defines as Creolization, specifically “a perpetual movement of cultural and linguistic interpenetrability which means that one never ends up with a definition of Being” (85, tr. Britton). The most substantial challenge here relates to the racial and class disparities borne by the languages of each country, inextricably bound to their core as a result of the history briefly outlined in previous pages. Most concerning of all, the elite training that translators receive is irreconcilable with the vision presented by the works themselves. Creole languages, the languages of the people, can therefore end up steamrolled by the official language within the target language. The other monumental challenge is that strict equivalents are hard to come by when working, for example, from Jamaican Creole into Spanish, as Spanish-based Creole languages are few and far between. It would be absurd to translate into Saint Andrew-­Providence Creole, in the case of Colombia, because that Creole language is not understood by the majority of the reading audience, typically Spanish-speaking, in the country. Meanwhile, where the work itself originates, Creole is differentiated but at the same time understood by local speakers, beginning with the author. The recognition or status of indigenous languages as literary languages has taken different paths, and dialogue with national languages has not been straightforward. Perhaps due to a lack of shared linguistic roots (which do exist between Creole and dominant languages), these languages were not by rule even partially evoked in national texts, much less translated in the case of national or international literary works. Recent efforts have therefore focused on translating documents such as national constitutions. In Colombia, for example, it was a noteworthy event when, in 2010, a plan was announced to translate the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, written by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, into Wayuunaiki, the language of the Wayúu people, who live in both Colombia and Venezuela. And it was only in that same year that the eight volumes of the Biblioteca Básica de los Pueblos Indígenas de Colombia were published. Similarly, it was only in 2015 that the magnificent anthology Hermosos invisibles que nos protegen (Duchesne Winter 2015) was released. This collection, which compiles a broad corpus of texts from the Wayúu tradition on both sides of the C ­ olombian-Venezuelan border, involved the participation of translators working from Wayuunaiki into Spanish. It is clear that one of the most pressing work- and research-related needs in the field of literary translation in the Greater Caribbean will be the training of 93

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translators not only in dominant languages, but also in Creole and vernacular languages. A number of studies naturally insist on this point, particularly Grau-Perejoan (2016). In keeping with the new life of these languages and the flows between coexisting languages, one phenomenon that has emerged in this period is self-translation. Authors such as the Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal, the Wayúu poet Vito Apushana, and the writers Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim (2013) from Yucatán, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (2020) from Oaxaca, and Juan Ramírez Dawkins from Saint Andrew, Colombia (studied by Arboleda Toro, 2017) have been navigating between worlds and discovering for themselves possibilities of expression at this intersection of linguistic borders that were, until recently, practically unthinkable. Curiously, despite this familiarity with navigating between languages and cosmovisions, few writers—even among those who self-translate—allude to literary translation. One exception appears to be Édouard Glissant, who uses it as metaphor, praises it, and defines it within his philosophical system in Poetics of Relation. The characterization of translation outlined in the pages of his lecture “Languages and langages” (2020) encompasses both of the aspects thus far emphasized in this chapter: on the one hand, the principle of equality between all languages and, on the other, the principle that every language has its own means of expression, which, in the case of popular languages within the Greater Caribbean, produces a creative tension between oral and written expression. Glissant condenses these concepts into sentences that appear enigmatic, but which are intelligible in the context of all this chapter has discussed up to this point. He calls the first principle “the imagination of languages” and synthesizes it with the sentence: “we write in the presence of all the world’s languages, even if we do not know any of them.” (23, tr. Britton) This is his way of rejecting linguistic standardization: “in the current context of literatures and of the relation between poetics and the chaos-world, I can no longer write in a monolingual way. [...] We will not save one of the world’s languages by letting the others die” (24, tr. Britton). The second principle deals with the connection between oral and written expression, which Glissant (2020) frames in terms of the creator’s obligation to find an avenue for the collective expression of these forms. Incidentally, Kamau Brathwaite puts forth a similar claim in “Caribbean Critics” ([1969] 2009). This form of expression shies away from universality and also avoids the privilege afforded to writing: There are in fact two kinds of orality. There is the orality of the mass media, which is the orality of standardization and banalization. And then there is another form of orality that is vibrant and creative, which is that of those cultures that are now suddenly appearing on ‘the great stage of the world’ and which, also, do not choose the mode or the tool of written language as often as those of cinema, the visual and plastic arts, etc. but which are nonetheless oral cultures and manifestations of orality. (23, tr. Britton) The two principles share what Glissant calls “solidarity” between languages, which is the basis of Creolization. Here, the interweaving or intermingling of languages and the blending of registers naturally occurs: We have come to a moment in history where we see that human imagination needs all the world’s languages and that, as a kind of consequence, in the crucial place from where the literary work is produced, in the Antilles, the Antillean human imagination needs Creole and French. (24, tr. Britton) 94

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In addition, both principles present ties to the unexpected or unpredictable; in Glissant’s words, to the unforeseeable. He thus connects them to the baroque, a poetics that does not permit the implantation of a singular or universal code, but which encourages coexistence and multiple forms of expression. Translation, as he sees it, is the fullest expression of this, the art of the future. As such, he characterizes it as follows: It is an art of the flight [‘fugue’] from one language to another, in which neither the first nor the second are effaced. But also an art of fugue in that every translation now forms part of the network of all possible translations from and into all languages. (27, tr. Britton) Based on these understandings of cultural relations, Glissant is prepared to analyze phenomena such as the aforementioned incommensurability from a perspective that is more productive than that of loss in transit from one language to another: Translation is a flight, in other words, a beautiful relinquishing. This is what one must perhaps above all discern in the act of translation. It is true that the poem, when translated into another language, loses some of its rhythm, its assonances, the chance that is both the accident and the permanence of writing. But one must perhaps accept this, accept this relinquishing. Because in fact, in the world-totality, it equates with the part of oneself that in every poetics one gives up to the other. (27, tr. Britton) To conclude this discussion, some areas for further research related to the issues raised in this section would be: contrastive studies of authors who self-translate, translations done both into and out of Creole and indigenous languages of the Greater Caribbean, the issues related to the training of Creole and indigenous language translators, and literary analysis of works where Creole or vernacular languages play an important role.

The Publishing Market and the Search for Circum-Caribbean Connections The countries of the Greater Caribbean seem to have realized in the final decades of the twentieth century that they had neighbors who spoke other languages and with whom they could engage in cultural exchange. This occurred in part due to forced migrations and the exile of writers in countries like Cuba or Venezuela beginning in the 1950s. Another factor was the launch of literature or cultural studies programs at universities in the geographic area, such as the University of the West Indies or the University of Puerto Rico. And, without a doubt, the work of Casa de las Américas also played a crucial role from the 1990s onward. Translation travels many paths in the circum-Caribbean space, and clearly some countries are more experienced and better prepared than others for the work of literary translation and, in particular, for the publishing work of printing, diffusing, and circulating titles and authors. Casa de las Américas has been awarding a prize for literature in English since 1975 and added a prize for literature in French soon after, which meant the entries would often get translated into Spanish. Titles like Mar de fondo (2002) by Oonya Kempadoo, a Guyanese, Grenadian, and British writer, and Barrancos del alba (1993) by the Martinican writer Raphaël Confiant, are a result of this trend. Cuba is, without a doubt, one of the main centers of translation into Spanish in the Greater Caribbean, with a program systematically organized 95

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around the Casa de las Américas prizes. Much of the work is done by recognized poets or writers. In the prologue of the anthology Poetas del Caribe anglófono, Keith Ellis (2011), who edited and translated the volume, acknowledges this: “The translators, many of them poets of great renown and all of them from Cuba, unless otherwise indicated here [are]…” (8). He goes on to cite a list containing familiar names from the Cuban intellectual elite: Jesús Cos Causse, Eliseo Diego, Armando Fernández, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Adelaida de Juan, and Manuel Moreno Fraginals. It is relevant to mention the role of a certain identity politics that increasingly permeates the pairing of authors and translators. Thomas Rothe (2015–2016) points to this trend in the case of Nancy Morejón: Desde su ubicación en Cuba, Nancy Morejón se ha embarcado en el proyecto de traducir otros poetas del Caribe francófono. El hecho de que tanto la traductora como los autores pertenezcan a una misma región geográfica y que compartan marcas identitarias -todos son afrodescendientes-, establece desde un comienzo relaciones más horizontales entre ambos lados del texto y posiblemente facilita o fomenta una toma de posición ética de parte de Morejón. (18) [From her location in Cuba, Nancy Morejón has embarked on the project of translating other poets from the French-speaking Caribbean. The fact that both the translator and the authors belong to the same geographical region and share identity markers—they are all of African descent—establishes from the very beginning a more equal relationship between the two sides of the text and possibly facilitates or encourages the assumption of an ethical position by Morejón] This is not surprising given that Cuba is one of the epicenters of exiled intellectuals—for example, René Depestre, whose poetic works were translated in Cuba by Cubans, among them Roberto Fernández Retamar—and also the birthplace of several key figures in the dialogues with the Négritude movement, such as Nicolás Guillén and, especially, Wifredo Lam, whose drawings illustrated the first Spanish version of Cahier du rétour au pays natal, translated by the Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera. Another area of study tied to Cuba and highly relevant to the field of literary translation in the twenty-first century is the role of the diffusion of work written by authors who found themselves censured by the revolutionary government and whose disruptive voices were not heard on the island but were heard outside the country in translation. In the case of values that exalt both the baroque and a divergent masculinity, the novel Paradiso by José Lezama Lima, translated into French by Didier Coste, fits this description (Letters to Eloisa 2020). The role of self-translation for authors like Guillermo Cabrera Infante must also be studied on a deeper level. According to his translator, Suzanne Jill Levine (2019), when she and Cabrera Infante were comparing versions of a text, they found a certain freedom in the author’s second language that allowed them to outwit censorship. In the same vein, the influence exerted by another language on the work of writers like Calvert Casey, who was a United Nations interpreter and some of whose texts are in English, should also be examined. Translation anthologies and compilations are another type of work that has been important for the diffusion of Greater Caribbean literature, and they merit study within the field of translation. It is important to note the directionality of these translations: into English and Spanish, rarely into French, and even more rarely into Creole languages. They are practically 96

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nonexistent in pairs such as Dutch into Spanish, for example. The locations where these translations get published tend to be known as places with close relationships to the Caribbean, if not Caribbean countries themselves: for example, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and occasionally Mexico. These are isolated projects, because, apart from Casa de las Américas, there exists no long-running systematic project that seeks to translate Caribbean literature produced in one of the area’s languages into another. There are no publishing houses on the non-Spanish-speaking islands that wish to translate Spanish-speaking authors into French or English or Dutch, for example, though there are at least two publishers focused on literature: Ibis Rouge Éditions, founded in French Guiana and with branches in Martinique and Guadeloupe, Caraïbe Éditions, in Martinique, and Peepal Tree, which, despite its location in Leeds, England, has an extensive catalog dedicated to the Greater Caribbean and has done a magnificent job of reprinting authors whose work would be considered classics of Anglo-­ Caribbean literature. Recently, Mémoire d’encrier, founded in Montreal by the Haitian writer Rodney Saint Éloi, has done excellent work focused on the diffusion of Haitian literature written since the time of the Duvalier dictatorship outside Haiti. Additionally, they have now begun to publish French translations of titles in English and Spanish. On the shores of the Caribbean Sea itself, there are currently two publishing houses of different backgrounds looking to pave their own paths in this work. The first, House of Nehesi Publishers in Sint Maarten, has been active for the last forty years and can afford to publish trilingual versions of some of their literary and critical texts. And the second, Lasirén Editora in Bogotá, Colombia, has been working steadily since 2016 to publish translations of French and English texts and offers a catalog containing titles by Patricia Powell, born in Jamaica, as well as Myriam J. A. Chancy and Frankétienne, both born in Haiti. This shortage of publishing houses working in all language pairs reveals a great deal about the invisible borders, products of a colonial legacy, that still exist in this geographic area. It also demonstrates two immense gaps in the field. First, the training of translators who are exclusively dedicated to Greater Caribbean literature, which presents its own demands and peculiarities. And second, the development of publishing houses whose purpose transcends commercial interest and which possess the muscle to circulate works of common interest within this limiting geographical context regardless of costly translation and author’s rights or projected sales. This could be done more effectively, in fact, through organizations jointly run by governments that use different languages. It is interesting, but not surprising, given the publishing scene in Argentina and the backgrounds of the translators who work there, that Caribbean authors like Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and Kamau Brathwaite or the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols have broken into the Spanish-speaking world by way of the Southern Cone through studies and translations undertaken and published in Argentina, such as Florencia Bonfiglio’s work on La unidad submarina (Kamau Brathwaite 2010). Given the presence of Haitian communities in a number of Latin American countries—particularly Mexico and Chile—following the 2010 earthquake, it is quite probable that in the not-so-distant future Spanish translations of Haitian literature, and even other literature from the French-speaking Caribbean, will begin to appear on the market. Returning to translation anthologies, it is widely recognized that literary genres in the Greater Caribbean have developed in their own particular ways. In the introduction to Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women (1991), a collection that translates stories written by women from various countries and in various Greater Caribbean languages into English, Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, one of the most experienced translators in this area, and Carmen C. Esteves provide an overview of the forms and subject matters that women writers 97

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in the Greater Caribbean have molded to fit their expressive needs. They explain that the short story is where women have truly excelled: Thus far, critical attention has centered almost exclusively on Caribbean women novelists. Short story writers (and poets) have received at best moderate notice, primarily because their work has appeared most frequently in local journals, newspapers, and magazines, severely limiting access by readers and critics. The short story, however, is a genre of unique importance in the Caribbean, with roots dating back to rich Taíno/African folk traditions of which women have often been the custodians. (xii) To date, literary criticism books about the Greater Caribbean have not often been translated into Spanish, despite the fact that doing so would help diffusion and improve understanding of works and authors beyond the canonical touchpoints that reach Latin American academias by way of U.S. academia. The essays of authors like Makeda Silvera, Dionne Brand, and Sylvia Wynter continue their English-only soliloquy. Theater proves especially challenging, not only because the works themselves are tied to specific historical moments, but also because their performance places its own particular demands upon the actors. The version of Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey (2005) performed in peninsular Spanish cannot proceed without explanatory stage directions, which in the theater are useless during the performance itself. Because it is in Creole, the rich Haitian theatrical tradition poses a significant challenge in terms of literary translation, as textual and performance elements would have to simultaneously be addressed. The complete works of Walcott, a Nobel Prize winner, have yet to be fully translated, much like the writings of other English- and French-speaking Nobel laureates, and his dramatic texts are a fundamental piece of that unfinished task. Perhaps the most fortunate genre in terms of translation has been poetry, which can circulate little by little, poem by poem, in journals or periodicals, generally due to the desire or initiative of the translator, without the daunting issue of having to pay publishing houses for the rights. In Spanish, the translation of the two-volume anthology Poetas del Caribe anglófono (Ellis 2011) broke ground on a path that has in some ways been completed with the publication of The Sea Needs No Ornament (Collins-Klobah and Grau-Perejoan 2020), a bilingual anthology of women poets. In the former, the translators are largely poets themselves, while in the latter, the translators completed their work in collaboration with the authors (Grau-Perejoan and Collins-Klobah 2020). The processes of selecting potentially interesting works for translation and publication in other countries are complex. Jesse Tangen Mills (2015) has shown how the translation of an author like Óscar Collazo from Colombia does not resonate in the United States because, though he entered into the Afro-Colombian canon after the 1991 constitution, he is associated with a particular moment—already passé for the tastes of publishers in general—in leftist literature in Latin America, and that ends up carrying more weight than his recently acquired status as an Afro-Colombian author. A similar phenomenon, different though it may seem, occurs with the acceptance of authors who can be placed within the familiar box of magical realism for a U.S. audience. In other words, assumptions about Caribbean literature—so often associated with magical realism or questions of Afro-descendant and gender identity politics—filter what can reach readers in the United States, just as they filter what can reach readers in, for example, Latin America. Related to this challenge is the fact that few incentives exist for literary translators dedicated to Caribbean literature. 98

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To conclude this discussion, one can look to some of the areas where professional translators working in the Greater Caribbean are currently developing projects: paremiological studies and multilingual botanical dictionaries. This work is both relevant to and wholly necessary for the translation of Caribbean titles where landscape descriptions or vernacular languages—which often appears in the name of so-called popular wisdom, such as proverbs and idioms—play central roles, as is the case with the writing of Maryse Condé. Some potential research topics related to this section would be: (1) the stories of award-­ winning works that were subsequently translated, the role of international prizes in canonization and circulation of titles, and the function of translation within this process, (2) the effects of translation and publication of Caribbean authors on literary trends in the country where they are translated, (3) the inter-institutional and international marketing mechanisms of literary translation in the Greater Caribbean, (4) the history of Casa de las Américas’s monumental achievements in the field of translation (see Guzmán 2020), and (5) the career paths of translators in the Greater Caribbean.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted a number of characteristics particular to the literature of the Greater Caribbean, to its history, and to the relationships between the languages that coexist but are granted unequal prestige within this space. It has also discussed the unique challenges that all this poses to literary translation. Thus far, both specific and general examples of the issues that have at various points in time surrounded the relationship between literature and translation have been addressed: the exclusion of popular languages from national literary canon and written literature, the recuperation of these languages through folklorization, and the focus on recognized forms of canonical material as literature. The chapter has also indicated areas where there is much to be done or where the work is just beginning. Literary translation in the Greater Caribbean is currently in the process of organizing itself, discovering its needs, and exploring its possibilities. Therein lies its novelty as a field of study, research, and professional development. For a translator in training, it provides the opportunity to choose between hundreds of languages. The growing number of translators bringing Maya poetry into Spanish is just one example of this reality. The ability to travel from a ­Spanish-speaking country to a French-speaking one, with Creole languages on board, or from a Dutch-speaking country to a French-speaking one and find different ways of life but also certain similarities, is another advantage. The presence of universities with the potential for translator training and the burgeoning publishing industry in the area can also prove a powerful incentive for those beginning a career in literary translation or those who wish to broaden the scope of their work. For literary critics, the Greater Caribbean holds a boundless wealth of formats, languages, and genres. More bridges, alliances, and experts are needed. The collaborative work of translators and literary critics can help push the realities of the Caribbean beyond the boundaries imposed by water and land and carry them to where they can and should be heard. Translated from Spanish by Fiona Maloney-McCrystle

Works Cited Aguilar Gil, Yásnaya Elena. Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística. Mexico City: Almadía ediciones, 2020. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Thick Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 3rd ed. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012, pp. 331–343. 99

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Arboleda Toro, Andrés. “Creación, traducción y autotraducción en la obra literaria de Juan Ramírez Dawkins.” Mutatis Mutandis, vol. 10, no. 1, 2017, pp. 86–115. Balutansky, Kathleen M. and Marie-Agnès Sourieau, editors. Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity. Gainesville: LibraryPress @ UF, 2017. Barnet, Miguel. Biografía de un cimarrón. 1st ed. Argentina: Galerna, 1968. Bernabé, Jean, et al. Elogio de la creolidad. Translated by Gertrude Martin Laprade and Mónica María del Valle. Bogotá: Editorial Javeriana, 2011. Collins-Klobah, Loretta, and Maria Grau-Perejoan, editors and translators. The Sea Needs No Ornament/El mar no necesita ornamento: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Caribbean Women Poets. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2020. Confiant, Raphael. Bitako-a. Martinique: Éditions du Gérec, 1985. ———. Barrancos del alba. Translated by Max Figueroa. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1993. Cooper, Carolyn. Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, [1993] 1995. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. Escribir en el aire: Ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad sociocultural en las literaturas andinas. 2nd ed. Lima: CELACP, 2003. Christopher Livingston, Adel. Dih Kriol Man. San Andrés: Creating medios, 2016. De Sahagún, Bernardino. Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España. México: Pedro Robredo, 1938. Del Valle Idárraga, Mónica María. “Martinica: la lengua y la escritura. Entrevista a Raphaël Confiant.” Aguaita, no. 24, Dec. 2012, pp. 11–27. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Ellis, Keith. Poetas del Caribe anglófono. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2011. Esteves, Carmen C., and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, editors. Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1991. Fernández, Roberto G. Raining Backwards. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Para una teoría de la literatura hispanoamericana. 1975. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1995. Figuera, Renee. “Critical Cultural Translation: A Case of Translating Creolization in Newspaper Tales of Trinidad 1919–1920.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, edited by Desrine Bogle, Ian Craig and Jason F. Siegel., special edition on Translating Creolization, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 195–219. Frankétienne. Anthologie Secrète de Frankétienne. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2005. Glissant, Édouard. El discurso antillano. Translated by Aura María Boadas and Amelia Hernández. Caracas: Monteávila, 2005. ———. Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. Grau-Perejoan, M. “The Role of Literary Translators in the West Indian Literary Field and the Importance of Creole.” Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, edited by Bogle, D., Craig, I. y Siegel J. F., special edition on Translating Creolization, vol. 2, no. 2, 2016, pp. 241–257. Grau-Perejoan, Maria and Loretta Collins-Klobah. “Prácticas feministas y postcoloniales en la traducción colaborativa de poetas mujeres del Caribe insular anglófono e hispanohablante.” Mutatis Mutandis: Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 421–444, https:// doi. org/10.17533/udea.mut.v13n2a11. Gruzinski, Serge. La colonización de lo imaginario: Sociedades indígenas y occidentalización en el México español. Siglos XVI–VIII. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991. Guzmán, María Constanza. Mapping Spaces of Translation in Twentieth-Century Latin American Print Culture. New York: Routledge, 2020. Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon Books, 1967. Howard, Késhia. San Andres: A Herstory. San Andrés: Casa Editorial Welcome, 2014. Kamau Brathwaite, Edward. Roots: Essay. Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1986. ———. “Críticos caribeños.” Translated by Florencia Bonfiglio, 1969. Katatay, no. 7, sept. 2009, pp. 44–50. ———. La unidad submarina: Ensayos caribeños. Translated by Florencia Bonfiglio. La Plata: Katatay, 2010. Kempadoo, Oonya. Mar de fondo. Translated by Osmany Oduardo Guerra, Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2002. Labriola, Rodrigo. “Traducir, traicionar, tragar: ocelotl, Sahagún y la retórica de los tamales.” No solo con las armas/non solum armis: cultura y poder en la Nueva España. Edited by Pérez, Manuel and Claudia Parodi. Madrid: Vervuert, 2014, pp. 125–154, https://doi.org/10.31819/9783954871957-009 100

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León-Portilla, Miguel et al. “Los indios del Caribe y circuncaribe a finales del siglo XV.” América Latina en la época colonial. Barcelona: Crítica, 2003. Letters to Eloisa. Directed by Adriana Bosch. [Documentary]. United States: National Endowment for the Arts & Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2020. Levine, Suzanne Jill. “La traducción como camino de autoescritura.” Latin American Literature Today, vol. 1, no. 12, Nov. 2019, https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/es/2019/11/writing-self-translationsuzanne-jill-levine/. Lezama Lima, José. “La expresión americana.” Obras completas, vol. 2. México: Aguilar, 1977, pp. 279–390. Martínez Huchim, Ana Patricia. U Yóol xkaambal Jaw Xíiw/Contrayerba. Yucatán: CDI, 2013. Rothe, Thomas. “Diálogos turbulentos: traducción intercaribeña como estrategia anticolonial.” Sargasso, no. 1 and 2, 2015–16, pp. 13–30. Sarrazin Z., Jean Paul. “Las hojas sabias en otra casa: análisis de la traducción de la constitución política colombiana a la lengua indígena Inga.” Signo y pensamiento, vol. 65, no. 33, jul–dec. 2014, pp. 16–31, https://revistas.javeriana.edu.co/index.php/signoypensamiento/article/view/11825. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Deconstructing Historiography.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988, pp. 3–33. Stevens, Laura M. “Transatlanticism Now.” American Literary History 16 (1): 93-102, Spring 2004. Tangen-Mills, Jesse. Los límites del mercado mundial de literatura: un estudio de caso de la traducción de un autor “afrocolombiano.” Master’s thesis in cultural studies, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, 2015. Valdeón, Roberto. Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2013. ———. “Doña Marina/La Malinche. A Historiographical Approach to the Interpreter/Traitor.” Target, vol. 25, no. 2, 2014, pp. 157–179. Walcott, Derek. La voz del crepúsculo. Translated by Catalina Martínez Muñoz. Madrid: Alianza editorial, 2000. ———. La Odisea/The Odyssey. Translated by Jenaro Talens and Manuel Talens, 1993. Madrid: Visor, 2005. Wynter, Sylvia. “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum NHI, vol. 1, no. 1, Fall 1994, pp. 42–73 Van Kempen, Michiel. “Una breve historia de la literatura surinamesa.” Cuadernos de literatura, vol. 30, jul.–dec. 2011, pp. 329–350.

Further Readings Cuadernos de literatura, vol. 30, jul.–dec., 2011. Special edition about literatures of the Greater Caribbean distributed by country. Curell, Clara. “Reflexiones en torno a la traducción del francés antillano: L’écran rouge de Ernst Pépin.” Hermëneus: Revista de traducción e interpretación, vol. 20, 2018, pp. 105–123. Analyzes translation strategies and their degree of success in this novel translated by Lourdes Arencibia. Forsdick, Charles. “Translation in the Caribbean, the Caribbean in Translation.” Small Axe, vol. 19, no. 3, 2015, pp. 147–162. Provides a clear and brief overview of literary translation in the Greater Caribbean. Munday, Jeremy. “The Caribbean Conquers the World? An Analysis of the Reception of García Márquez in Translation.” BHS, vol. LXXV, 1998, pp. 137–144. Discusses various tactics used in the translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s work into English by contrasting strategies to demonstrate how the reception of the author and his world changes in each case. Veldwachter, Nadège. “Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé and Raphaël Confiant in English Translation: Texts and Margins.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 40, no. 2, Spring 2009, pp. 228–239. Examines the reception of these three authors in English translation.

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6 Translation and A ­ nthropophagy from the Library of H ­ aroldo de Campos Max Hidalgo Nácher

Introduction: The Library of Haroldo de Campos as a Space for Criticism and Creation Haroldo de Campos (São Paulo, 1929–2003) was a poet, critic, translator, literary theorist, researcher in literary translation, and tireless cultural mediator who actively contributed to forming networks by establishing contact with writers, critics, and intellectuals at the vanguard from many countries. He translated from English, German, French, Russian, Italian, Provençal, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew, among other languages, and he did so with a keen awareness of the cultural specificity of Brazil and, more generally, Latin America. As will be discussed later in this chapter, inspired by the Manifiesto antropófago [Anthropophagic manifesto] (1928) by Oswald de Andrade, Haroldo de Campos’s theory and practice as a translator are marked by a poetic commitment militantly established through an anthropophagic appropriation of difference. Thus, throughout Haroldo de Campos’s intellectual and creative journey, one can observe how his practice of translation as an incorporation of difference and a capitalization of language itself deepened over time. Beginning in 1962, it is also possible to observe how his theory of translation developed, a theory that would ultimately conceive of translation as a general cultural apparatus. As will be seen below, Haroldo de Campos’s work serves as a key contribution to how translation is conceived of at large by incorporating singularities from the Latin American experience. Haroldo de Campos, along with his brother Augusto de Campos and the poet and translator Décio Pignatari, led a collective translation project that made it possible to incorporate many poets into the assets of Brazil’s Portuguese poetic language, such as the likes of Homer, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, Arnaut Daniel, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Ungaretti, Hölderlin, Goethe, Rilke, Brecht, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Corbière, Mallarmé, Ponge, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Pasternak, Biely, Mandelstam, Gennadiy Aygi, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, and Octavio Paz, as well as elements of biblical and contemporary Hebrew poetry, classical and modern Japanese poetry, and classical Chinese poetry. This translation work belongs to a broader project of capitalizing Brazilian poetry, which made it possible to incorporate a mobilized, pluralistic corpus into its heritage and traditions at the service of contemporary poetry.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-8

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Studying Haroldo de Campos’s library, with its more than 20,000 volumes preserved in the Casa das Rosas on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, proves highly valuable in understanding both his reading–writing practice (observable in the traces he left in his library books, see Hidalgo Nácher 2018) and the material and institutional space in which that practice was made possible. The library can be viewed simultaneously as a creative workshop and the material result and sedimentation of a writing practice intimately tied to translation. For Haroldo, criticism was first a question of choice, as it was for the writer and translator Ezra Pound. The idea of paideuma—what is necessary to read, pass on, teach, not just as knowledge of the past, but also for use in the present—is a slice of the library as a whole, but the library already prefigures paideuma, making it possible to mobilize it in the present. Haroldo expresses it that way in a letter to Roman Jakobson, one of the most important linguists and translation theorists of the twentieth century, with whom he would share a close intellectual relationship: A qualidade da escolha decide um pouco de antemão, como uma verdadeira condição de possibilidade, do êxito final da análise, da sua plenitude pelo menos. A operação seletiva—a escolha do objeto—seria já uma primeira decisão constitutiva do ato crítico [The quality of the choice determines a bit in advance, as a true condition of possibility, the final success of the analysis, at least of its completeness. The act of selection— choosing the object—would then be the first, formative decision of the critical act]. (De Campos 1970: 197) Leyla Perrone, who becomes a part of this school of thought and reconstructs it, also asserts that what is now at stake in the choice itself is the “julgamento de valor implícito em todo discurso histórico” [value judgment implicit in all historic discourse] (21). Therefore, above all, criticism is “choice and value.” Haroldo’s library is a material result of that principle, and it can be conceived of as a slice of the culture, preserving that which not only deserves to be preserved, but that which may also be worthy of being mobilized for use in the present. For as Haroldo said when taking a militant stance in citing Walter Benjamin: “Quem não é capaz de tomar partido, deve calar” [One who is not capable of taking sides, must stay silent] (De Campos 1997: 252). And here it follows that what is said about the library can also be said, all the more so, about translation. The texts worthy of translation are precisely those, which, due to their extreme difficulty, seem untranslatable, making them, for that very reason, transcreatable— texts that can enrich language itself and the very poetic and cultural tradition by becoming incorporated into the very cultural wealth in order to be presented as contemporaries. In 1962, Haroldo states it clearly: “Quanto mais inçado de dificuldades esse texto, mais recriável, mais sedutor enquanto possibilidade aberta de recriação” [The more difficulties a text has, the more recreatable, the more seductive, it will be concerning open possibilities for recreation] (5).

The Translation Space and the Worlds of the Library The library is where Haroldo de Campos’s translation theory and practice have their possibility space, a place that can be conceived of in terms of its own dynamics and transformations: its open porosity (how does it communicate with the outside world?), its flows and entrance channels (how, and how quickly, do books enter the library?), its plausibility (what types of 103

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books in the library are plausible?). This is a case of a multilingual, cosmopolitan library, which includes thirty-six languages. The library’s main collection in Portuguese represents 43.63% of the total. The second collection is composed of works in Spanish (18.30%), English (14.91%), and French (11.92%). The subsequent collection is made up of Italian (7.52%) and German (6.37%). The rest of the languages—which are significantly different, with Japanese and Greek preferentially placed—represent less than 1% of the total and, together, comprise approximately 3% of the total. Haroldo’s plurilingualism was excessive, and its specific nature lies in the fact that he sought to destabilize language itself and its semiotic codes through contact with other languages and codes. “Tant de langues dans toute langue” [So many languages in every language] Jacques Derrida would say in a note paying homage to Haroldo, where he would present him as one of his “grands-amis-admirables” [great-admirable-friends] (2015:18). The practice of heterolingualism allows language itself to be affected by other languages and poetics, thus questioning the very semiotic codes through contact with other codes, a movement confirming the fundamental link between the writing process and the translation process. A description of the library’s multilingual collection is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the choice part of the equation (for Haroldo, the first aspect of criticism, as discussed above), for the books in his library are no longer the same after having been read, digested, translated, and rewritten by him. The cosmopolitanism that appears here is neither passive nor reproductive, but rather it serves an appropriative function, simultaneously fracturing the national culture and the stories inherited about the international circulation of ideas. For that reason, his library and his theories of translation and transculturation stem from a foundational act in 1566, when the Caeté indigenous peoples devoured Bishop Sardinha. The scene is one in which, in a heterochronic and anthropophagic gesture marked by translation, the Brazilian modernism of Oswald de Andrade (Manifiesto antropófago, 1928) and his theory of anthropophagy are affirmed as devoração crítica do legado cultural universal, elaborado não a partir da perspectiva submissa e reconciliada do “bom selvagem” (idealizado sob o modelo das virtudes europeias no Romantismo brasileiro de tipo nativista, em Gonçalves Dias e José de Alencar, por exemplo), mas segundo o ponto de vista desabusado do “mau selvagem,” devorador de brancos, antropófago. Ela não envolve uma submissão (uma catequese), mas uma transculturação; melhor ainda, uma “transvaloracão:” uma visão crítica da história como função negativa (no sentido de Nietzsche), capaz tanto de apropriação como de expropriação, desierarquização, descontrução. Todo passado que nos é “outro” merece ser negado. Vale dizer: merece ser comido, devorado. Com esta especificação elucidativa: o canibal era um “polemista” (do grego pólemos = luta, combate), mas também um “antologista:” só devorava os inimigos que considerava bravos, para deles tirar proteína e tutano para o robustecimento e a renovação de suas próprias forças naturais… (De Campos 1980: 234–245) [a critical devouring of the universal, cultural legacy, produced not from the submissive and reconciliatory perspective of the “noble savage” (idealized under the model of the European virtues in nativist Brazilian Romanticism, in Gonçalves Días and José de Alencar, for example), but rather according to the insolent point of view of the “ignoble savage,” devourer of white men, anthropophagus. It does not involve submissiveness (a catechism), but rather transculturation; or, even better, a “transvaluation:” a critical vision of history as a negative function (in the Nietzsche sense of the phrase), which is capable of appropriation as well as expropriation, de-hierarchization, deconstruction. 104

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Everything past that is “other” to us deserves to be denied. It can be said: it deserves to be eaten, devoured. With this clarifying specification: the cannibal was a polemicist (from the Greek pólemos = fight, combat), but also an “anthologist:” only devouring the enemies they considered valiant, to extract the protein and marrow to bolster and renew their own natural strength]. As Oswald de Andrade said in his 1928 Manifiesto antropófago: “Tupi or not tupi, that is the question.” Alliteration, differential identity: a celebration of the ignoble savage who invites the foreigner to his table (in this case, Shakespeare) to devour him. The same can be said for the library: for all the books it contains, and for how varied and diverse this Library of Babel may be, at its heart is Haroldo, chewing over and over on the Western legacy. That transculturation in which codes and cultures mix is tied to the act of reading and a general idea of translation, since at stake in reading is a rewriting process that Haroldo has considered a translation process since the 1980s. For Haroldo, translation has two meanings: the first is restrictive (insofar as conceiving of translation as a transference process of a text from one language to another) and the second, much broader, encompasses any cultural operation under the model of translation. Now, in Haroldo’s work, the first meaning is always running through the second, for he arrives at the theory of translation through a lengthy practice of poetic translation. Thus, when he refers to translation in its broader sense (as a general cultural apparatus), he never fails to include the experience of poetic translation—a paradigm for him—which makes his perspective quite different from that of authors such as Rebecca Walkowitz (Born translated, 2015). The often monolingual, homogeneous space of World Literature, then, has nothing in common with the multilingualism and heterolingualism running through the multiple, heterogenous spaces of Haroldo’s Brazilian Weltliteratur. In fact, the library is the sediment of a politics of literature based on cosmopolitanism and the defense of a “world literature” quite different from the one upheld by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti. Where those authors project a homogeneous, uniform space in which the literary hierarchy is ultimately subordinate to a political, economic, and military hierarchy presided over by the logic of debt, Haroldo introduces a foundational violence marked by the absence of origin. In that regard, it is symptomatic that Haroldo, one of Brazil’s primary agents of cosmopolitanism and “world literature,” is completely absent from Casanova’s map (Hidalgo Nácher, “Modelos y problemas”). That other Haroldian Weltliteratur would be a fractured space built on translations in which cultural mediations can now be understood as translation processes. In that way, Haroldo reclaimed a cosmopolitanism of difference that is diametrically opposed to Casanova’s universalist cosmopolitanism, a cosmopolitanism that is tied to a theory of translation that he created by drawing on Ezra Pound and the texts of Max Bense, and, beginning in 1967, Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Jacques Derrida. It is clear that they are all invited to the anthropophagic feast in which, from his library in São Paulo, Haroldo assembles and reassembles the cultural fragments by introducing Brazilian and Latin American difference. Thus, beginning in the 1980s, Haroldo would begin to build a theory of transculturation, through the lens of his cosmopolitanism, no longer opposing nationalism and universalism (as if these were two rivals), but rather modal nationalism and ontological nationalism (De Campos 1980: 237). Thus, the question will no longer be whether to establish contact with foreign texts or not, but rather how to do so: through servitude (like the noble savage) or insubordination (like the ignoble, anthropophagic savage who invites the foreigner to his banquet…to eat him). So, it will be a matter of practicing a critical devouring that will make Latin American difference emerge in the very act of translation. 105

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Networks, Voyages, Textual Galaxies That cosmopolitanism of difference is materially woven through a network of alliances and elective affinities. Going back to the body of the library (where magazines have significant value, both in number and quality, given that they make up approximately one-quarter of all volumes in the library) and the dedications written in some of the volumes (as is the case with the books of Max Bense, Roman Jakobson, Henri Meschonnic, and Antoine Berman, among others), as well as Haroldo’s epistolary correspondence, may contribute to reconstructing those intellectual networks, woven at length through a certain practice of travel (Hidalgo Nácher, “Redes intelectuais”). As the Spanish writer Julián Ríos recalled, Haroldo’s trips were marked by exchanges: En la era digital y de la instantaneidad de nuestros días, no resulta a veces evidente que las peregrinaciones de Haroldo a Europa no eran en el fondo muy diferentes de las de los monjes y eruditos en siglos anteriores en busca de manuscritos y contactos con otros sabios desperdigados por el mundo. Haroldo llegaba a Europa para difundir libros brasileños, que llenaban sus maletas, además de regalos como, por ejemplo, pesados ceniceros hechos de trozos de árboles fosilizados, y se volvía a Brasil con las maletas aún más atiborradas de libros regalados y comprados. El Amazonas reposado y repasado de Haroldo no era el Amazon a un click de ahora. (Ríos 2018) [In the digital age and the instantaneousness of our times, it is sometimes not obvious that Haroldo’s pilgrimages to Europe were at their heart not so different from those of nuns and scholars in previous centuries searching for manuscripts and contact with other wise people scattered throughout the world. Haroldo would arrive in Europe to circulate Brazilian books, his luggage filled with them, in addition to gifts such as, for example, heavy ash trays made from pieces of fossilized wood, and he would return to Brazil with his luggage stuffed even more with books that he bought and was gifted. Haroldo’s Amazon of relaxation and revisitation was not the Amazon we can access in a click today]. In Brazil, Leyla Perrone corroborated in an interview what Derrida had said a few years before: O Haroldo esteve sempre em toda parte, antes de todo mundo—eu digo antes dos universitários porque ele não era universitário na época. Ele tinha conhecimento do formalismo russo, tinha contatos antes de mim com o grupo Tel quel, com o grupo Change. Aliás, ele ficou mais próximo do Change, do Jean-Pierre Faye, do que do Sollers. Foi o primeiro que entrou em contato com o Todorov, com a Kristeva, com todo mundo. (Wolff 2016: 151) [Haroldo was always everywhere before everyone—what I mean is before those from the universities, because he wasn’t yet part of the university at that time. He knew Russian formalism, he was in contact with the Tel quel group before I was, with the Change group. In fact, he ended up getting closer to the Change group, with Jean-Pierre Faye, than with Sollers’s group. He was the first to have contact with Todorov, Kristeva, with everyone]. 106

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Along the same line, Jacques Derrida has said in a beautiful text in homage to Haroldo: Tout ce qui a pu signifier la loi, le désir aussi, l’urgence, mais l’urgence la plus aventureuse et la plus audacieuse pour moi, dans l’ordre de la pensée, de l’écriture, de la poésie – « unique source » – dans l’horizon de la littérature, et avant tout dans l’intimité de la langue des langues, chaque fois tant de langues dans toute langue, je sais que Haroldo y aura eu accès comme moi avant moi, mieux que moi. (Derrida 2015: 17–18) [Everything that has been able to signify the law, also the desire, the urgency—but the most adventurous and bold of the urgencies for me—within thought, writing, ­poetry—“unique source”—literature, and most of all within the intimacy of the language of languages, every time so many languages in every language, I know that Haroldo must have accessed all that before I did, better than I did]. On November 17, 1968, Haroldo wrote to Jakobson, shortly after his trip to Brazil, and mentioned to him that he needed to travel to write Galáxias (1984), a book of poems that tells of Haroldo’s passion for travel whose first excerpts date back to 1963.1 The book presents, in fifty poems, what is—in the words of Augusto de Campos, poet and translator who deserves a separate study for the enormous work he has done in translation to date—an authentic linguaviagem [languagevoyage] which is, at the same time, a viagem via linguagem [voyage via language] in which the languages become enjambed. A permutative game that immediately demonstrates the problem with translation and what is lost by wanting to translate the “content” of a poem or any poetic prose. Canto 36 of Galaxias reads: “I see all and I translate into writing […] all this is a translation a translating into a visible mode” (De Campos 2022, tr. Cisneros). As Haroldo writes in a note in the book, as the textual journey unfolds, the mothertongue (this dead tongue this ill-starred luck the umbilicord that stuck you to the door) begins to display all of its capacity for metaphor and metamorphosis, even through the appropriation and expropriation of other languages, through transgression and transcreation, hurling itself into an ‘even more excessive excess’ (De Campos 2022, tr. Cisneros) The collection of poems is not a book about voyages because it is, in and of itself, a mobile creation, a permutable work, constantly shifting, “the play of moveable pages, interchangeable in their reading” (De Campos 2022, tr. Cisneros). As stated in the eighth poem, dated August 2, 1964, “this is not a travel book because travel is not a book of travel” (De Campos 2022, tr. Cisneros). Haroldo mentions this book in a letter to Leyla Perrone on June 30, 1974, referring to an out of joint transitoriness: É preciso ter uma paciência beneditina para se fazer algo nesta maldita língua morta. Enquanto isto, vejo que todo mundo publica em ritmo de coelho nessa Lutécia velha mas sempreviva. Daqui a pouco, pela demora que ainda prevejo para a publicação das minhas GALÁXIAS estampadas no nº de 64 de INVENÇAO (falo da 1a sequência, iniciada em 63), ficarei eu mesmo com a impressão borgiana de que o último Sollers (que finalmente descobriu Joyce e Rabelais) é que andou me influenciando por algum fenômeno de reencarnação às avessas na máquina do tempo! (Letter from Haroldo de Campos to Leyla Perrone, São Paulo, June 30, 1974) 107

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[One must have Benedictine patience to do something in this damned dead language. Meanwhile, I see everyone publishing like rabbits in that old, ever-vibrant Lutetia. Soon, due to the delay I still anticipate for the publication of GALÁXIAS printed in number 64 of INVENÇAO (I’m talking about the first sequence that started in 63), I myself will have the Borgesian impression that the last [Phillipe] Sollers (who has finally discovered Joyce and Rabelais) is the one who influenced me through some phenomenon of retrospective reincarnation in a time machine!]. Additionally, it is worth noting how themes and methods circulate in a work that resists staying shut away in siloed departments. Canto 23 of Galáxias reads: schiller’s laughter explodes between goethe and voss and your word is tinted red either the man is insane or pretends to be voss writes it was during a dinner party chez goethe you should have seen the way schiller laughed and then i suggested that phrase as a contribution to the farbenlehre theory ismene saying du scheinst ein rotes wort zu faerben through the voice of sophocles through the voice of hölderlin schiller laughing goethe smiling illustrious company he must have been crazy herr hölderlin or he pretended to be because sophocles only meant you seem worried about something ismene to antigone through the voice of sophocles one of the most laughable products of pedantry that red-tinted word of mr hölderlin’s and still in the meantime in the midtime in the intension the sea purpled in kalkháinous’ epos polypurple sea of fury polycrimson warrior sea

This poem, in fact, revisits his article “A Palavra Vermelha de Hoelderlin” [The red word of Hölderlin] (1967), where Haroldo refers to the Hölderlinian translation of Sophocles’s Antigone (De Mello 2018: 123–128) and, concretely, to a Greek expression that the German poet translated, “erroneously,” as “du scheinst ein rotes wort zu faerben” (canto 23), which is to say as the syntagma “the red word” (when it is a figurative expression that can be translated as “being concerned”). Haroldo transforms this literalizing translation, which made Goethe, Schiller, and Voss laugh, into a deconstruction strategy of language’s monolingual action, which tends to subject the source text to the parameters of the target text while making the work of the translator invisible. The criticism continues in a retranslation that explains a proposal made by Túa Blesa, a Spanish professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, when he says that “translation is translation(s)” (Blesa 2016). The understanding of writing as rewriting goes hand in hand with the conviction that translating is not copying an original in a subservient way, but rather creating something new, not necessarily worse than what was translated—and that idea is what authorizes Haroldo to retranslate Hölderlin’s text into Portuguese (which was, in turn, a translation of Sophocles). In this turn to Hölderlin—but also in many other aspects of Haroldo’s work, such as his reflection on the crisis of genres (De Campos 2013b)—it is worth noting how Haroldo becomes a part of a long tradition that emerges with the first German Romanticism (Seligmann-Silva 2018: 106–107). That is where Haroldo would also align with Henri ­Meschonnic—there are many books with dedications from him preserved in Haroldo’s library—who liked to say that translators had chosen the wrong patron for themselves: they should not have chosen Saint Jerome, but rather Charone, because, well, most of the time they are transporting dead

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bodies (Meschonnic 1999: 17). Or, in Benjaminian terms, they are devoted to imprecisely conveying inessential content (De Campos 2013c: 212).

Toward a Poetics of Translation Haroldo’s theory of poetic translation stems from his own translation practice and the critical and creative incorporation of specific aspects of the work of some authors with whom he dialogued: Ezra Pound, Max Bense, Roman Jakobson, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida. It becomes possible, in fact, to reconstruct Haroldo’s dialogue with Jakobson and, with it, Haroldo’s evolution, by going back to Jakobson’s archive, preserved at MIT. Beginning in 1966, Jakobson was a fundamental reference for Haroldo, both at a theoretical and institutional level, as he saw him as a philosopher of language and poetry, a tireless linguist for whom nothing linguistic was foreign, a poet at the vanguard who moved through the century, the continents, and the disciplines with a passion that went beyond every type of border. His work and perspective served as models in crossing disciplinary borders and in the protean interest for the most varied artistic practices through an approach that involved a critical relationship between theory and creation. For Jakobson, it was about reciprocally planting the seed of thought and creation, bearing in mind both the “grammaire de la poésie” and the “poésie de la grammaire” ( Jakobson 1960: 219–233). The study of his correspondence attests to a friendship in the language—a friendship that begins in 1966 and lasts until Jakobson’s death in 1982. In that way, Jakobson was a privileged contact with whom Haroldo formed a productive relationship that would allow him to become a part of newly forming theoretical networks in the second-half of the 1970s and renew his theory of poetic translation. Their first exchange, preserved in Jakobson’s archive, is the article “Maiakóvski em português: roteiro de uma tradução” (1961), which Haroldo sent to Jakobson in January 1966. In the article, Haroldo reconstructs his first translations from Russian. Haroldo had already been studying German since approximately 1950, Japanese since 1956, and Chinese since 1957, and he started studying Russian in 1961 to translate Mayakovsky and the Russian poets at the vanguard. The first poem he translated—after little more than three months of studying ­Russian—was “Sierguéiu Iessiêninu.” The possible limitations of having only incipient knowledge of a new language must have been offset by a poetic theory that privileged creation over literal transcription. He wrote: “Traduzir poesia há de ser criar sob pena de esterilização e petrificação, o que é pior do que a alternativa de trair” [Poetry translation must be creation under penalty of sterilization and petrification, which is worse than the alternative of betrayal] (1961: 23). To defend these ideas, he took refuge in the example of Pound, who translated Chinese poems and Japanese Noh theatrical plays “numa época em que não se tinha ainda iniciado no estudo do ideograma, ou em que estaria numa fase rudimentaríssima dêsse estudo” [at a time when he had not yet begun studying the ideograms, or was still at a very rudimentary stage in his studies] (1961: 23). Those translations by Pound, which greatly exceeded those of the “competente sinólogo e niponista Arthur Waley” [competent sinologist and Japanese scholar Arthur Waley] served as a paradigm for Haroldo from which he derived “toda uma didática” [an entire teaching]. Just as Pound leaned on Fenollosa, Haroldo would make use of two translations (one in Spanish and another in German) to propose his recreation. It is also possible to immediately observe in the article how the choice of the poem—which was always crucial for Haroldo—would stem from what he considered “uma das mais importantes realizações de Maiakóvski” [one of Mayakovsky’s most important achievements] (1961: 23).

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Jakobson appears not only in Haroldo’s poem “meninos eu vi” (1998), but also in two others: “o.p. octogenário” (2006: 130–132), dedicated to Octavio Paz, and the “Ode (explícita) em defesa da poesia no dia de são lukács,” where it reads: e jákobson roman

[and jakobson roman

(amor/roma)

(love/rome)

octogenário plusquesexappealgenário

octogenarian plusquesexappealgenarian

acaricia com delícia

caresses with delightedness

tuas metáforas e metonímias

your metaphors and metonymies

enquanto abres de gozo

while you open in pleasure

as alas de crisoprásio de tuas paronomásias

the chrysoprase wings of your paronomasias

e ele ri do embaraço austero dos savants

and he laughs at the austere embarrassment of

(1999: 48)

the savants]

In the poem, Haroldo contrasts vibrant reflection with the discomfort of the “savants,” and brings up paronomasia (the phonetic similarity between two or more words that are only differentiated by one vowel or consonant), which Jakobson refers to in his famed 1959 text on translation “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” Haroldo’s poem illustrates the resource of paronomasia by playing with Jakobson’s name and its inversion: Roman, roma, amor [Roman, rome, love]. Paronomasia is fundamental in Haroldo’s work. In April 1977, he sent Jakobson La operación del texto [The operation of the text], a book in which—Haroldo wrote to him—“the presence of your poetics is a constant, along with my concern with the practice of poetic translation” (De Campos 1977 [MIT, B48 F10]). Furthermore, Haroldo’s library preserves publications with dedications from Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska. In the dedication of A Bibliography of His Writings (1971) it reads: For Haroldo de Campos, magician of concrete poetry and miraculous poetic translation from his devoted friend Roman Jakobson ( Jakobson, 1971 [AHC, archivo 8366])

In July of 1966, Haroldo shared his first article on translation theory with Jakobson: “Da tradução como criação e como crítica” [On translation as creation and criticism], a text-­ manifesto written in 1962 and published in 1963. The text proposed building a theory of poetic translation at the service of creation. Bense was the theoretical model, and Pound was the poetic model. Bense differentiated between three types of “information:” documentary, semantic, and aesthetic. When up against the first two, which are characterized by their ability to be codified and conveyed in different ways, aesthetic information would be fragile, given 110

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that it is associated with the very way in which it is conveyed (“a informação estética não pode ser codificada senão pela forma em que foi transmitida pelo artista” [aesthetic information can only be codified by the way in which it was conveyed by the artist] [De Campos 2013a: 166]). In principle, from where would this hypothesis of an aesthetic text’s untranslatability be drawn? With that inversion, Haroldo proposed a project: “Admitida a tese da impossibilidade em princípio da tradução de textos criativos, parece-nos que esta engendra o corolário da possibilidade, também em princípio, da recriação dêsses textos” [Accepting the thesis of the theoretical impossibility of translating creative texts, it seems to us that this engenders the corollary of possibility, also in principle, of recreating those texts] (167). Translating aesthetic messages would be associated both with translating semantic content and recreating its form: building an “relação de isomorfia” [isomorphic relationship]. Thus, “para nós, tradução de textos criativos será sempre recriação, ou criação paralela, autônoma porém recíproca. Quanto mais inçado de dificuldades esse texto, mais recriável, mais sedutor enquanto possibilidade aberta de recriação” [for us, translating creative texts will always be recreation, or parallel, autonomous, nevertheless reciprocal creation. The more packed a text is with difficulties, the more recreatable it will be, the more seductive in regard to the open possibility of recreation] (167). Haroldo found the paradigm of that type of translation-recreation in Pound, who maintained that the task of the translator was the formation of an active tradition in the present: Os móveis primeiros do tradutor, que seja também poeta ou prosador, são a configuração de uma tradição ativa (daí não ser indiferente a escolha do texto a traduzir, mas sempre extremadamente reveladora), um exercício de intelecção e, a través dêle, uma operação de crítica ao vivo [The primary motive of a translator, provided they are a poet or prose writer, is to form an active tradition (which is why the choice of text to translate not only matters, it is extremely relevant), an exercise of intellection and, through it, a critical operation in real time]. (176) Here, Haroldo referred to his conviction da impossibilidade do ensino de literatura, em especial de poesia (e de prosa a ela equiparável pela pesquisa formal), sem que se coloque o problema da amostragem e da crítica via tradução. Sendo universal o patrimônio literário, não se poderá pensar no ensino estanque duma literatura. Ora, nenhum trabalho teórico sobre problemas de poesia, nenhuma estética da poesia será válida como pedagogia ativa se não exibir imediatamente os materiais a que se refere, os padrões criativos (textos) que tem em mira. (178) [of the impossibility of teaching literature, especially poetry (and prose comparable to poetry through formal research), without bringing up the problem of sampling and criticism via translation. As literary heritage is universal, teaching literature cannot be siloed. Now, no theoretical work on the issues of poetry, no aesthetic of poetry will be valid as active pedagogy if it does not immediately lay out the materials it references, the creative patterns (texts) in its sights]. 111

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To conclude his article, in 1962, Haroldo argues the impossibility of studying literature without studying creative translation, a conviction that served as a foundation for a collaborative project between poets and linguists that would need to be carried out in a laboratory of texts, thus placing criticism at the service of creation. Having said that, his 1966 meeting with Jakobson would signify a shift and a deepening of his theory of poetics and translation.

Transcreation and Transculturation: Uses of the Library Haroldo’s theory of translation can be tied to his theory of reading. In so doing it becomes possible to interpret how he used the library since, for Haroldo, reading was choosing and translating was rewriting. Thus, Haroldo constructed a series of concepts and neologisms to talk about the specificity of poetic translation (a type of translation that, with Haroldo’s tendency to expand, would end up incorporating prose and even some excerpts from Hegel’s philosophy, all of them considered Dichtung, meaning “artistic use of language” as defined in the first German Romanticism [De Campos 1972]). Out of the impossibility of translation grew the possibility of “recriação” [recreation]; “transcriação” [transcreation]; “reimaginação” [reimagination], with Chinese poetry; “transtextualização” [transtextualization]; “transparadisação (ou transluminação)” [transparadization (or translumination)], for the six cantos of Dante’s Paradise; “transluciferação” [transluciferation], for Goethe’s Faust—where the importance of friction with the various bodies of work in the successive renamings of the task of the translator are apparent. That process also involved a shift from an “isomorphic” understanding of translation, defended in 1962, to a “paramorphic” theory beginning in 1967. Haroldo himself referred to those concepts: Essa cadeia de neologismos exprimia, desde logo, uma insatisfação com a ideia ‘naturalizada’ de tradução, ligada aos pressupostos ideológicos de restituição da verdade (fidelidade) e literalidade (subserviência da tradução a um presumido “significado transcendental” do original)—ideia que subjaz a definições usuais, mais ‘neutras’ (tradução ‘literal’), ou mais pejorativas (tradução ‘servil’), da operação tradutora. (1985: 79) [Naturally, this series of neologisms expressed a dissatisfaction with the ‘naturalized’ idea of translation, tied to the ideological presuppositions of recovering truth (fidelity) and literalness (subordination of the translation to an alleged “transcendental meaning” of the original)—an idea that lies beneath the common, more ‘neutral’ definitions (‘literal’ translation), or the more pejorative (‘servile’ translation), of the translation operation]. As Haroldo wrote, “o que se entende, geralmente, por tradução é uma atividade neutralizadora: trata-se de rasurar a forma significante—suprimir o corpo—para dela extrair um presuntivo ‘conteúdo’, uma assim desincorporada ou desencorpada ‘mensagem referencial’” [what is generally understood by translation is that it is a neutralizing activity: it is about crossing out the signifier—suppressing the body—to extract supposed ‘content’ from it, thus an unembodied and disembodied ‘referential message’] (De Campos 1988: 104). The first, opening gesture was to problematize that natural or naturalized idea of translation: to shift from translation as a servile copy of an original (denied in the impossibility

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of translation) to the possibility of a new creation (signaled by the prefix “re” in “recreação” [recreation] and “reimaginação” [reimagination]), a translation theory complemented by a theory of reading as rewriting. Thus, the ways to conceive of reading, translation, and the uses of the library are intimately connected. In the three cases, the supposed “original” (the work read, translated, or deposited in the library, understood through the lens of their unity and isolation) loses its uniqueness and referential value in order to transform itself based on its use. In fact, in 1980, Haroldo would begin to conceive of the theory of translation as “o capítulo por excelência de toda possível teoria literária (e literatura comparada nela fundada)” [the chapter par excellence of any possible literary theory (and comparative literature based on it)] (De Campos 1981: 76). Theoretically, it would be a matter of shifting from a mimetic operation that transposes the formal structures of the original (“isomorfismo” [isomorphism]) to a differential operation that would produce a new mimesis, thanks to difference (“paramorfismo” [paramorphism]), thus the original would be modified by the translation. In that sense, the books in Haroldo’s library would therefore be modified through reading. As Haroldo writes in “Da razão antropofágica: diálogo e diferença na cultura brasileira” [On anthropophagic reason: dialogue and difference in Brazilian culture] (1980), [a] um certo momento, com Borges pelo menos, o europeu descobriu que não podia escrever a sua prosa do mundo sem o contributo cada vez mais avassalador da diferença aportada pelos vorazes bárbaros alexandrinos. Os livros que lia já não podiam ser os mesmos, depois de manducados e digeridos pelo cego homeríada de Buenos Aires, que ousara até mesmo reescrever o Quijote, sob o pseudônimo de Pierre Menard… (1980: 253–254) [[at] a certain point, at least with Borges, the European discovered that they could not write their worldly prose without the increasingly overwhelming contribution of difference provided by the voracious Alexandrian barbarians. The books that they would read could no longer be the same, after being gobbled and digested by the blind Homerian of Buenos Aires, who even dared to rewrite el Quijote, under the pseudonym of Pierre Menard…]. Likewise, it would be a matter of shifting from a literary theory founded on a metaphysics of the presence of a theory both textual (“transtextualilização” [transtextualization]) and cultural (“transculturação” [transculturation]) in which the very idea of passage (“trans”) and the crisis of siloed identities would be at stake in affirming a theory of difference. And this would bring about a clear awareness of the value of the body of work. As has already been seen, contact with Chinese poetry would give way to “reimaginação” [reimagination]; Dantes’s Paradise, to “transparadisação” [transparadization]; and Goethe’s Faust, to mephistofaustian “transluciferação” [transluciferation]. Or, said differently: there is no possibility of establishing a poetic or translation theory without bearing in mind the specificity of the corpora with which one works. Goethe is not translated the same way as the Bible. Each work stirs up issues and opens possibilities for different strategies. For that reason, the value of the corpus thus refers to the value of the library: any library would already be criticism, given that it presents itself as a selection of culture. And any translation would imply a critical decision tied, from the start, to a choice.

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Translation as a Parodic Space That gesture is evident in Haroldo’s translation proposal for the following Chinese poem (De Campos 2000: 69–72):

For reasons previously discussed, Haroldo dismisses the referential translation (which in English would be something like “Sun rises (in the) East”). As Haroldo points out, that translation would not acknowledge the textual work in the code that the poem carries out through the triple repetition of the solar ideogram, which repeats in the three characters that make up the poem. Now, instead of proposing a new translation, and precisely to highlight that visual character of the Chinese poetry, Haroldo proposes a multiplicity of possible translations that connect it with texts that already exist in the literary tradition. Thus, the poem could be translated as the following phrase from Sousândrade’s Guesa: “O Sol ao pôr-do-sol (triste soslaio!)” [the Sun in the sun-set (unhappy sideslung!)], which, in addition to making the sequence sol [sun] repeat three times and containing other phonic plays studied by the author, in Portuguese has eight occurrences of o which, visually, fulfills the function of the solar icon. Haroldo would go on to offer another possible translation using these verses from ­Oswald de Andrade: “América do Sul /América do Sol /América do Sal” [South America / Sun America /Salt America]. And why not, using Dante’s Paradise, translate that same poem as “e fissi li occhi al sole oltre nostr’uso” (And sunward fixed mine eyes beyond our wont, tr. Longfellow) or even “e di subito parve giorno a giorno /essere aggiunto, come quei che puote / avesse il ciel d’um altro sole adorno” (And suddenly it seemed that day to day/Was added, as if He who has the power /Had with another sun the heaven adorned, tr. Longfellow)? By arranging the previous excerpts side by side, they go about opening a space of parodic meaning in which the texts build relationships between themselves. This makes it clear that translation is a phenomenon of contact that, more than being an exact transfer of a text or a communication of content, serves as a reading apparatus that brings heterology to the 114

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surface, “tant de langues dans toute langue” [so many languages in every language] (2015: 18). Therefore, the transcreated Chinese poem allows readers to see with new eyes the excerpts from Sousândrade, Oswald de Andrade, and Dante proposed by its side, thus insisting on the synchronous dimension of literature and the transformative potential of reading and translation.

Conclusion Haroldo de Campos’s literary project thus appears as a proposal to devour the universal legacy that would at the same time bring Brazilian difference to the surface. It is not simply about passively importing poetry from other languages, but rather transforming it in the very gesture of translation, which sets in motion the most advanced of the repertoire in available poetic techniques. Doing so transforms the Western poetic legacy while incorporating it into Brazilian poetry. Thus, translation presents itself as an anthropophagic act of appropriation in which the body of the other proceeds to be metabolized by the translator, who in this way introduces into their own blood something of a strange, foreign blood. And this ritual—which would not have been possible without correspondence and voyages—takes place at the desk. A desk where the library volumes are available, side by side, building changing constellations driven by the power of reading. And translation, transcreation. For that reason, perhaps it will no longer be possible to approach reading the same books in the same way after having undergone this transformative experience of moving through that excessive space, which is the Alexandrian Library of the Barbarian Haroldo de Campos. Translated from Spanish by Michelle Mirabella

Note 1 Thank you Odile Cisneros for sending the excerpts of Galáxias in English, forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Press in September 2022, to be published here.

Works Cited Blesa, Túa. “Traducción es traducciones.” Puentes de crítica literaria y cultural, no. 5, 2016, pp. 16–21, http://www.puentesdecritica.es/uploads/1/2/2/8/122805272/puentes5.pdf 2016. De Campos, Haroldo. “Maiakóvski em português: roteiro de uma tradução.” Revista do libro, no. 23– 24, 1961, pp. 23–50. ———. “A palavra vermelha de Holderlin.” A arte no horizonte do provável. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1967, pp. 93–108. ———. “O poeta da linguística.” Lingüística. Poética. Cinema. Roman Jakobson no Brasil, edited by Roman Jakobson. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1970, pp. 183–194. ———. “Superación de los lenguajes exclusivos.” América Latina en su literatura, edited by César Fernández Moreno. Paris: Siglo XXI, 1972, pp. 279–300. ———. Letter from Haroldo de Campos to Leyla Perrone. 30 June 1974. ———. Correspondence. Cambridge: Archivo Roman Jakobson, Institute Archives MIT, 1977, B48 F10. ———. “Da razão antropofágica: dialogo e diferença na cultura brasileira.” Metalinguagem & outras metas. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1980, pp. 231–255. ———. Deus e o diabo no Fausto de Goethe. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1981. ———. “Da transcriação. Poética e semiótica da operação tradutora.” Haroldo de Campos. Transcriação, edited by Marcelo Tápia and Thelma Médici Nóbrega. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1985, pp. 77–104. ———. “A esquina da esquina.” Haroldo de Campos. Transcriação, edited by Marcelo Tápia and Thelma Médici Nóbrega. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1988, pp. 105–107. 115

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———. “Poesia e modernidade: da morte do verso à constelação. O poema pós-utópico.” O arco-íris branco. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1997, pp. 243–269. ———. “Meninos eu vi.” Crisantempo no espaço curvo nasce um. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1998. ———. “Ode (explícita) em defesa da poesia no dia de sao lukács.” Galaxia concreta, edited by Gonzalo Aguilar. México D.F.: Universidad Iberoamericana/Artes de México, 1999, pp. 42–51. ———. Ideograma. Lógica poesia linguagem. São Paulo: EdUSP, 2000. ———. “o.p. octogenário.” Crisantiempo (en el espacio curvo nace un). Translated by Andrés Sánchez Robayna, bilingual ed. Barcelona: Acantilado, 2006, pp. 130–132. ———. “Da tradução como criação e como crítica.” Haroldo de Campos. Transcriação, edited by Marcelo Tápia and Thelma Médici Nóbrega. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013a, pp. 1–18. ———. “Ruptura dos gêneros na literatura latino-americana.” A reoperação do texto. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013b, pp. 161–198. ———. “Tradução da parte inicial de ‘A tarefa do tradutor’, de Walter Benjamin.” Haroldo de Campos. Transcriação, edited by Marcelo Tápia and Thelma Médici Nóbrega. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013c, pp. 211–213. ———. Galaxias. Translated by Odile Cisneros and contributions by Suzanne Jill Levine, Charles Perrone, and Christopher Middleton. New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2022. De Mello, Simone Homem. “Similitude alheia: a poesia alemã como fio condutor da teoria ­poético-tradutória de Haroldo de Campos.” Roteiros de palavras, sons, imagens. Os diálogos transcriativos de Haroldo de Campos, edited by Jasmin Wrobel. Frankfurt: TFM, 2018, pp. 115–132. Derrida, Jacques. “Chaque fois, c’est-a-dire, et pourtant, Haroldo…” Cisma, vol. 4, 2015, pp. 16–18, A written homage to Haroldo. Hidalgo Nácher, Max. “O dispositivo de leitura de Haroldo de Campos e os usos da biblioteca.” 452ºF, vol. 18, 2018, pp. 216–231. ———. “Modelos y problemas en el estudio de la circulación de la teoría literaria (I): Candido (1959), Haroldo de Campos (1989) y el secuestro del Barroco.” Landa, vol. 7, no. 2, 2019, pp. 219–222. ———. “Redes intelectuais e constelações textuais: a biblioteca de Haroldo de Campos como espaço de crítica e de criação.” Circuladô, vol. 9, 2019, pp. 36–53. Jakobson, Roman. “Aspects linguistiques de la traduction.” Essais de linguistique générale. Paris: Minuit, [1959] 1964. ———. Roman Jakobson: A Bibliography of His Writings. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Acervo Haroldo de Campo, archive 8366. ———.“Poésie de la grammaire et grammaire de la poésie.” Questions de poétique. Paris: Seuil, [1960] 1973, pp. 2019–233. Meschonnic, Henri. Poétique du traduire. Paris: Verdier, 1999. Ríos, Julián. Electronic personal communication of Julián Ríos. 29 June 2018. Seligmann-Silva, Márcio. “Poema pós-histórico: poesia como exercício de tradução e encontro entre línguas e linguagens. O caso das Galáxias de Haroldo de Campos.” Roteiros de palavras, sons, imagens—Os diálogos transcriativos de Haroldo de Campos, edited by Jasmin Wrobel, Frankfurt: Instituto Ibero-Americano (Biblioteca Luso-Brasileira), 2018, pp. 95–114. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Wolff, Jorge. Telquelismos latino-americanos: a teoria crítica francesa no entre-lugar dos trópicos. Rio de Janeiro: Papéis Selvagens, 2016.

Further Readings Aguilar, Gonzalo. Poesía concreta brasileña: las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003. Detailed and critical study of the Brazilian concrete poetry movement led by Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and Décio Pignatari beginning in the mid-1950s. This essay revisits the history, the phases, and the strategies of the concrete movement, which include rereading and translating a certain paideuma. Hidalgo Nácher, Max. “La traducción como dispositivo general de la cultura: galaxias y correspondencias desde la biblioteca de Haroldo de Campos y el archivo de Roman Jakobson (1966–1981).” Meta, vol. 66, no. 1, April 2021, pp. 154–177. https://doi.org/10.7202/1079325ar. A reconstruction of some aspects of Haroldo de Campos’s theory and practice of translation using as a launch point his library, relationship with Roman Jakobson, and the documents contained in Jakobson’s archives. The

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article emphasizes the importance of translation theory and practice, for Haroldo de Campos, concerning the creation of a literary theory and a cultural theory. Jackson, Kenneth David, editor. Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, 2005. A pluralistic presentation of Haroldo de Campos stemming from a compilation of writings by K. David Jackson, Gonzalo Aguilar, Leyla Perrone-Moisés, Nelson Ascher, Horácio Costa, Craig Dworkin, João Alexandre Barbosa, Wladimir Krysinski, Inês Oseki-Dépré, Luiz Costa Lima, Marjorie Perloff, Willard Bohn, Elizabeth Walther-Bense, Piero Boitani, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, Umberto Eco, Jorge Schwartz, Gonzalo Aguilar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Lello Voce, as well as some texts from Haroldo de Campos himself. Marcelo Tápia and Thelma Médici Nóbrega, editors. Haroldo de Campos. Transcriação. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013. A compilation of Haroldo de Campos’s principle articles on translation and transcreation.

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7 Resisting Translation Spanglish and Multilingual Writing in the Americas Sarah Booker

Introduction In his work, Mexican writer Yuri Herrera focuses on what he has called “lo fronterizo,” explaining in an interview with Tristan Foster that it is a space that allows for “the exchange of goods and symbolic values, the creation of new identities, of new linguistic forms, of new political practices” (n.p.). For Herrera, it is via the confrontation and navigation of difference that new modes of being and communication may emerge. His novel Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2009) (Signs Preceding the End of the World in Lisa Dillman’s translation) examines this border space through the translator-figure of Makina, a switchboard operator who speaks multiple languages, mediates communication in her community, and crosses the U.S.-Mexico border to deliver a message to her brother. Her name itself, which echoes both “máquina,” the Spanish term for “machine,” and “maquila,” the factories that can be found along the border, also speaks to the mechanized, dangerous space of the border as well as her social function. To articulate the movement through this border space, Herrera introduces the neologism “jarchar,” referencing the jarchas that concluded medieval muwashshah texts. This unfamiliar verb derived from poetry marks an in-between space, shows language in transition, and describes Makina’s physical and linguistic navigation of that space. Narrated through inventive language, Makina, too, observes the linguistic fluidity she encounters on the border: Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people. And then they speak. They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it’s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link. (65) In her Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas, Ellen Jones examines this same quote and points out that the mobile, fluid language of this border space is paralleled by Makina’s constant physical movement through the liminal space (1). Such a 118

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-9

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description recalls so many narratives of the linguistic hybridity taking place on the border and in the bodies that inhabit that space, including Gloria Anzaldúa’s canonical declaration of the new mestiza consciousness that transgresses the painful and artificial borderline. While Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) does celebrate the new identity that emerges in that space, she also avoids romanticizing it, articulating the violent and colonial nature of that space as such: The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal”. (25) It is because of the uneven and violent confrontation of numerous entities that a liminal, borderland space emerges, and these spaces are defined by multiple languages and ways of viewing, interacting with, and reflecting the world. There, the linguistic hybridity, inventions, negotiations, and exchanges, as Herrera describes them, can be understood as modes of translation, as can Anzaldúa’s particular use of language, which itself is constructed through translation to express the author’s experience in the physical, racial, and sexual borderlands. If this plurality of language and cultural identity defines the borderlands and migrant experience, or life in a multilingual society—a reality for much of Latin America, with the U.S.-Mexico border, Paraguay, or parts of Uruguay as particularly prominent examples of bilingual uses of Spanish with English, Guaraní, or Portuguese—how can it be reflected in literature? Writing from an Indian perspective, author Amitav Ghosh describes the multilingual reality of Indian people and examines how he, as a writer, can use the novel, which in recent centuries has been considered a monolingual object, to reflect multilingual voices. After exploring various approaches, he finds that, for him, “the only possible solutions are formal ones: that is to say, variations of language have to be suggested rhetorically and not naturalistically” (294). In her work on multilingualism, Beyond the Mother Tongue, Yasemin Yildiz also approaches the question of multilingual writing, though points out that multilingualism is not a new phenomenon. She poses the term “postmonolingual” to articulate the current period of monolingualism (4) and advocates for a postmonolingual “mode of reading attuned both to the existence of multilingual practices and to the continued force of the monolingual paradigm” (6). Responding to similar questions of language and World Literature, in their introduction to Multilingual Literature as World Literature, Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang further push back on simplistic understandings of monolingualism, stating that they do not assume that “‘mulitlingualism’ is merely the accumulation of several ‘monolingualisms,’ a mode of thinking that continues to imply that languages should be kept separate” but instead conceive “language itself not only as an elastic and evolving practice but also inherently multilingual whose mobility and inventiveness can be aptly dramatized in literary writing” (6). Jones takes this a step further to work against the notion that literature is fundamentally monolingual and claim that translation can also be multilingual. 119

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This chapter, then, considers how multilingual writing in the Americas relates to translation to explore additional solutions to the problem Ghosh poses. Particular attention is paid to the use of Spanglish in contemporary novels. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Julián (originally published under Juliana) Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre Tropical (2020) function as primary examples of the use of multiple languages, but they are brought into dialogue with other multilingual writers. Within this archive, there is a prevalence of coming-of-age stories that frequently focus on questions of identity creation and realization, especially in terms of gender and sexuality, as in texts such as Fiebre Tropical, Myriam Gurba’s Mean (2017), Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X (2018), Xavier Velasco’s Diablo guardián (2003), Mayra Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000), or even Anzaldúa’s writing, which in large part articulates a specific cultural and sexual identity. Queer identities also come to the fore in these texts, as seen in Anzaldúa’s articulation of her lesbian identity, Santos-Febres’s depiction of Caribbean drag culture, or Delgado Lopera’s story of budding queer love and hints at gender queerness. This writing seeks to give voice to individuals living in the linguistic in-between and is particularly relevant for those who may also see themselves as out of place in terms of gender and sexual identity, and it consequently diversifies language in the Americas by taking advantage of that liminality. Borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s theorization of a queer approach to phenomenology that asks critics to consider questions of orientation and relationships between objects in space, this chapter argues that these writers queer language by finding non-normative, nonstandard modes of expression to undermine language hierarchies while giving voice to a broader spectrum of identity construction. These contemporary, multilingual writers in the Americas use translation in the construction of multilingual texts through techniques that include code-switching, self-translation, bilingual texts, cultural translation, and the documentation of oral language. Hybrid languages and literatures, in turn, resist translation because the intent of the text is intrinsically wound up with the meaning.

Spanglish and Hybrid Languages Spanglish is a particularly good example of hybrid language that have developed both through the evolution of language accelerated by migration and cross-cultural encounter and through the creative act of writing and linguistic experimentation. I understand the term to describe the many ways that Spanish and English are brought together in lived acts of communication. In his book on Spanglish, Ilan Stavans defines the language as such: “Spanglish, n. The verbal encounter between Anglo and Hispano civilizations” (5). He later updates his own definition, saying: “My working definition of Spanglish became even more flexible: an encounter between cultures that is also a record of abundant past transactions” (22). This is a useful starting point to thinking about how what is conventionally known as Spanglish is more than a linguistic mix, but a sociocultural use of language that is established over the course of history. In her seminal work on the language in the U.S. Southwest, Rosaura Sánchez connects language to material and social conditions, such as migration, racial and economic structures in the region, and education systems, arguing that these impact a language’s survival or loss as well as its development. Spanglish has developed outside of—and usually in opposition to—linguistic regulation in the form of dictionaries or other ways of codifying languages. This means there are many iterations of the language with a huge variety in its use. Critics have tried to push back against this heterogeneity, in large part to establish the legitimacy of the language. Stavans, for instance, has written a Spanglish dictionary (published in his book Spanglish) and translated several canonical texts into Spanglish, including Le Petit Prince and a chapter from Don 120

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Quijote de la Mancha. Reflecting on his translation of Le Petit Prince and his experimentation with the possibilities of the birth of Spanglish as a language, Stavans notes that the project “exemplifies, to the degree possible, the way Spanglish has been ‘normalized’ in the new millennium. It uses a neutral form that results from the convergence of multiple varieties, a form that is commonly used in media” (“El Little Príncipe”). In his attempt to legitimize Spanglish through its unification and use in publishing, Stavans also acknowledges there are many forms of Spanglish. Building on this, Jones argues for a definition of “Spanglishes” rather than a singular language. This variation is often tied to geography, as Anzaldúa makes clear in her list of the languages her people speak, which include: “1. Standard English 2. Working class and slang English 3. Standard Spanish 4. Standard Mexican Spanish 5. North Mexican Spanish dialect 6. Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have regional variations) 7. Tex-Mex 8. Pachuco (called caló)” (77). This multiplicity of hybridity further undermines the notion of a monolingual system. As we experientially know, language is inextricably tied to identity such that the dominant model of monolingualism in much of the Americas is violent. In her writing, activist, linguist, and translator Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil argues that the linguistic is political because the relationship between the Mexican state and the languages spoken in the country are integral to the construction of racism and violence that defines it (12). For her, tactics such as the erasure of Indigenous languages or the creation of linguistic hierarchies through the education system—she discusses, for instance, the socioeconomic differences between rural and urban bilingual schools that pair Spanish with Indigenous languages or English and make clear that certain kinds of bilingualism are much more admirable than others (32)—make it easy for the state to continue to marginalize Indigenous communities. “Si no conocemos la diversidad lingüística,” she says, “será difícil que un día pidamos saber más de ellas y demandar espacios para aprender y disfrutar de las lenguas que se hablan en tu propio país” [If we are not familiar with the linguistic diversity, then it will be difficult for us to one day ask to know more about the languages that are spoken in your own country and to demand spaces in which to learn about and enjoy them] (35). While Aguilar Gil speaks to the cultural consequences of monolingualism in Mexico, Derrida introduces some of the personal effects of monolingualism in relation to his experience with the French language as an Algerian Jew. He recognizes that he uses French as his primary language and that his language and identity are inseparable. Yet at the same time, as a non-French citizen, outsider, and colonial subject, the language is not his. He states: I am monolingual. My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me. The monolingualism in which I draw my very breath is, for me, my element. … For me, this monolingualism is me. (1) He then flips this statement on the following page, stating: Yet it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to speak, as long as speech is possible for me in life and in death; you see, never will this language be mine. And truth to tell, it never was. (2) The multilingual writers I examine here recognize this double bind, that they are asked to use a language that may or may not be their own, so they resist that monolingualism by 121

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using multiple languages. In her discussion of Hispanic writing in the United States, Cristina Rivera Garza dialogues with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s “ch’ixi epistemology”—in brief, Rivera Cusicanqui’s use of Aymara and Quechua language and cosmology in her theoretical practice—to argue that the use of multilingual writing resists the colonial structures that, for instance, contributed to the violence of monolingualism that both Aguilar Gil and Derrida describe. Rivera Garza explains that within Rivera Cusicanqui’s analysis of contemporary Aymara culture, Rivera Cusicanqui has emphasized how ‘semiotic movers’ generate ‘methods of translation and integration of present and future entities.’ She shows, above all, a special interest in the production of ‘ch’ixi languages, polluted and tainted, an aymarized Spanish that allows a critical dialogue with state development and initiatives for the rural world’. (158–159) Indeed, as contemporary texts using Spanglish show, mixing languages can be a way of resisting the dominance of a colonial language. There is an inescapable history of violence that defines what Rivera Garza calls ch’ixi languages, but their use also has the potential to confront this violence. Anzaldúa articulates the way Spanglish is often seen as a mutilation of Spanish and English, despite—or perhaps because of—being a used language: For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves—a language with terms that are neither español ni inglés, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages. Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identify ourselves as a distinct people. (77) For those who are not in the linguistic center due to migration, education, culture, race, etc., Anzaldúa argues, there is no alternative but to create a language that recognizes that identity. While Anzaldúa writes of a forked tongue, Rivera Garza argues that there is more to it than that, that the use of ch’ixi languages is not just a fusion but a way of reflecting and overturning layers of colonialism: Resulting from both migratory experiences and a contested context in which struggles over colonization takes prominence, ch’ixi languages cannot simply be described as a mere blend or fusion of tongues. It is the use of Spanglish that characterized some of Chicana literature, for example. But it is also more. Always aware of the many layers of the colonial experience, each ch’ixi enunciation would look for ways to both “use and demolish” the very context out of which it emerges. (159) In much ch’ixi writing, such as in work by Anzaldúa and Delgado Lopera, queer spaces become a place within which this identity construction and colonial deconstruction can 122

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take place. In their TedTalk “The Poetry of Everyday Speech,” Delgado Lopera describes linguistic hierarchies and the ways standard forms of languages exclude those who do not have access to or use them. In addition to the linguistic inventiveness of private conversations between their mother and aunts, for Delgado Lopera, queer bars in San Francisco, specifically a place called “Esta Noche,” offer spaces of linguistic experimentation where Spanglish and queer identities are celebrated. Recalling the invention of terms like “queena,” “sissy marica,” and “butch papi” that are meant to reflect “our own bodies, our own genders, the ways that we come together” (10:15), Delgado Lopera describes this space as one that allows for the subversion of patriarchal and colonial structures. For both Anzaldúa and Delgado Lopera, or even Herrera with his “jarchar,” creating fronterizo space for nonstandard forms of language is key to resisting hegemonic systems. As with many modes of communication, translation is central to the use of Spanglish. This chapter understands translation in Karen Emmerich’s terms—as the creation of a new version of a text or body through the transformation of its form; this is an ongoing process that requires the constant navigation of choice. In her community-engaged work on rhetoric, Laura Gonzales explores the ways individuals negotiate linguistic differences and uses translation to conceptualize this navigation: I call these periods of communicative negotiation ‘translation moments’—instances in time when individuals pause to make a rhetorical decision about how to translate a word or phrase from one named language to another… Signaled by a pause, translation moments are instances of rhetorical action embedded in the process of language transformation. (2) Gonzales thus understands translation less as the conveyance of meaning and more as the navigation of choice based on language, register, intent, audience, etc. Jones, too, conceptualizes translation as a constant navigation of choices when she suggests, through her reading of Herrera’s work, that “the work of a translator, like the language Makina hears in Herrera’s novel, involves constant movement, a repeated pivoting between infinitesimally different versions” (1). In its real-world usage, Spanglish functions as a language, as a form within which an individual communicates ideas. In literature, however, translation becomes an important tool for writers as they navigate multiple languages. Stepping back from the specific use of language to consider hybrid cultures and migration in terms of translation is also relevant for this discussion. The experience of living in migration or otherwise divided is echoed throughout generations of Latin American literature. Stavans, along with other critics, such as Edwin Gentzler, has argued that translation is central to cultural construction in the Americas, as it is in the intersection of distinct systems that hybrid American identities emerge. Considering the ways Indigenous vocabulary was integrated into Spanish, Stavans claims that: “This jumble, este orden en el desorden, suggests that the Americas exist in translation. That is, they are sensible to the imposition of language as a hegemonic force brought from abroad” (25). To zoom out from Latin America, Korean translator and poet Don Mee Choi offers a particularly valuable connection between this lived experience and translation that Stavans uses to define the Americas. In her essay-­pamphlet Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, in which she contextualizes her translation practice within a neocolonial system and posits her work as an act of resistance, Choi identifies as a twin and a constant foreigner, as paradoxically existing in multiple places while not truly existing in any because of her experience living in both Korea and the 123

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United States: “As a foreigner, as foreign words myself, I seek incomprehensibility—a mirror image of myself. I seek mirrors through which I can also traverse, in order to map out the neocolonial history of my home, to translate myself ” (17). Translation, for Choi, becomes a mode of existence, a practice, a way to navigate a constant sense of homesickness. For many of the multilingual writers studied here, many of whom are living in the diaspora, translation is also integrated into the writing process as a way of navigating that divide Choi articulates.

Hybridity in Action In a conversation with Myriam Gurba, Delgado Lopera reflects on the oral storytelling ability of their family members, particularly the Colombian women living in Miami who were able to twist and play with language. Delgado Lopera then asks: “how do you translate that to the page?” (“Juli” 20:05). The literary representation and use of Spanglish can be understood as a translation of a primarily oral language into a textual, aesthetically conscious form. In his defense of the translatability of poetry, Octavio Paz argues that essentially any act of communication is an act of translation: “No text can be completely original because language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation, first from the nonverbal world, and then, because each sign and each phrase is a translation of another sign, another phrase” (154). Following the same logic, the transition from the verbal sign system of spoken language to the textual system of prose is also translation. Spoken Spanglish is constructed through use whereas literary Spanglish is a translation of the spoken language that also uses various translation tools that are not necessarily used when speaking Spanglish within communities. This literary Spanglish is performative, making the particular use of language integral to the message itself. While there certainly are exceptions, it is rare for there to be an even distribution of languages within a multilingual text. Considering writing in the United States, Jones points out that “historically much ‘Spanglish’ literature has subordinated Spanish to English, with which readers are assumed to be comfortable and familiar. English is usually dominant both in terms of quantity and in the extent to which Spanish is translated and explained” (16). This tends to be the case for both theoretical and fictional texts in which the dominant language of the publication location dictates the text. Stavans’s book on Spanglish, for example, is written in a performative Spanglish. The use of Spanish is generally done in a way that is comprehensible to the reader, often through the juxtaposition of an English equivalent, cognates, or context, but English terms are also occasionally glossed in Spanish, as in the following example: “Spanglish is often described as the trap, la trampa Hispanics fall into on the road to assimilation—el obstáculo en el camino” (3). This variation from the typical order of a “foreign” word followed by an English gloss varies the text’s rhythm and decenters the English language, even while the book privileges an English-language reader. In her ch’ixi writing, Rivera Cusicanqui uses Aymara and Quechua terms in her discourse and as central parts of her theoretical approach, but she provides tools in the form of in-text explanations and a glossary for the readers she assumes do not have access to those languages. These approaches do require the reader to work more to confront and navigate unfamiliar language, but guidance is provided through in-text or paratextual translations. Anzaldúa’s book offers one of the most canonical examples of hybrid writing. Like Stavans’s work, Borderlands/La Frontera performs the language hybridity it seeks to describe in a way that is accessible to an English-language reader. Anzaldúa’s primary tools for this consist in the use of italics to differentiate the Spanish (and very occasional Nahautl) from the English. This typographical choice is used to indicate linguistic difference. In her article on 124

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the use of italics in literary publishing in the United States and United Kingdom, Khairani Barokka shows how italics are frequently used to reinforce power imbalances, as it assumes a particular audience and marks what is and is not included as part of that audience’s linguistic system. The use of italics in Anzaldúa’s work does precisely this: it distinguishes linguistic systems, marks power hierarchies, and indicates both self and other to the reader. In this sense, they are used politically to illustrate uneven power structures, but they also work against the notion of a hybrid, borderland language that Anzaldúa seeks to describe. At the same time, the use of italics could be read as a way of honoring the different linguistic systems and visually showing how the two come together, as in the following example: “Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (76). Here the adjacent sentences mark the Spanish and English as different, but use that difference politically, to exercise the right to use a language that is not English to point out those responsible—White Americans or “Unitedstatesians”—for restricting speech. The use of Spanish allows this allegation to be more direct, stating it is “El Anglo” who is responsible for cutting out the tongue, whereas the English iteration of the statement uses the passive voice to describe these wild tongues. In her analysis of Anzaldúa’s work, Marlene Hansen Esplin notes Anzaldúa’s use of italics as a way of othering Spanish, arguing: “Spanish is figured as an Other language marked by italics and accounted for by parentheses, footnotes, repetition, context, or other strategies of translation” (182). Translation does indeed figure as a primary tool in Anzaldúa’s rhetoric, causing Hansen Esplin to refer to her as an author– translator. Anzaldúa uses translation to meet the Anglo reader halfway; she uses her language, but makes it comprehensible, such as in the following example in which Anzaldúa explains phrases used in her childhood: En boca cerrada no entran moscas. ‘Flies don’t enter a closed mouth’ is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don’t answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back to one’s mother or father (76) As seen in these examples, self-translation and code-switching, along with contextualization and glossaries, are translational strategies that many multilingual writers employ. Compared with Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, which holds the English-language reader’s hand, translating unfamiliar terms through contextualization or direct interlingual translation, Delgado Lopera writes for a specifically bilingual, queer audience; one who can navigate the layering of languages and who has frequently been othered precisely because of that capability. Fiebre Tropical is written in a radical and irreverent Spanglish that reflects the author’s migrant experience as a Colombian in Miami. The novel portrays fifteen-year-old Francisca’s first summer in Miami, her relationship with the evangelical church, and her development as a queer woman. It assumes a bilingual audience capable of navigating the twists and turns and border-crossing language, and thus does not use italics to differentiate Spanish and English but explicitly brings the languages together to create something new. Delgado Lopera does not see a major boundary between languages, and Fiebre Tropical makes apparent that supposedly distinct languages can coexist and reminds the reader that we are always existing in multiple languages, especially those who live outside the sociocultural center. Though heavily used in most bilingual texts examined, self-translation in Delgado Lopera’s novel is rare, but it does happen, as in the following examples: “¿Es mucho pedir? she said. Too much 125

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to ask that you not handle him like he’s trash?” (16); or: “Yo no muerdo, he said. I don’t bite” (186). While the novel is intended to make the monolingual English speaker uncomfortable, these examples show that it does offer guidance for those who put in the work. For the most part, though, there is significant fluidity between languages. The narrative is not consistent with using one language over another for a particular term; heat, for example, appears in both Spanish and English, though with different connotations: “The heat, I would come to learn the hard way, is a constant in Miami. El calorcito didn’t get the impermanence memo, didn’t understand how change works” (2). Here “the heat” in English describes the literal climate in the U.S. city, whereas the “calorcito” is personified to stand in for the narrator’s discomfort with her arrival. These terms are thus set up as linguistic equivalents that translate across language, but their distinct meanings allude to translation. In other instances, the bilingualism is used less to play with concepts and more so to vary rhythm: “The outskirts of Miami are dead land. It is lago sucio after dirty lake with highways and billboards advertising diet pills and breast implants” (4). As suggested in each example and mirrored by the language, the tropical climate and summer heat define the atmosphere of the novel, locating the events in the exotic fringes of the United States. The playful pivoting between languages further characterizes the marginal, multilingual nature of this tropical wing of the country: Lluvia tropical is nature’s violence. And here it was a lluvia tropical on acid, a fiebre tropical. Tropical fever for days. Nature soltándose las trenzas, drowning the ground so that by the evening, when the rain subsided, the land had turned into a puzzle of tiny rivers. (13) As suggested through these few examples, the movement between languages in Fiebre Tropical is fluid, much like the rain the narrative describes, whereas someone like Anzaldúa does play across languages and with uneven translations, she does differentiate languages by using italics. Due to the temporal distance and changing literary politics around literature, language, and translation, Delgado Lopera can play with hybridity and fluidity by constantly moving between languages to translate to the literary text the playful orality they saw among Colombian family members as a teenager. The opening paragraph of the novel offers a useful example of Delgado Lopera’s plural language: Buenos días, mi reina. Immigrant criolla here reporting desde los Mayamis from our ant-infested townhouse. The broken air conditioner above the TV, the flowery couch, La Tata half-drunk directing me in this holy radionovela brought to you by Female Sadness Incorporated. That morning as we unpacked the last of our bags, we’d found Tata’s old radio. So the two of us practiced our latest melodrama in the living room while on the TV Don Francisco saluted el pueblo de Miami ¡damas y caballeros! And Tata—at her age!—to Mami’s exasperation and my delight went girl crazy over his manly voice. (1) The first line of the novel gives a sense of the performative oral language that is continued throughout the book (Francisca’s narrative voice can best be defined by the spontaneous weaving of various discourses). For one thing, the opening line and subsequent mention of a radio program recalls a radio broadcaster, pointing to the popular culture that influences the novel as well as its orality. The narrator also frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader as “mi reina,” a nod to queer culture and the language developed in it as 126

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an informing factor of the novel. For instance, several pages later, the narrator states: “Pero, mi reina, siéntate pa’trás—we’re only getting started” (5). While there are not actually many terms in Spanish in the above quoted paragraph, the foregrounding of the language to open the text also works to situate and imagine a bilingual interlocutor. In addition to the orality of this opening paragraph, the politics of migration also come to the fore through language as this narrator starts to adapt to her new home. The term “immigrant” is in English, using the language in which this word marks Francisca as an outsider in the United States. The use of the phonetic Spanish of “los Mayamis” to refer to the U.S. city of Miami, however, gives power to Spanish speakers to name places, especially a place with such a strong Hispanic population. In her review of the novel, Jones notes that Delgado Lopera does avoid and even subverts certain clichés of the migrant novel; they do not highlight a total change of worlds, but rather show how Miami is deeply connected to Colombia and Latin America in general. This strategic combination of Spanish and English here shows that messy border. The use of language in conjunction with symbolism, such as the tropical climate or the ants in this opening paragraph, extends this discussion of the reality of migration. In this novel that uses language to represent an identity that is intermediary in terms of language, migration, geography, gender, and sexuality, there are a few explicit instances of interlingual translation that might guide a reader or bridge a gap. We can, however, think about translation in terms of Gonzales or Jones, who both say that multilingual speech engages translation through the constant negotiation of choice, or about the translation from oral to written language. As previously discussed, both Anzaldúa and Delgado Lopera employ self-translation to a certain extent, though Anzaldúa uses it much more than Delgado Lopera. Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X offers a particularly clear example of self-translation that is used to create a bilingual voice without overpowering the text with Spanglish. The novel, about a highschool girl from a Dominican-Bronx family navigating family politics, first love, and an initiation into the world of slam poetry, is written in a series of short poems in English but includes select phrases—typically in the mother’s dialogue—in Dominican Spanish that are left untranslated, which gives the voice a sense of place. There is one poem written in Spanish and then translated into English toward the end of the novel; the poem is written in second person and directed to the mother, who has punished her daughter for kissing a boy in public. The use of Spanish here is a way of speaking directly to the mother in Spanish, in the mother tongue. The lines of the poem, however, express a frustration with the lack of communication between mother and daughter due to strict rules placed on the daughter. One stanza reads in Spanish: “Y las palabras que nunca dije/quedan mejor muertas en mi lengua/porque solamente hubieran chocado/contra la puerta cerrada de tu espalda” (“A Poem Mami Will Never Read”), and are translated into English on the following page as: “And the words I never say/are better left on my tongue/since they would only have slammed/against the closed door of your back” (“In Translation”). Unlike in Delgado Lopera’s novel, Spanish and translation are used here to articulate wounds and divisions with the aim of mending them. Self-translation is frequently used to create fully bilingual texts of either prose or poetry. This is a common practice with Indigenous poets, such as Esteban Sabino, Natalia Toledo, or Humberto Ak’abal, as it is a way to utilize minoritized languages while also writing in a form that is comprehensible for a Spanish-speaking audience. This is less common with prose, in part because less space has been made in the publishing industry for Indigenous writers of prose, but Marisol Ceh Moo’s X-Teya, u puks’ik’al ko’olel/Teya, un corazón de mujer does offer an example of a fully bilingual text that is presented first in Maya and then in Spanish. This translation practice can be an effective way of experimenting with the gaps 127

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between languages; in her bilingual poetry collection, Boomerang/Bumeran, Achy Obejas uses gender-neutral language everywhere possible, though she does state in her author’s note that an entirely gender-free text is impossible because there are stories recounted in these poems in which gender does matter (ix). Paz argues that “while translation overcomes the differences between one language and another, it also reveals them more fully” (154), and this is certainly the case with Obejas’s project. The book is divided into separate English and Spanish versions (though there is some mixing of languages; the English version of “Volver,” for instance, does include full lines in Spanish) with each starting on either side of the book; the reader must flip the book upside down to get to the corresponding poems, but doing so reveals the different ways Spanish and English must adapt to fulfill this goal. As Obejas approaches it, gendered endings of articles and adjectives in Spanish are changed from “-o” or “-a” to “-e” (nouns are left unchanged), whereas the pronouns—specifically the use of “they”—is the focus of the English version. She also notes that because Spanish exists on the binary, the creation of a gender-neutral language is very much a work in progress: “What you hold in your hands is my effort in this regard,” (ix) she states. Self-translation for Obejas, then, represents an effort to innovate language rather than make it accessible. Self-translation is not exclusively used in the production of bilingual texts but can also function to demonstrate the limitations of language and translation. Carmen Boullosa’s La novela perfecta, set in a multilingual New York City, is an examination of the possibilities of technology in the production of art. In it, a Brooklyn-based Mexican writer befriends his computer engineer neighbor, Lederer, who convinces the narrator to collaborate with him on a new project that seeks to produce a novel that would be “read” as a fully sensorial experience. As Lederer explains it, his new apparatus can produce the perfect novel by circumventing the act of writing to directly translate the imagined novel into a form that can be experienced sensorially. Much of the first half of the novel, then, illustrates the limitations of language that make such an invention necessary. The space the narrator occupies affects his use of language as he thinks in Spanish but communicates with his immediate world in English, thus having to move back and forth between languages. This linguistic negotiation plays out in the text, exposing the reader to both Spanish and English and to the narrator’s interlingual translations. When the narrator first meets Lederer, he translates the conversation for his own benefit as well as for the Spanish-language reader: “¿Que de qué trabajo? ¿Yo? ¿Trabajo?”, traduje en mi cabeza. Me reacomodé en el escalón y, por respeto a mi mujer, dije: —I’m a writer. I write novels. I’ve published one in English. Soy un escritor. Escribo novelas. He publicado una en inglés” (18). These in-text translations continue throughout the novel (though they do sometimes falter), suggesting that a singular language system is not enough to navigate and create in a multilingual setting. Ironically, though, the narration of this novel, especially with its heavy use of English, opens modes of expression and allows for a broader linguistic range (as well as linguistic missteps and misunderstandings) with which characters express themselves. While on the surface the previous examples all demonstrate ways self-translation can contribute to the circulation of an author’s work or allow for linguistic experimentation, Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera articulates the introspective position involved in self-translation. In a translator’s note to a set of poems published in Waxwing, Salas Rivera writes: “Translating my own poetry has been a way of healing my relationship with a bilingual self who struggled intensely to learn standardized dialects of both languages” (“A Note on Translation”). For Salas Rivera, the practice of self-translation is less about making something accessible to a new audience and more about reconciling an experience of pain. In an interview with Sarah Timmer Harvey for Asymptote, he expands on this practice of 128

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self-translation as it relates to his recently published collection while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (2019) stating: I’m a self-translator. To translate oneself is to self-other in order to move through a space dominated by another system or code. To successfully self-translate you must fold yourself into self and a projected self that is mediated by another’s gaze. In this sense, one must also witness the limits of self-translation. In order to self-translate, I must to some extent face my colonizers and turn my back on my unknowability, but since I never stop being whole, I am also able to witness my estrangement, my refusal, and my doubling. Salas Rivera directly speaks to the ways he navigates his bilingual life experience of living between Spanish and English, in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia, this notion of self and otherness, familiarity and strangeness, while also finding ways to connect and disrupt the linguistic and gender binaries, as also seen in Anzaldúa and Delgado Lopera’s work. The other key aspect that Salas Rivera brings up in relation to his self-translation practice is the agency to choose when not to translate. Within translation discourse, there is such an emphasis on translation always being a generative and productive mode of increasing communication. However, the choice to leave something untranslated in an English text, as Salas Rivera does with some lines of his poetry and Delgado Lopera does with their novel, disrupts the privileged position of English, forcing the English-language reader into an excluded position while also safeguarding certain ideas. In conjunction with or in place of self-translation, code-switching is another key technique for the multilingual writer. Whereas self-translation is a clearer engagement with translation, code-switching does involve translation, as, returning to Gonzales’s understanding of “translation moments,” it involves the negotiation of a series of choices to communicate an idea in a particular way, within and beyond a particular system. Code-switching is not a random speech act, as Sánchez explains. She shows that, in the spoken use of Spanglish, code-switching happens when the grammatical structures between the two languages align, thus allowing for a bit more flexibility across the linguistic gaps. For instance, she argues that you can say “Lo hizo slowly” but not “How lo hizo” (36). Stavans also describes the frequent use of spanglishismos, such as “parquear, grincar, and la migra,” (14) that have emerged in the United States. Again, though, there is a difference between spoken Spanglish and that which is created for the literary text. The playfulness and potential political nature of unexpected juxtapositions tend to take precedence, such as with Delgado Lopera’s use of “Immigrant criolla here reporting desde los Mayamis” (1) that plays with foreignizing the name of a U.S. city and confronts the English term often used against migrants. There are certainly many more ways of using code-switching than can be addressed here, but the practice has implications as a way of manifesting a particular class, racial, or geographic identity or to deconstruct binaries. In his punk rock contribution to the Crack and McOndo trends of the early 2000s, Xavier Velasco employs code-switching to tell the story of Violetta and Pig in 1990s Mexico. Both marginalized figures, the two characters present themselves as outcasts in Mexico and the United States. The novel switches back and forth between Violetta’s first-person memoirs dictated orally into a tape recorder and shorter, third-person narratives of Pig’s backstory. Born into a middle-class, Mexican family, Violetta’s disgust with her family and fascination with U.S. culture leads her to steal her family’s money and run away to New York. Much of the novel narrates her time in New York, where she earns money through sex work and spends a lot of it to refashion herself as an American woman. Her name becomes a marker 129

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of this self-fashioning throughout the novel. As she begins to adopt a new identity, Violetta plays around with changing her name, trying it on for size as she moves through the city: “era yo, con el nombre que me gustaba y un apellido que no me iba tan mal: Schmidt. Good morning, Sir, this is Violetta Schmidt. Smith? S-c-h-m-i-d-t, my father was from Germany. Me? I’m from New York” [it was me, with the name I liked and a last name that wasn’t too bad: Schmidt. Good morning, Sir, this is Violetta Schmidt. Smith? S-c-h-m-i-d-t, my father was from Germany. Me? I’m from New York] (218). To embody this new name, she switches to English. Language thus becomes a way for Violetta to experiment with her hybrid identity. In the opening page of the novel, in a pseudo-confession, the narrator further flaunts her hybridized use of language: Ave María Purísima: me acuso de ser yo por todas partes. O sea de querer siempre ser otra. Y hasta peor: conseguirlo, ¿ajá? Me acuso de bitchear, witchear y rascuachear, de ser barata como vino en tetra-pak, y al mismo tiempo cara, como cualquier coatlicue traicionera [Ave María Purísima: I accuse myself of being me everywhere. Or rather of always wanting to be another. And even worse: achieving it, y’know? I accuse myself of bitchear, witchear, and rascuachear, of being cheap as boxed wine, and at the same time expensive, like any old treacherous Coatlicue]. (11) The use of spanglishismos like “bitchear” and “witchear” suggests a subversive use of hybridity as a mode of survival, as they go beyond a simple code switch to create a new term, much like Herrera does with “jarchar.” Translation can indeed be a form of invention. Mayra Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000) is another queer coming-of-age story that subverts a notion of pure language; while, like Velasco, she is not writing in Spanglish, Santos-Febres does reflect a Puerto Rican Spanish with English influences. The novel focuses on Sirena Selena, a young person with an amazing voice and a talent for drag performances, and Martha Divine, Selena’s mentor and business manager, herself a trans woman, as the two travel from Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic to try to make a career for the young singer. The narrative voice of the novel contributes to a sensation of multiplicity that resists binary conceptualizations of language and gender. It is overtly oral, reflecting the speech patterns of the Caribbean characters in syntax, vocabulary, and inclusion of English phrases. The linguistic flexibility blurs boundaries between English and Spanish in a way that both resists translation between two homolingual systems and reinforces the heterogeneity of the represented community. English words are sprinkled throughout the novel, as are locally specific terminology that reflects the liminal position of Puerto Rico, an island that exists in the margins between the English-dominant United States and Spanish-dominant Latin America. For example, Martha analyzes her own life story in the opening pages, saying: “Sorry, nena. Me malacostumbré al buen vivir” (13). In a later chapter, a drag performer expounds on the sexuality of “los indecisos,” again breaking down binaries of sexual desire through a hybrid oral language. She says: ¿Todo bien, todo fabulous, todo too much? … Les quiero dedicar el show de esta noche a los indecisos; esos que cuando les preguntan: «Oye, ¿pero tú eres gay?» tuercen la boca de la sorpresa, se coolean poniendo aire de que van a decir algo profundo y contestan: «Pues fíjate, yo no creo en esas clasificaciones. Si acaso, soy bisexual. Tú sabes, hay que explorar ampliamente los cuerpos, las pasiones, el deseo». (119) 130

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How is everybody doing, isn’t everything too fabulous, just too much? … I want to dedicate the show tonight to los indecisos, the undecided, those men who when they’re asked, ‘Oye, are you gay?’ twist their mouths in surprise, act cool, putting on an air of being about to say something profound and answer, ‘Ay, mi amor, I don’t believe in classifications. Maybe I’m bisexual. You know, one has to be free to explore bodies, passion, desire’. (in Stephen Lytle’s translation, 86) Again, this performance seeks to destabilize norms of sexual desire and gender identity, and it does so through linguistic hybridity, by borrowing English words—such as “fabulous”—or creating new words composed of English and Spanish parts—such as “se coolean.” At the same time, this is not necessarily the creation of a new, hybrid language, as the use of italics to mark the English words calls attention to the familiar and the foreign. While Barokka criticizes the use of italicization of terms originating in colonized territory in writing in English, in the case of Sirena Selena, the colonized voices mark the colonizer’s language as other. When taking place on the periphery, this use of italics others the center. These few examples of multilingualism in the novel contribute to its larger exploration of gender that resists binaries.

The (Un)translatability of Spanglish While multilingual texts certainly use translation in their construction, the texts themselves resist translation. In their discussion of multilingual writing, Hiddleston and Ouyang remind us that “translation need not be the means of circulation, and translatability, or untranslatability, should not define the terms of our engagement with world literature” (9). Indeed, when engaging with multilingual writing and its place in World Literature, translation functions as a literary tool that can both reveal and hide meaning, include and exclude. The resulting hybridity, however, resists translation because the meaning is so tightly entwined with the form of the text. In a commentary on his translation of Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov examines this question. He details some of the multilingual elements of Pushkin’s text, specifically the French influence on the Russian, and argues that such layers are impossible to translate. What the translator can do, then, is “reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text” (121), and create a text—famously, through the use of f­ootnotes—that is as precise a guide as possible to the original text. The translation, however, will never replace the original. While Nabokov’s extreme devotion to the original ignores much of what we know translation can do, it does illustrate one of the central problems to the translation of multilingual writing: when a text relies on the multiple and disparate layers of cultural influence to exist as a new form, how can that be translated? While untranslatability—either the inability to translate something because of a lack of equivalency or an ethical reason to leave something untranslated—can prohibit circulation, it is essential to an understanding of cultural difference and identity. In her rethinking of traditional approaches to comparative literature as a discipline, Emily Apter calls for a recognition of “the importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability” (4) with an aim to read across cultural systems and languages. Focusing on the cognate, or terms that supposedly offer minimal resistance to translation, Heather Cleary also argues that translation is not an even exchange of terms and meanings. The notion of untranslatability should be central to thinking about translation, as it is because of the irregularities between languages and their lack of correlation that translation is even necessary. She points out that 131

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languages are not exact equivalences, which is why we need translators and argues that: “we should think about untranslatability not in light of specific terms, works, or categories of discourse, but instead as integral to translation as a whole” (58). Embracing untranslatability, according to Cleary, has the potential to activate a practice of reading across languages and cultures attuned to the specificities of both the translated and translating languages. It would also recognize the series of active interventions behind even the most apparently straightforward cases of linguistic transfer and … call into question the ownership of these works circulating globally as cultural goods. (59) Certain things are untranslatable, and the texts that develop a unique language and use that language as part of the message—rather than a mode of delivery—pose challenges to translation, which in turn decenters monolingual systems. Code-switching, for instance, invites a never-ending translation process, especially when translating into the secondary language. In a global system constructed of uneven power relations, languages are not interchangeable, as the use of a particular language holds symbolic power. While the use of Spanglish in the U.S. context frequently marks a migrant identity, its use in many upper-class Latin American contexts works the other way around to mark a specifically upper-class status. This use of language is not one that has emerged in the borderlands, that marks a wound of division or reflects a growing Latinx population, rather it underscores class division and language hierarchies. Mónica Ojeda’s Mandíbula (2018) offers a particularly good example of this in its portrait of dangerous relationships between women at an upper-class, Opus Dei school. Throughout the novel, Ojeda uses italics to mark non-Spanish terms—primarily in English, though there are a few instances of French—thus visually emphasizing the multilingual aspects of the text. This is most prevalent in the dialogues and narratives of the adolescent girls. The teenagers, all part of upper-class families, pepper their speech with English to mark their class status. These tendencies are particularly apparent in the one-sided dialogues between one girl and her therapist, in which she constantly marks her speech with phrases such as “you know,” “I mean,” and “of course.” This use of italics and English poses a challenge to a translation into English, which would erase the linguistic difference. In my translation of the novel, I chose to strategically use italics by italicizing the terms that were in English in the Spanish version of the text, even though the text would all appear in English. I considered trying to create an alternative sort of multilingualism, one that would incorporate Spanish terms into the English translation as a way of marking the multilingual speech patterns. Indeed, some dialogue does retain some Spanish slang, but in the use of English, it was important to consider the international linguistic hierarchies that mean the use of English terms in Spanish is a fashionable thing to do within the conservative, upper-class circles, but the use of Spanish, which is still seen in the United States as a lesser, foreign language, would not produce the same effect. French may have worked here but would have created too much of a deviation from the Ecuadorian context. Ultimately, I found the italics worked to mark the linguistic differences, but it does alter the effect of the text. While this challenge does indicate that exact equivalence is not possible when working with multilingual texts—though it would be difficult to identify a text that is truly ­monolingual— there are general ways in translation to render the intention of a text in another form. Walter Benjamin argues in Harry Zohn’s translation that translation is not about recreating 132

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a particular use of language, as Nabokov argues, but recreating the effect of a text when he says: “The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original” (76). Also focusing on translatability, Jones argues that “literary multilingualism is translatable, and in such a way that does not necessarily erase its complexity or subversive potential” (28). Jones takes the approach that texts are almost always translatable, but the question of what texts and how certain texts are approached must be kept at the fore. While translating these hybrid texts certainly poses challenges and resists a translation aimed at total equivalency, translators are taking on these projects and finding creative approaches to the task. Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre Tropical, for instance, has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese and Colombian Spanish. Take the opening paragraphs in Portuguese, translated by acclaimed Brazilian writer Natalia Borges Polesso, and Spanish, translated by Juana Silva Puerta, as examples: Buenos días, mi reina. Imigrante criolla falando aquí de Maiamis, de nosso sobrado infestado de formigas. O ar-condicionado quebrado sobre a TV, o sofá florido, La Tata meio bêbada me dirigindo nesta bendita radionovela oferecida para você pela Corporação Tristeza de Mulher. Naquela manhã, quando desfazíamos a última das nossas malas, encontramos o rádio velho da Tata. Então nós duas praticamos nosso mais recente melodrama na sala de estar, enquanto Don Francisco na TV saudava el Pueblo de Miami ¡damas y caballeros!, e a Tata — nessa idade —, para o desespero da Mami e para o meu deleite, ficou louca como uma menininha por causa da voz máscula do apresentador. (7) Good morning, mi reina. Aquí immigrant criolla reportando desde Los Mayamis, desde nuestra casa infestada de hormigas. El aire acondicionado dañado encima del televisor, el sofá de flores, la Tata medio borracha que me dirige en esta sagrada radionovela presentada por Female Sadness Incorporated. Esa mañana, cuando desempacábamos las últimas maletas, encontramos su radio vieja y nos pusimos a ensayar nuestro más reciente melodrama en la sala, mientras Don Francisco, desde la televisión, enviaba un saludo “¡al pueblo de Miami, damas y caballeros!” y Tata —¡a su edad!—, para exasperación de Mami y mi deleite, se volvía loca por su voz masculina. (9) These translations convey key elements of the novel, capturing this playful, melancholic voice as Francisca begins to navigate her life in Miami as a migrant and nodding at the multilingual nature of the text. Both translations also maintain Delgado Lopera’s multilingualism; the Brazilian version does so through the blending of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Colombian version does so by inverting Spanish and English. For the most part, the Portuguese version maintains the parts of the text that were in Spanish in the original version and replaces the English parts with Portuguese. Borges Polesso also includes a glossary and footnotes on terms such as “reina” or “panela” that are used to guide the reader through the less familiar parts of the text, generally those related to Colombian culture. Whereas the U.S. version of the novel weaves in vocabulary specific to both Colombian and queer culture that is intended to make readers outside of those communities slightly uncomfortable—this is a novel that is working to decenter the monolingual English reader—this approach to the Portuguese translation functions to explain the unfamiliar to the reader. The other major deviation this version takes is that it replaces the jarring juxtaposition of Germanic English 133

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and Romance Spanish with two Romance languages, thus increasing the fluidity between languages. While Delgado Lopera was only tangentially involved in the Portuguese translation, they took a very hands-on approach in the Spanish translation, meeting frequently with Silva Puerta and their editor to work through the translation. In this version, Spanish takes over as the dominant language with English sprinkled in to create a different bilingual form. Furthermore, this version makes heavy use of Colombian slang to compensate for the different ways the language politics function in the two versions; in the U.S. version, for instance, the mother and grandmother characters do speak English as it is necessary for the audience, but it would not make sense in the Colombian rendition for these characters to speak English, so their voices are instead filled with slang to create a different kind of linguistic layering. For example, the mother uses the term “culicagada” to rebuke Francisca (103), and many characters frequently use the -ico diminutive, as in “el señor del bigotico” (56). Because it is translated into Colombian Spanish, this version works as a linguistic homecoming for the text, making the Spanish familiar and the English foreign. While these translations do replicate the multilingual nature of the novel, they lose the geographic specificity of the use of Spanish as an outsider language in Miami. The opening chapter of Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena also offers a window into the intricacies of multilingual texts and the challenges they pose to translation. The novel’s opening chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the novel, creating the Caribbean mythos encapsulated by the figure of Sirena Selena that is defined by a poetics of doubling, performance, and desire. The chapter in full reads: Cáscara de coco, contento de jirimilla azul, por los dioses di, azucarada Selena, suculenta sirena de las playas alumbradas. Bajo un spotlight, confiésate, lunática. Tú conoces los deseos desatados por las noches urbanas. Tú eres el recuerdo de remotos orgasmos reducidos a ensayos de recording. Tú y tus siete moños desalmados como un ave selenita, como ave fotoconductora de electrodos insolentes. Eres quien eres, Sirena Selena… y sales de tu luna de papel a cantar canciones viejas de Lucy Favery, de Sylvia Rexach, de la Lupe sibarita, vestida y adorada por los seguidores de tu rastro… (11) Echoing the multilingual showmanship of the opening lines of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres or Fiebre Tropical, this chapter puts the figure of Sirena Selena on stage and marks this character as an object of desire and betrayal. Here, that desire and identity is located simultaneously in the body and the voice, creating a surface-level doubling through the references to the singing and descriptions of the body. In these lines, memory and trauma are contained within a singular body defined by performance, multiplicity, and expansion. The focus on lighting through the “playas alumbradas,” “spotlights,” and “ave photoconductora” creates a narrative stage, a space Santos-Febres argues allows for trans* survival, stating that “El travesti se ubica entonces en el centro del spotlight. … El travesti se disfraza porque si se mostrara tal cual es tan sólo encontraría su aniquilación” [The travesti, then, is located in the middle of the spotlight. … The travesti dresses up because if she were to show herself as she is, she would only find her annihilation] (“Sobre piel” 131). This doubled existence at the heart of trans* identity is further replicated in the language used in this opening chapter, as echoes are created across the lines. In the first sentence, Sirena Selena—the name we know from the title—is divided into “azucarada selena, suculenta sirena de las playas alumbradas” (11). “Lunática” is then echoed at the end of the paragraph with “luna,” and “el recuerdo” is 134

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repeated in the English word “recording,” thus creating a trans-lingual resonance. This wordplay further functions to create the artifice of the performance, thus calling attention to the active labor of construction and creation. Throughout his translation, Stephen Lytle mimics the multilingual nature of this text by inflecting the English version with Spanish, though he often glosses those terms with an English equivalent. His translation, which is not able to maintain the same resonances outlined above, does recreate the repetition and bifurcation in the way he opens the novel. Rather than directly beginning with the English rendering of the text, Lytle first gives the opening line in Spanish and then repeats it in his version, using italics to mark the different languages: “Cáscara de coco, contento de jirimilla azul, por los dioses dí, azucarada Selena… Coconut shell, melancholy and restless, from the gods you came, sweet Selena” (1). It is noteworthy that Santos-Febres’s “contento de jirimilla azul” becomes “melancholy and restless” in translation, as this is a domestication of the Spanish, which makes use of the invented word “jirimilla.” According to Debra Castillo’s footnotes in her edition of the novel, “jirimilla” is “una ‘mala’ pronunciación de ‘jiribilla’. Término musical afroantillano. Se usa para decir que alguien ‘llevaba la música por dentro’ o ‘tenía algo por dentro/una intranquilidad de algún tipo’” [‘Jirimilla’ is a ‘bad’ pronunciation of ‘jiribilla.’ Afro-Antillean musical term. It is used to say someone ‘carried the music from within’ or ‘had something within them/a volatility of some sort’] (2). Lytle’s “melancholy and restless” pales, then, in comparison to this deeply oral and culturally specific term, while also avoiding the ambiguity of “contento.” By including both Spanish and English, however, he at least signals the Spanish wordplay and specificity while also opening his version of the text to the possibilities of the performance of multilingualism that characterizes much of the novel. The inclusion of the Spanish line, then, is a way of getting around its resistance to translation. In the rest of this opening chapter, Lytle continues to include Spanish words in line with the source text: “Bajo un spotlight, confiésate, lunática” becomes “beneath the spotlight, lunática” (1). This mixing and replication reinforce that linguistic liminality of Puerto Rico and is a way for Lytle to work around the regionally specific language used to set the novel in Puerto Rico. In her analysis of the place of Puerto Rican literature in academic disciplines, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel considers how the use of a specific, hybrid vernacular—like the kind Santos-Febres uses—poses challenges to translation. For her, Latino cultural productions, such as texts written by Esmeralda Santiago, make us realize that linguistic hesitation or untranslatability cannot be understood as incompetence or lack of control over communicative skills, but quite to the contrary, as a discursive strategy that forces us as readers to reconsider our basic notions about the relationship of language and cultural identity. (75) For Martínez-San Miguel, then, the resistance to translation in texts like Sirena Selena vestida de pena or Fiebre Tropical is essential to conceptualizing cultural identity and difference precisely because they make evident where equivalence is unattainable. This does not mean, however, that translation is impossible.

Conclusion This discussion has endeavored to show the importance of making literary space for multilingual writing, discuss some of the ways that translation is a part of creating that multilingual 135

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literary voice, and consider the challenges to translating that multiplicity. Untranslatability, especially when working with and against linguistic hierarchies that are reinforced by racially driven systems, does not mean failure. While translation does allow for the greater circulation of texts, the resistance to translation is essential to recognizing cultural difference and identity.

Works Cited Acevedo, Elizabeth. The Poet X. E-book. HarperCollins Publishers, 2018. Aguilar Gil, Yásnaya Elena. Ää: Manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística, edited by Ana Aguilar Guevara, Julia Bravo Varela, Gustavo Ogarrio Badillo, and Valentina Quaresma Rodríguez. Almadía, 2020. Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. Aunt Lute Books, [1987] 2012. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013. Barokka, Khairani. “The Case Against Italicizing ‘Foreign’ Words.” Catapult, 11 Feb. 2020, https:// catapult.co/stories/column-the-case-against-italicizing-foreign-words-khairani-barokka. Accessed 9 Feb. 2021. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, 1968. Boullosa, Carmen. La novela perfecta. Alfaguara, 2006. Ceh Moo, Marisol. X-Teya, u puks’ik’ al koolel/Teya, un corazón de mujer. Consejo Nacional para la cultura y las Artes, 2008. Choi, Don Mee. Translation Is a Mode=Translation Is an Anti-neocolonial Mode. Ugly Duckling Press, 2020. Cleary, Heather. The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Delgado Lopera, Juliana. Fiebre Tropical. Feminist Press, 2020. ———. Febre tropical. Translated by Natalia Borges Polesso. Editora Instante, 2021. Delgado Lopera, Juli. Fiebre Tropical. Translated by Juana Silva Puerta. Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2021. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford University Press, 1996. Emmerich, Karen. Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Identity in the Americas: New Directions in Translation Theory. Routledge, 2008. Ghosh, Amitav. “Speaking of Babel: The Risks and Rewards of Writing about Polyglot Societies.” Comparative Literature, vol. 72, no. 3, 2020, pp. 283–298. Gonzales, Laura. Sites of Translation: What Multilinguals Can Teach Us About Digital Writing and Rhetoric. University of Michigan Press, 2018. Gurba, Myriam. Mean. Coffee House Press, 2017. Hansen Esplin, Marlene. “Self-Translation and Accommodation: Strategies of Multilingualism in Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza’ and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s ‘Puppet.’” Melus, vol. 41, no. 2, Summer, 2016, pp. 176–201. Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World. Translated by Lisa Dillman, and Other Stories, 2015. ———. “Eight Questions for Yuri Herrera: Interview by Tristan Foster.” 3:AM Magazine, 6 July 2016, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eight-questions-for-yuri-herrera/. Accessed 24 July 2017. Hiddleston, Jane and Wen-chin Ouyang. “Introduction: Multilingual Literature as World Literature.” Multilingual Literature as World Literatures, edited by Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 1–10. Jones, Ellen. Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas. Columbia University Press, 2021. ———. “The Queer, Latinx Desire of Fiebre Tropical.” Jezebel, 3 Apr. 2020, https://jezebel.com/thequeer-latinx-desire-of-fiebre-tropical-1842563174. Accessed 25 May 2021. “Juli Delgado Lopera and Myriam Gurba in Conversation.” YouTube, uploaded by San Francisco Public Library, 22 July 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAXjUsfe4SE. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. “Boricua (Between) Borders: On the Possibility of Translating Bilingual Narratives.” Spanglish, edited by Ilan Stavans. Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 72–87. 136

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Nabokov, Vladimir. “Problems of Translation: ‘Onegin’ in English.” The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti. Routledge, 2000, pp. 115–127. Obejas, Achy. Boomerang/Bumerán. Beacon Press, 2021. Ojeda, Mónica. Mandíbula. Candaya, 2018. Paz, Octavio. “Translation: Literature and Letters.” Translated by Irene del Corral. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 152–162. “The Poetry of Everyday Speech | Juliana Delgado | TedxSoMa.” YouTube, uploaded by Tedx Talks, 4 Feb. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N2vbUjQmpM. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Sociología de la imagen: Miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2015. Rivera Garza, Cristina. “On Alert: Writing in Spanish in the United States Today.” Translated by Sarah Booker. The Restless Dead: Necrowriting & Disappropriation. Translated by Robin Myers. Vanderbilt University Press, 2020. Salas Rivera, Raquel. “Translator’s Note.” Waxwing Literary Magazine, no. X, Fall, 2016, http://waxwingmag.org/items/issue10/49_Salas-Rivera-A-Note-on-Translation.php#top. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021. Sánchez, Rosaura. “Our Linguistic and Social Context.” Spanglish, edited by Ilan Stavans. Greenwood Press, 2008, pp. 3–41. Santos-Febres, Mayra. Sirena Selena. Translated by Stephen Lytle. Picador, 2000. ———. Sobre piel y papel. Ediciones Callejón, 2005. ———. Sirena Selena vestida de pena. Edited by Debra Castillo. Stockcero, 2008. ———. Sirena Selena vestida de pena. Punto de Lectura, 2009. Stavans, Ilan. “‘El Little Príncipe’—Translating Saint-Exupéry’s Classic into Spanglish.” Words Without Borders Daily, 25 Jan. 2017, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/el-little-­ principe-translating-saint-exuperys-classic-into-spanglish. Accessed 19 May 2021. Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. Rayo, 2003. Timmer Harvey, Sarah. “An Interview with Raquel Salas Rivera.” Asymptote Journal, Oct. 2019, https://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-raquel-salas-rivera/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021. Velasco, Xavier. Diablo guardián. Debolsillo, [2003] 2016. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press, 2012.

Further Readings Hiddleston, Jane and Wen-chin Ouyang, editors. Multilingual Literature as World Literatures. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. A new approach to theorizing world literature that engages directly with multilingualism. Jones, Ellen. Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas. Columbia University Press, 2021. An extended discussion of the relationship between multilingual writing and translation. Sánchez, Marta E. A Translational Turn: Latinx Literature into the Mainstream. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. An in-depth study of the translation into Spanish and English of Latinx literature with a focus on the recent trend to translate this literature from English to Spanish. Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. Rayo, 2003. An exploration and initial codification of Spanglish as a distinct language.

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8 Approaching Literary Self-­ Translation in the United States and Latin America Marlene Hansen Esplin

Introduction In the broadest sense, all forms of writing and speaking, every utterance, intonation, gesture, or silence, can be considered “translation.” As George Steiner posits in his polemic but still prescient After Babel, “translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, […]. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate” (1998: xii). Distinguishing how and when translation departs from general communication or from literary creation, editing, or translation proper is a seemingly unending pursuit, as is attempting to demarcate the borders between the fluid “self ” and the equally evasive “other.” In his generative “Borges and I,” an elusive “Borges” concedes that “It’s Borges, the other one, that things happen to” (“Borges and I” 324, tr. Hurley). Here, the speaker acknowledges the distance or slippage between himself and the other as himself, as well as the fact that both instantiations of Borges will eventually cede ownership of their words to the domain of language: I willingly admit that he has written a number of sound pages, but those pages will not save me, perhaps because the good in them no longer belongs to any individual, not even to that other man, but rather to language itself, or to tradition. (“Borges and I” 324, tr. Hurley) The boundaries between Borges the man and Borges the projected author are porous, as are the lines between language and any version of Borges and the borders between the purported languages, dialects, and sociolects that pertain to any one individual. Self-translation operates in the many elisions between the self and the other (or the self as the other), and in the fissures between these instances of the self and an all-encompassing language. To further complicate the matter, the contours of life and language are not bound by national imaginaries, nor are they necessarily governed by the intrinsic characteristics of any given grammar or by likely legacies of heritage and culture. As multilingual author, writer, and critic Ilan Stavans describes, 138

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It is wrong to think that polyglots inhabit several alternative universes, each defined by a different tongue. In truth, they live only one life, just like everyone else—except that they have the advantage of looking at it through different linguistic lenses. (2018: 140) Likewise, Puerto Rican-born diasporic author Esmeralda Santiago rebuffs the idea that her languages (English and Spanish) are neatly compartmentalized or unnaturally conjoined. She deadpans: “When I live in both languages at the same time, it’s like breathing” (Gleibermann 2018). In the same vein, Cuban-American writer, poet, and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat underlines the fluid permutations of language kinship: “Mother tongues are forked and folded into father and sister tongues, spouse and lover tongues, friend and enemy tongues. Particularly among bilinguals, language kinship is not restricted to the maternal” (2003: 3). As a case in point, contemporary U.S.-based Mexican author Valeria Luiselli recalls speaking primarily English in school during her international upbringing and returning home to speak a belabored Spanish with “holes” in it. As she relates: The Spanish I spoke belonged to slow, dispassionate conversations around the family breakfast table. The Spanish spoken by people in the street was a living language, rapid and vibrant, and I found it impossible to get my teeth into it. I stuttered, I trembled when I spoke, suddenly went gravely silent in the middle of a sentence. My language was full of holes. (Luiselli and MacSweeney 2014: 12) The forking, folding, and filling in that these authors describe best approximate the event and processes of self-translation. While literary self-translation is always already interwoven with the processes of general communication, literary creation, and interlingual translation (the movement from one recognized national language into another), it also distinguishes itself as an event attuned to limits of communication and toward the fictions of nationalism, as well as to the confines of the global literary marketplace. Authors who translate their own texts, and, in the process, some version of themselves, expose material dimensions of the literary marketplace, foreground the national and linguistic ambivalences that permeate their language negotiations, and resist the sanctification of national authors and “original” texts. Thus, self-translation is a more overt display of the shifts in register, idiolect, or sociolect that are at play for all authors. As Steven Kellman asserts in his comprehensive study of multi- or translingual writers from a variety of national traditions, “neither language nor the relationship between languages is ever static for an individual speaker. In a sense, every speaker is translingual, moving with if not through languages” (2000: 4). Against this backdrop, we might view self-translation as simply a performative or willful display of authorship, in which authors showcase their virtuosity across distinct national languages and literary traditions. However, the stakes are much higher, especially in contexts of historical and social inequity and states of precarity. In the first place, self-translators call for more capacious notions of authorship and language and actively destabilize the tired but still extant hierarchy of a primary “original” text and a secondary “translation.” Authors who write and publish in multiple languages (either by their own accord or in collaboration with other writers, translators, and editors) present two or more disparate and authoritative originals that disrupt canons drawn solely according to lines of language or nation and unsettle Romantic notions of solitary or ex nihilo creation. Likewise, multilingual authors who translate on the pages of their texts, by codeswitching, employing calques, or undertaking strategies of non-translation, challenge monolingual publishing 139

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norms and foreground the linguistic and, often, ethnic diversity of the fictional and actual worlds represented in their texts. We need new terms and categories to talk about pioneering and contemporary U.S. and Latin American authors and rule-breakers such as Rosario Ferré, ­Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Ariel Dorfman, Gloria Anzaldúa, ­Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, Rolando Hinojosa, María Luisa Bombal, Roberto Bolaño, Mónica de la Torre, Daniel Alarcón, Valeria Luiselli, Mario Bellatin, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, and Cristina Rivera Garza, who defy national, linguistic, and/or generic categorizations. As this limited and varied catalogue of U.S. and Latin American writers suggests, self-translation is a generative and multi-directional practice that both refutes and draws light on cross-cultural divides, whether North–South, South–North, North–North, South–South, or otherwise. In the case of writers positioned in the global south or in peripheral spaces amid global centers, self-translation provides a way of resisting (or at times giving into) what Graham Huggan describes as the “postcolonial exotic” or “the global commodification of cultural difference” (2001: vii). As Huggan argues, despite much lip service to the contrary, postcolonial writers and scholars are often implicated in the global power systems that they critique or counter, especially when these systems involve centering a global English. He posits: it seems worth questioning the neo-imperialist implications of a postcolonial literary/ critical industry centred on, and largely catering to, the West. English is, almost exclusively, the language of this critical industry, reinforcing the view that postcolonialism is a discourse of translation, rerouting cultural products regarded as emanating from the periphery toward audiences who see themselves as coming from the centre. (2001: 4) Likewise, contemporary cultural theorist and Hispanist Ignacio Sánchez Prado draws attention to the English-dominated fields of comparative and transnational literature and to the rather cursory treatment of non-Anglophone writers within their ranks: it is not at all uncommon for Hispanophone authors to be confined to one-dimensional roles in the larger cartographies of transnational literature as established by the field. Paradoxically […] there are perhaps more scholarly books on Mexican literature written in English than actual works of literature translated into the language. (2018: 7) Self-translators working both in English and another national language are best positioned to combat Anglo-centrism in the realms of publishing, translation, and academia and to represent some of the complexities that are often denied extra-national or multi-ethnic writers. As Gayatri Spivak argues: “I think it necessary for people in the Third World translation trade now to accept that the wheel has come around, that the genuinely bilingual postcolonial now has a bit of an advantage” (2012: 319). Spivak sees these bilingual writers as better able to identify and account for nuance in institutions that may flatten alterity or translate “rhetoricity” into an anodyne global English: In my view, the translator from a Third World language should be sufficiently in touch with what is going on in literary production in that language to be capable of distinguishing between good and bad writing by women, resistant and conformist writing by women. (2012: 313, 319) 140

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As inveterate revisers, inclined to rewrite their words across multiple languages and literary traditions, self-translators hailing from peripheral or border spaces are perhaps the most and least qualified to represent, disavow, or show deference to their postcolonial projects. Moreover, in the context of the United States and Latin America in the twentiethand twenty-first centuries, self-translation provides both a crucial opportunity for self-­ representation and an apt means of approaching narratives of immigration, exile, and displacement. As Gabriel García Márquez proclaimed in his 1982 Nobel Lecture: “The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway” (1982). In retrospect, his projections of a hypothetical country of just more than 4 million Latin American exiles, refugees, and immigrants seem wildly conservative. While there is no imperative for self-­t ranslators and/or multilingual authors to reenact personal or collective trauma, their translation negotiations often accompany stories of crossing, relocating, adapting, assimilating, resisting, or brokering for legal or social status. As Steven Kellman posits: “Much translingual writing—like the growing body of work produced in German by newcomers from Turkey and other parts of the Levant that has been called Gastarbeiterlieratur (guestworker literature)—is the literature of immigration” (2000: 17). Many Latin American or U.S. Latinx writers recur to strategies of translation (or non-translation) to account for national and linguistic ambivalences across their works, to clear space for more expansive notions of authorial and textual identity, and to resist monolingual portrayals of multilingual peoples, places, and experiences. In what follows, this chapter strives to give substance to these claims about self-­ translation by delving into the circumlocutions of a number of multi-, pluri-, trans-, or bilingual authors in a contemporary U.S. and Latin American context. Various instances of self-­t ranslation in the United States and Latin America are indexed here—including self-­ writing, intralingual self-translation, interlingual self-translation, and collaborative translation ­projects—to highlight a small swath of the varied multilingual fabric of the assorted countries, regions, and communities that comprise the Americas and to underline vital contributions of Latin American and U.S. Latino writers to ongoing conversations in translation studies. Like the venerable Borges, multilingual writers, such as Octavio Paz, Sergio Pitol, Ariel Dorfman, Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Rolando Hinojosa, Junot Díaz, Cristina Rivera Garza, Valeria Luiselli, and Mónica de la Torre blur the lines between theory and praxis and seem wholly taken up with problems of translation and how they intersect with literature and its “modest mystery” (Borges, “The Homeric Versions” 15, tr. Eliot Weinberger). While this chapter emphasizes the rich interplay between English and Spanish or Spanish and English in a number of these writers’ works, it acknowledges the many other established and hybrid or “tropicalized” (Aparicio 1997: 1) languages that have cultural strongholds across the Americas, including hundreds of indigenous languages. “Latin” America is, of course, an imaginary that overwrites indigenous, African, and other extra-national voices—and the lack of engagement with these marginalized voices and their languages in translation studies is a critical lacuna in which the author of this chapter notes her complicity. Likewise, despite ardent English-only sentiment from some factions, what is now the United States has always been a multilingual expanse—and the convergences and divergences between English and Spanish speak to any number of language fault lines. Through their various strategies of self-translation, contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American writers foreground national and linguistic ambivalences that are latent in any nation-state and call for more expansive notions of U.S. and Latin American identity. 141

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Self-Writing In the first place, self-translation is everywhere entangled with self-writing. The tradition of the multilingual bildungsroman has become a kind of rite of passage in U.S.-Latina/o/x literature, and the Latin American literary tradition (however we define it) boasts of countless semi-autobiographical protagonists and unreliable narrators inclined toward doubling the self and blurring the lines between originality and reproduction. In the former camp, we could include, for starters, pioneering texts, such as José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, Tomás Rivera’s inimitable Y no se lo tragó la tierra, Gloria Anzaldúa’s landmark Borderlands/La Frontera, Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street, Richard Rodriguez’s polarizing but enduring Hunger of Memory, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, and her Cuando era Puertorriqueña (published almost simultaneously), and critically acclaimed but somewhat less widely read semi-autobiographical novels such as Who Would Have Thought It? by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, George Washington Gómez by Américo Paredes, Puppet by Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, and Trini by Estela Portillo Trambley. To this cadre of coming-of-age texts, we can pair memoirs, essays, and poetry collections explicitly centered on the intersections of language and identity, including Pérez Firmat’s Bilingual Blues, Dorfman’s Heading North, Looking South, and his Rumbo al Sur, Deseando el Norte (both published in 1998), Stavan’s Borrowed Words, Ferre’s Language Duel/Duelo del Lenguaje, María Lugones’s “Hablando cara a cara/ Speaking Face to Face,” and Tato Laviera’s AmeRícan. Each of these works takes up problems of language and self-translation and involves readers in their linguistic and cross-cultural negotiations. As Pérez Firmat writes in a characteristically playful passage from Bilingual Blues: “Soy un ajiaco de contradicciones,/un puré de impurezas/a little square from Rubik’s Cuba/ que nadie nunca acoplará./ (Cha-cha-chá)” [I am a stew of contradictions,/a puree of impurities/a little square from Rubik’s Cuba/that no one will ever solve./ (Cha-cha-chá)] (2003: 28).1 For some of these authors, the multilingual topology of their work is merely implied via context, for others, the language contradictions play out across distinct Spanish and English versions of their texts, and for many others, the English-and-Spanish or Spanish-and-English interplay is a prominent feature of the prose and dialogue. Several more recent and loosely autobiographical projects modernize and play with tropes of the multilingual bildungsroman, for example: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Michele Serros’s How to Be a Chicana Role Model, Richard Blanco’s The Prince of Los Cocuyos, Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, Juli Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre Tropical, and Francisco Goldman’s Monkey Boy. Here, we could also include recent prose-poetry collections such as Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem and Mónica de la Torre’s Repetition Nineteen, the multilingual performance art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Pocha Nostra, and, if we extend to the realm of television, the recent self-aware series like Jane the Virgin and Gentefied. These projects are playful and self-reflexive, and they are also keenly cognizant of and eager to move away from Chicano and Latino predecessors, particularly on matters of gender and sexuality, ethnicity, and urban sensibility. As Lyn Di Iorio argues about Angie Cruz’s Dominicana and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Taína, “Today, Latinx writers are writing their own versions of the bildungsroman, but with a twist” (Di Iorio 2020). While disparate and not necessarily representative of the vast and dynamic field of Latino literature, these projects each engage language tensions/fusions as a driving force. Building on Debra Castillo’s discussion of “new Latino” (2005: 8) bilingual writers, Francisco Laguna-Correa coins the term “new Latino American” (2018: 115) to describe U.S.based Latin American authors like Luiselli, Yuri Herrera, Claudia Salazar Jiménez, and Jack 142

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Martínez Arias who have fewer affinities with the “working-class migratory experiences” of early Chicano and Latino texts and more ties to U.S. universities and “upper-middle-class intellectual and cosmopolitan experiences” (2018: 117). Laguna-Correa argues that these “Latino American authors have paved an initial stage of postnational identity reformulation where both bilingualism and deterritorialization make visible the geopolitics of labor and knowledge from a transnational Latino American perspective” (2018: 116). The works of authors like Luiselli, Herrera, or Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexican writer and distinguished chair of the first U.S.-based PhD program for Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston) are difficult to locate or classify because of the authors’ at-homeness in the U.S. academy and their border or transnational poetics that defy national categorization. Their translation strategies, whether intra- or interlingual, are key to formulating this, arguably, post-nationalist vantage point. As Rivera Garza explains in a video for the MacArthur foundation following the receipt of her “genius” award: “I like to explore the tension, the friction between English and Spanish in order to find the exact words to convey and share an experience that was deeply felt at a specific point in time” (2021). Herrera and Rivera Garza write primarily in Spanish, while Luiselli writes in both Spanish and English, often in close collaboration with her translators into either language. These authors’ transnational projects build on earlier Latin American literary works attuned toward cosmopolitanism and toward expanding their national literary idioms. As Ignacio Sánchez Prado argues about the meteoric rise of Luiselli: [W]e must be attentive to the ways in which Luiselli’s work has emerged from an ecosystem of Mexican literature that remains invisible to English-language readers and critics. Her success is among the latest iterations of large-scale developments, both in literary institutions and fiction aesthetics, that have been brewing since the late 1960s. (...) it is impossible to account for Luiselli’s achievements without understanding its conditions of possibility within Mexican literature. (2018: 4) Following Sánchez Prado, it is important not to view these authors as multilingual exceptions among a sea of monolingual and regionally centered Latin American contemporaries, but rather as writers who exemplify global and polyglot tensions already at work in various Latin American contexts. Latin American literary predecessors from the late nineteenth-century onward attest to “the conditions of possibility” that have cleared space for contemporary transnational and/or self-translating writers both north and south of the U.S.-Mexican border. The not-­scalable Latin American literary scene boasts any number of multilingual and globally inclined writers, apart from English-translation favorite Roberto Bolaño. A preliminary list could include: turn-of-the-century translations and political commentary of pan-Americanist and poet José Martí; the Francophone gestures of the modernistas; the cosmopolitan manifestos and “cannibalistic” projects of literary and art collectives, such as Martín Fierro, Amauta, and Brazil’s Anthrophagists; the counter-cultural and urban thematics of Mexico’s “onda” writers; theorizations of transculturación by Fernando Ortiz and Ángel Rama or “la hibridez” by Néstor García Canclini the city-centered and male-dominated “Crack” and “McOndo” movements; the transnational and hard-to-classify corpuses of writers, such as Mexico’s Carmen Boullosa, Brazil’s Clarice Lispector, and Argentina’s Luisa Valenzuela; Portunhol works by Wilson Bueno and Fabián Severo; the lesser-known Mexican border novels of Rosina Conde and Luis Humberto Crosswaith; and the very-literary writings, translations, 143

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and critical writings of Mexican polyglot and diplomat Sergio Pitol. This chapter does not aspire to establish a chronology so much as a series of precedents for literary experimentation, multilingual play, and different ways of approaching tensions of globalization and the related specters of the United States, English, and the prospect of translation into the global literary marketplace. As Alberto Fuguet and Edmundo Paz Soldán ask in their anthology Se habla español: Voces latinas en USA, which includes a number of writers based in Latin America, “¿puede alguien hoy—de verdad, sin posar—no tener nada que ver con USA? Quizás pueda uno quererlo, pero es poco menos que imposible lograrlo. Estados Unidos—let’s face it—está en todas partes” [Can anyone today—truthfully, without posturing—not have anything to do with the USA? Perhaps someone can want not to, but it’s nearly impossible to do so. The United States—let’s face it—is everywhere] (2000: 14). Fuguet and Paz Soldán depict the United States both as a place of inspiration, dreams, and a fount of popular culture—and also as a source of nightmares, an imperial force that has infused institutions in any national context (2000: 14–15). Contemporary multilingual authors, such as those listed above reiterate how their lives, predilections, and creative decisions do not adhere to national literary canons or languages. They freely draw from precursors and influences the world over, and their hard-to-locate projects expand stubbornly policed literary frontiers, whether local, national, or global, at a time when borders governing the transmission of information, money, and resources (not to mention disease!) are becoming more and more fluid. Rebecca Walkowitz cites Bolaño as a primary example of an author whose texts are “born translated,” in that they are seemingly “written for translation” and invoke translation both as “a condition of their production” and as a prominent trope (2015: 3–4). She maintains that because his Spanish-language texts frequently recur to the theme of translation and refuse the idea of a national or a “unique regional audience” through a Spanish that is “not reducible” to Chile, Mexico, or Spain, we can claim Bolaño as a multilingual author who preemptively anticipates or invites the event of translation (2015: 18, 17). While Walkowitz succeeds in elucidating a plausible canon of seemingly nation-less texts, texts that “start as world literature,” we can also read Bolaño as participating in a more local conversation, in the longstanding series of explorations around translation and originality and commodification and reproduction by Latin American authors (2015: 2). In his La condición traductora, Martín Gaspar examines works that are “saturated” with the practice of translation, including projects by Argentina’s Alan Pauls, Peru and Mexico’s Mario Bellatin, and Brazil’s Chico Buarque and João Gilberto Noll (2014: 12). Likewise, in their recent monographs, Heather Cleary and Rosemary Arrojo extend the discussion of the so-called “fictional turn” in Latin American literary translation studies, in which polyglot writers in the wake of Borges’s “Pierre Menard” feature translators and interpreters as protagonists, foils, and interlocutors. Both Cleary and Arrojo examine implications of the fictional translator in works by Borges and Julio Cortázar, and Cleary examines a number of contemporary works by well-known and emerging national writers, including Ricardo Piglia, César Aira, Rodolfo Walsh, Salvador Benesdra, Pablo De Santis, and Pedro Mairal from Argentina; Luís Fernando Verissimo, Chico Buarque, and Moacyr Scilar from Brazil; and Valeria Luiselli and Cristina Rivera Garza from a Mexican or U.S.-Mexican context. Translators and/or multinational figures in their own right, these writers foreground translation by giving translators time in the limelight, whether as detectives, intermediaries, lovers, or hapless academics, and by weaving specific translation problems, and questions into the plot. As Cleary argues: Ultimately, if the translator-as-practitioner is subject to both the vertical and horizontal structures that comprise the dynamics of global cultural exchange, the 144

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translator-as-­protagonist offers a means of commenting upon and even subverting these structures from within the text, positing alternative models of creativity grounded in iteration and play rather than chafingly proper notions of author and authoritative original. (2021: 15) While not all of these translator-protagonists can be described as semi-autobiographical, they are a ready vehicle through which their authors can explore recurrent intersections of translation, identity, and the self, as well as the translator’s role in bridging and, sometimes, effacing crucial differences.

Intralingual Translation Instead of writing texts that appear primed for translation or refuse a “unique regional audience” (Walkowitz 2015: 18), a number of self-translators take just the opposite tack. In their movement between Spanish, English, or some combination of both, these writers espouse an overtly multilingual or “intralingual” praxis that resists translation and is often hyper-attuned to a particular place and a local vernacular. These authors compel readers to pass through their numerous translations and creative assemblies of one or more national languages, whether on the sentence level or on facing pages. As author, translator, and theorist Debra Castillo argues, these multilingual texts: [D]efy translation into either of their constituent parts in a particularly strong sense, for to translate such performative utterances into either Spanish or English would be to distort them into meaninglessness, to subject them to a kind of linguistic assimilation and erasure. Such translations could speak to the reader only in a very limited sense, since they would inextricably dislocate the doubleness of the language into an unacceptable version of the monolinguism against which these writers are defining their entire poetics. (2005: 12) Castillo’s projections about the inevitable “dislocations” of translation echo French translation theorist Antoine Berman’s fairly anguished claims about translation’s violence. Berman bemoans the “serious injury” that is the “effacement of vernaculars” and argues that because “a vernacular clings tightly to its soil and completely resists any direct translating into another vernacular” (2012: 250), the interlingual translator’s choice to merely substitute another foreign vernacular can easily go awry. He cautions that: “An exoticization that turns the foreign from abroad into the foreign at home winds up merely ridiculing the original” (2012: 250). Yet, while patently bilingual projects such as Ana Lydia Vega’s “Pollito Chicken,” Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Cota-Cárdena’s Puppet, Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing!, Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas, Tato Laviera’s “Spanglish,” Fabián Severo’s Noite du Norte [Night in the North], or Stavan’s partial rendering of the Quixote into Spanglish present formidable stumbling blocks for translators and privilege a bilingual reader, they also invite and draw attention to creative translation. As Brian Lennon argues, “In the strong bilingual or plurilingual text, [...] translation is already, and in advance, denied—but, also, in a way, already performed” (2010: 74). Even the most “strong” or aggressively bilingual projects employ a variety of translation strategies and involve readers in their linguistic and cross-cultural negotiations. Moreover, as I argue in an article about the contrasting intralingual translation strategies of pioneering Chicana writers Anzaldúa and Cota-Cárdenas, even texts that are ostensibly 145

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forbidding are often more conciliatory than not (Esplin 2016: 179–181). While Anzaldúa includes a number of untranslated and potentially alienating passages in Borderlands/La Frontera, particularly in the poetry section at the end of this book, she also adopts a number of compensatory translation strategies to accommodate the monolingual English reader. Consider one such representative passage: En boca cerrada no entran moscas. “Flies don’t enter a closed mouth” is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don’t answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back to one’s mother and father. I remember one of the sins I’d recite to the priest in the confession box the few times I went to confession: talking back to my mother, hablar pa’ trás, repelar. Hocicona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying talks are all signs of being mal criada. In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women—I’ve never heard them applied to men. (2007: 76) This passage is immediately preceded or framed by an untranslated, three-line poem or epigraph in Spanish; however the epigraph—“Ahogadas, escupimos el oscuro./Peleando con nuestra propia sombra/el silencio nos sepulta” (2007: 76)—fulfills a mostly paratextual role. The bulk of the narrative in this passage remains accessible for the English reader—either by side-by-side translation (the two versions of the flies adage); definition (Ser habladora was to be…); side-by-side translation (Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls); use of a cognate (respeto/respect); side-by-side translation (talking back to my mother, hablar pa’ tras, repelar); paraphrase (the catalog following Hocicona, repelona, chismosa); and repetition (mal criada has been translated earlier in the paragraph). Moreover, all Spanish words are italicized, and Anzaldúa adds a summary statement at the end of the paragraph reiterating the “derogatory” and gendered valences of the Spanish words in the previous sentence. She takes on a pedagogical role as translator, guiding as much as she pushes away the monolingual English reader. In these teaching moments, her narrative falls in line with what Lennon, following Alice Kaplan and others, describes as the “language learning” or “language memoir,” a sophisticated since-the-twentieth-century genre of autobiography in which the narrative subject tries to reconcile multiple selves, resists “the false universal subject of Bildung,” and tests “reflective structures of ethnic, national, or class identification” (Lennon 2010: 17, 126). By frequently translating for the reader of only English, Anzaldúa both involves the reader in her complex cultural and linguistic negotiations and formally softens aggressive discursive gestures toward the Anglo-reader, for instance: “But we Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture—to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step” (2007: 20). She balances any off-putting statements toward the monolingual reader by employing a variety of overt and subtle translation strategies. Through the collected poems in her Repetition Nineteen, contemporary Mexican-born poet, self-translator, and theorist Mónica de la Torre explicitly examines or makes light of the translations and/or self-translations that are everywhere on display in her book. The poetic speaker ponders on discontinuous repetition; on cognates and “false friends”; on deviance; on a chance encounter in an airport with someone who shares her name but leads a fairly dissimilar life; on mimesis; on homophony; on metafiction and the Quixote; on “productive ambiguity;” on “refraction;” on the plurilingualism of a city space; and, throughout the

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collection, she assembles at least twenty-five Spanish and English or Spanish-and-English versions of a poem, the appropriately titled “Equivalencias” (2020: 7, 10, 14, 23–26, 110, 143). Translation is the thread that spins around and through each of these poetic variations on a theme. In the third section of the book, de la Torre provides a “Translation Key” to the dissimilar versions of the poem, in which she prefaces each “translation” with an arrestingly matter-of-fact description, including: “T1: Embedded translation;” “T3: Self-­ translation informed by journal entries from 1996, the original poem’s year of composition;” “T4: Early Google Translate version from 2012;” “T9: Google Translate version from Spanish to Japanese to English, 2018, with occasional contributions from Merriam Webster;” “T16: Unedited version produced by iPhone’s autocorrect function upon trying to text the poem via SMS;” “T18: Deliberate mistranslation of polysemic terms in T17;” and “T24: Anagrammatic translation permutating all of the letters in an English version of the original into Spanish-language words, and its corresponding translation into English” (2020: 70–73). In this absurd and playfully transparent catalog, she connects the processes of composition, translation, and rewriting and emphasizes the never-simple creation and transfer of meaning in a twenty-first-century, tech-inflected context. As reviewer Christian Hawkey indicates, de la Torre “allows the many-chambered heart of translatory practices to reroute the detritus of techno-nationalism, monolingualism, fixed origins, and originals” (back cover). She revels in multiplicity and ambiguity and involves the reader in the creative opportunities born of both translation and mistranslation.

Interlingual Translation In her unapologetically multilingual Repetition Nineteen, de la Torre effectively blurs the distinction between intralingual and interlingual self-translation, i.e., translation within the signs of a single language or individual text and translation between two languages or versions of a particular text. Through the competing and authorized versions of her short poem, she enacts within the confines of her physical text the doubleness or multiplicity that characterizes the separate but contingent projects of bilingual writers who publish distinct versions of their texts in Spanish and English, or vice versa. Like these authors, she dispels the fiction of unchanging authorial intent or the thought that “only in the case of self-­t ranslation the problem of inferring what the author’s intentions could have been when writing a poem would be null, and that choosing which elements not to sacrifice is easier” (2020: 77). Rather, as de la Torre insinuates, the moment of composition is time-stamped, and the words on the page emerge from the dance between the chain of associations awakened by language in a particular moment and the hard-to-get-at subconscious. While claiming that for her “the resonances of both languages are equally loud,” de la Torre poses the deterministic or Whorfian question: “if those initial associations were the result of wordplay, […] wouldn’t the poet-translator have to suppress new ones triggered by the words in the target language, lest they pull the poem in a direction entirely different from the original?” (2020: 77). Presumably, de la Torre answers this question by involving and guiding the reader through the linguistically dissimilar and temporally distant versions of her poem. Her compulsion to rewrite attests to both the elusiveness of intention and the pressures born of temporal and linguistic displacement. De la Torre joins the ranks of a number of seemingly “unnatural” writers who publish in multiple national languages. As German philosopher and translation theorist Friedrich Schleiermacher muses:

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For let us consider those extraordinary men such as Nature is in the habit sometimes of producing, as if to show herself able to destroy even the barriers of national particularity in individual cases, men who feel such natural affinity to a foreign state of being that they immerse themselves, in both their lives and in their thoughts, in a foreign language and its works, and as they occupy themselves entirely with a foreign world, they allow their native world and their native tongue to become quite foreign to them; or else those other men who are destined to represent the power of speech in all its glory and for whom all the languages they can somehow acquire are equally serviceable and suit them as if made for them: these men stand upon a point at which the value of translation approaches zero. (2012: 50) Schleiermacher seems somewhat taken aback at the super-human figures so comfortable in the linguistic trappings of another countryman and, from his vantage point amid emerging German nationalism in the early 1800s, does not see the appeal of divided national loyalties, hyphenated identities, or hybrid poetics. Twentieth- and twenty-first century U.S. and Latin American writers, such as Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré, Chilean-­A rgentineU.S. writer Ariel Dorfman, Cuban exilic-authors Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Calvert ­Casey, Mapuche-Chilean author Elicura Chihuailaf, Brazilian writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro, Mexican-American writer Rolando Hinojosa, and, in a contemporary context, U.S.-based ­Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, U.S.-Mexican Jewish author Ilan Stavans, and Puerto R ­ ican writer Raquel Salas Rivera each capitalize on tensions of foreignness and liminality both in and between their works by authorizing distinct versions of their works in different languages. For these writers, self-translation affords an opportunity for revision, reinvention, and a means of approaching the linguistic parameters of life events, such as exile, migration, and living in a border space or in a seemingly extra-national community. By lending their namesake to two or more contingent and often competing versions of their works, these authors both formally and discursively contest national literary histories and destabilize notions of authorship and “originality.” They insinuate a meta-text and language outside the individual versions of their texts and underline the need for new terms and categories to account for the combinative whole of their unruly literary corpuses. Moreover, through their typically strong or writerly revisions of their texts, these authors resist expectations of an “invisible” translation praxis (Venuti 2008: 1) and illustrate the abundant intersections between translation and editing. As Stavans maintains, “In self-­t ranslation [...] there is an unavoidable temptation—indeed, a compulsion—to rewrite the original, to improve upon the source” (2018: 7). Likewise, in his study of bi-scriptive writers, such as Cabrera Infante, Casey, and María Luisa Bombal, Pérez Firmat remarks: “No writer wants to play second banana to another writer, and least of all to himself ” (2003: 108). Pérez Firmat describes how in House of Mist (1947), the English version of Bombal’s novella La última niebla (1934), Bombal clarifies a number of key ambiguities, omits an explicit love scene, reveals a female protagonist’s scandalous affair to be only a dream, and leaves this same protagonist in nuptial bliss and living in her dream house (1995: 135). Similarly, in Sweet Diamond Dust (1986), the English version of her Maldito amor (1986), Rosario Ferré lends more authorial credence to the perspective of her mulatta protagonist and advances a strangely messianic vision of translation as a kind of benevolent prostitution. In Ferré’s La casa de la laguna (1996), the Spanish version of her The House of the Lagoon (1995), she goes so far as to insinuate her changed stance on Puerto Rican independence and opens up a conversation between the English and Spanish versions of her novel about different perspectives on Puerto Rico’s national status, as well as the repercussions of her publishing her novel first in English and declaring 148

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her own sort of “independence” from her Spanish readers and critics. Across the Spanish and English versions of his memoir, Heading South Looking North (1998) and Rumbo al sur, deseando el norte (1998), Ariel Dorfman undertakes more subtle but still suggestive changes—at times he adds context, conveys national ambivalence, softens passages that could offend one or another of his readerships, and bolsters depictions of his narrative self as a crucial and ambidextrous cultural mediator. By asserting control over the processes of translation or rewriting, these “extraordinary” writers show little deference to “original” or “authorial” intent, and through their unconstrained revisions, they signal some of the social, economic, and political pressures that accompany writing and publishing in primarily one or another national language. A bilingual and bi-scriptive writer who actively participates in both the creation and “translation” of the Spanish and English versions of her texts (either as a self-translator or in close collaboration with translators, such as Christina MacSweeney and Daniel Saldaña), Valeria Luiselli also challenges the very possibility of an original text and of an unsocial or non-collaborative literary praxis. Consider the complicated genesis of one such combinative text or series of texts, what first appeared in English as “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” and in Spanish as Los niños perdidos: (un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas)—in both instances an indignant, nonfiction account centered around Luiselli’s experiences as a legal interpreter and her encounters with some of the thousands of migrant children seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border. The first print iteration was the nonfiction English essay published in Freeman’s in 2016 (the same as above), and Luiselli later expanded this essay into a short book in Spanish, what became Los niños perdidos with Sexto Piso in 2016. Then, in a somewhat hasty collaboration with the Spanish-English translator Lizzie Davis, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Luiselli completed an English version of the Spanish book (and of the earlier Freeman’s essay): Tell Me How It Ends with Coffee House Press in 2017 (Edwards 2017). She has since published subsequent editions of the English and Spanish books, each with slight and significant variations from each other. Luiselli is open about how she seizes the opportunity to revise, update, or write on top of the Spanish and English versions (and subsequent editions) of her texts (Edwards 2017). As she stated in an interview with NPR, I like to think of my books in English more as versions of the Spanish ones, and the Spanish ones as versions of the English ones. A lot of things change when I go from one language to the other. (“Smashing Snow Globes”) In addition to facilitating the linguistic transfer of the content of her texts, Luiselli adds new passages; strikes other passages; adds context, asides, and updates; rearranges, and reorders sentences, paragraphs, and even, chapters; localizes political asides in light of her different readerships; and, on occasion, inserts new cultural allusions or references. Her revisions are not marked by an ideological consistency so much as a general willingness to capitalize on creative opportunities and to plant and sow deliberative and generative seeds of disorder across her works. Luiselli freely and willfully combines the tasks of writing, translating, rewriting, and editing. Luiselli published her novel Lost Children Archive with Knopf in 2019, what could be described as a fictional English expansion (some 300-plus pages) of all of the previous texts, a (this-time) fictional but still semi-autobiographical recounting of a family road trip that is interwoven with stories of asylum-seeking children, asides about the transnational histories of the United States and Mexico, and stories and reimaginings of Native Americans 149

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who preceded either national entity. She collaborated with Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña to translate the novel into Spanish; Desierto Sonoro, a product of both Saldaña and Luiselli, was also published in 2019, just months after the novel appeared in English. In an interview with PBS News Hour, Luiselli claims that Lost Children Archive (or the beginning phases of it) actually preceded any of the nonfiction spin-offs of the book, that “Tell Me How It Ends” (I assume she refers to the Freeman’s essay) was rather an intervention into the already emerging novel, an attempt to directly address some of the larger themes that were shaping Lost Children Archive and to unstuff the eventual novel (“Valeria Luiselli on documenting ‘political violence’”). Here, she gives chronological precedence to the new novel and explicitly connects her fictional and nonfictional texts as part of a single larger project. Thus, one has to see these projects by Luiselli as portions of an evolving conversation—and must undertake some verbal gymnastics to come up with the right words for her individual works, maybe “continuations,” “versions,” “spin-offs,” “variations,” “rewritings” instead of Spanish and English “originals” and “translations.” Likewise, when talking about Luiselli’s interactions with her translators, we need new collocations, say, collaboration, co-creation, co-writing, or what Karen Emmerich describes as “translingual editing” (2017: 2). As Luiselli, her recurrent translator MacSweeney, and others have indicated, Luiselli is keen on making translation visible, on opening up conversations about the evolution and production of her texts. Consider, for example, the divergent titles to the Spanish and English versions of her works (e.g., Los ingrávidos/Faces in the Crowd and Papeles falsos/Sidewalks); Luiselli’s willingness to give her translators relatively free rein (e.g. MacSweeney adding a chapter to The Story of My Teeth, the English version of La historia de mis dientes); her eagerness to write collaboratively (La historia de mis dientes/Story of My Teeth was written in collaboration with workers at the Jumex factory); and, in general, how she approaches translation as an opportunity to revise the previous version of the texts. In public discussions of her works, Luiselli frequently references and gestures toward her translators and even credits them with spurring revisions of future editions or translations of her texts into other languages. For example, Luiselli explains that revisions of Faces in the Crowd by MacSweeney and by her English-Italian translator Elisa Tramontin inspired changes to later translations or versions of this text (“Writing Yourself,” 14). Examining how her works vary and extend from one another illustrates how translation, relocation, and migration have become formative tensions in her work and how she leverages discontinuities to create opportunities for revision and engagement with English and Spanish readerships.

Conclusion Future studies of self-translation could consider not only overtly intralingual and interlingual projects but also projects of collaborative translation, in which authors work closely with translators or editors to create a new edition or version of a particular text. Some noted U.S. and Latin American collaborators include Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger, Paz and Haroldo de Campos, and Suzanne Jill Levine and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. In her Subversive Scribe, Levine recounts a number of her writerly interventions into the already subversive and multivoiced texts of writers and literary stylists, such as Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, and Cortázar. Likewise, contemporary ­U.S.-Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón worked with his English-Spanish translators to create two Spanish versions of his novel City of Clowns, one in a vernacular Peruvian Spanish and the other in a more neutral pan-American Spanish (Gleibermann 2018), and Cuban-­A merican writer and translator Achy Obejas describes working closely with Junot Díaz to complete 150

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the “daunting” Spanish translation of Díaz’s translation-resistant The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2012). As Obejas playfully recalls: The most daunting hurdle was the novel’s herculean use of the F-word, that magical lexeme of profanity. Noun, verb, adjective—its versatility is unparalleled. And there’s absolutely nothing that comes even close to it in Spanish. But thanks to Hollywood, most Latin Americans have not only heard the word but are quite familiar with its myriad meanings. I just had to make it sound like something that Junot’s guys would say, and readers could relate to. Thus, “fokin”. (2012) Moreover, U.S.-Argentine writer and translator Sergio Waisman describes his recuperative labors to complete and, effectively, assume authorship of Ricardo Piglia’s posthumous manuscript following Piglia’s death (Waisman, forthcoming). Other recent collaborations include the aforementioned joint endeavors of MacSweeney and Luiselli, as well as collaborations between Cristina Rivera Garza and her Spanish-to-English translator Sarah Booker. Examinations of these translator–author pairings and shared projects are fascinating because they reveal social and often unseen material aspects of the processes of writing and translating and rewriting. As Sánchez Prado argues, “World literature requires us to be conscious of the materiality of its production. It is the product of concrete cultural labor—including material practices of translation, cultural contact, and publishing—that must be accounted for in their full historicity” (2018: 15). Especially in the contemporary era, these collaborations illustrate the extent to which translating the self involves working with others, including translators, editors, agents, and other less visible or behind-the-scenes mediators. However, given the difficulty of firmly establishing who did what, of accessing tangible records of frequently private exchanges between authors, translators, editors, and publishers, one can look to the projects of other inter- and intralingual self-translators to surmise some of the linguistic, social, and temporal displacements that have shaped their texts. In the case of authors who publish distinct versions of their texts in one or another of their “languages,” these unbounded translators, freed from the impossible expectations of fidelity to an “original” text or a foreign author, signal some of the collaborative forces that constitute authorship, and they endeavor to make their negotiations of translation more visible through the often dueling and disparate versions of their texts. In the case of the many intralingual translators who translate on the level of the sentence or on facing pages, these authors actively involve readers in their linguistic and cultural negotiations by having readers pass through their translations and, on occasion, think on what is withheld or what resists translation. Whether through competing versions of their texts or through their hybrid and polyglot poetics, these authors challenge presumptions of linguistic purity and national unity and act as their own agents and mediators in the global literary marketplace. As Borges claims of his unheralded Pierre Menard, Menard’s unseen or “subterranean” work (an identical, wordfor-word rendering of two chapters and a fragment of a chapter of Cervantes’s Don Quixote) is his most significant literary contribution (“Pierre Menard” 90, tr. Hurley). U.S. and Latin American self-translators in all their forms draw light on both the travail and the opportunities occasioned by the typically invisible but incredibly transformative task of translation.

Note 1 All unattributed translations are my own. 151

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Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: The New Mestiza/La frontera. 1987. 3rd ed., Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Aparicio, Frances R. and Susana Chávez-Silverman, editors. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. University Press of New England, 1997. Arrojo, Rosemary. Fictional Translators: Rethinking Translation through Literature. Routledge, 2018. Berman, Antoine. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign.” Translated by Lawrence Venuti. The Translation Studies Reader. 1984. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2012, pp. 240–253. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Borges and I.” Translated by Andrew Hurley. Collected Fictions. 1957. Penguin, 1999, p. 324. ———. “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote.” Translated by Andrew Hurley. Collected Fictions. 1939. Penguin, 1999, pp. 88–95. ———. “The Homeric Versions.” Translated by Eliot Weinberger. 1932. Selected Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Penguin, 1999, pp. 69–74. ———. “Las versiones homéricas.” 1932. Obras completas, vol. 1, Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2004, pp. 239–43. ———. “Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote.” 1939. Obras Completas, vol. 1, Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2004, pp. 444–50. Castillo, Debra A. Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture. State University of New York Press, 2005. Cleary, Heather. The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2021. De la Torre, Mónica. Repetition Nineteen. Nightboat Books, 2020. Di Iorio, Lyn. Writing the Latinx Bildungsroman. Public Books, 2020, https://www.publicbooks.org/ writing-the-latinx-bildungsroman/. Accessed 27 Oct. 2021. Edwards, Magdalena. “Eccentric Embodiment: Tales and Truth.” (Valeria Luiselli and Guadalupe Nettel in Conversation with Writer and Translator Magdalena Edwards). Aloud Podcasts. 23 Feb. 2017, https://www.lapl.org/books-emedia/podcasts/aloud/eccentric-embodiment-tales-and-truths. Emmerich, Karen. Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Esplin, Marlene Hansen. “Self-translation and Accommodation: Strategies of Multilingualism in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s Puppet.” MELUS, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 176–201, 2016. Fuguet, Alberto and Edmundo Paz Soldán, editors. Se habla español: Voces latinas en USA. Alfaguara, 2000. Garcia Márquez, Gabriel. “Nobel Lecture.” Translated by unknown. NobelPrize.org, 1982, https:// www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/25603-gabriel-garcia-marquez-nobellecture-spanish/. Gaspar, Martín. La condición traductora: Sobre los nuevos protagonistas de la literatura latinoamericana. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editorial, 2014. Gleibermann, Erik. “Inside the Bilingual Writer.” World Literature Today, May 2018, https://www. worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/may/inside-bilingual-writer-erik-gleibermann. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001. Kellman, Steven G. The Translingual Imagination. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Laguna-Correa, Francisco. “The Rise of Latino Americanism: Deterritorialization and Postnational Imagination in New Latino American Writers.” Contemporary US Latinx Literature in Spanish: Straddling Identities, edited by Amrita Das, Kathryn Quinn-Sánchez, and Michele Shaul, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018. Lennon, Brian. In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States. University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Lugones, María. “Hablando cara a cara/Speaking Face to Face: An Exploration of Ethnocentric Racism.” Making Face, making Soul/Haciendo caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa. Aunt Lute, 1990, pp. 46–54. Luiselli, Valeria. Faces in the Crowd. Translated by Christina MacSweeney. Coffee House Press, 2014. ———. Interview by Arun Rath. “Smashing Snow Globes: A Writer on Essays, Novels and Translation.” NPR, 21 Dec. 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/12/21/371261474/smashing-snowglobesa-writer-on-essays-novels-and-translation. ———. Sidewalks. Translated by Christina MacSweeney. Coffee House Press, 2014. ———. The Story of My Teeth. Translated by Christina MacSweeney. Coffee House Press, 2015. 152

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———. Interview by Nicole L. Reber. “Writing Yourself into the World: A Conversation with Valeria Luiselli.” World Literature Today, Jan.–Feb. 2016, pp. 12–14. ———. Los ingrávidos. 2011. Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2016. ———. Papeles falsos. 2010. Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2017. ———. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Selected translations from the Spanish edition by Lizzie Davis. Coffee House Press, 2017. ———. Desierto sonoro. Translated by Daniel Saldaña and Valeria Luiselli. Vintage Español, 2019. ———. Interview by Jeffrey Brown. “Valeria Luiselli on Documenting ‘political violence.’” PBS Newshour, 7 March 2019, https://www.pbs.org/video/author-valeria-luiselli-on-documentingpolitical-violence-1551923922/. ———. La historia de mis dientes. 2013. Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2019. ———. Lost Children Archive: A Novel. Vintage Books, 2019. ———. Los niños perdidos: (un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas). 2016. Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2019. ———, and Christina MacSweeney. “Stuttering Cities.” New England Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2014, pp. 12–16. NobelPrize.org. The Solitude of Latin America, 1982, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ literature/1982/marquez/25603-gabriel-garcia-marquez-nobel-lecture-spanish/. Obejas, Achy. “Translating Junot.” chicagotribune.com, 14 Sept. 2012, https://www.chicagotribune. com/entertainment/books/ct-xpm-2012-09-14-ct-prj-0916-book-of-the-month-20120914story.html. Accessed 2021. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Bilingual Blues, Bilingual Bliss. Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1995. ———. Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Rivera Garza, Cristina. “Cristina Rivera Garza.” www.macfound.org, n.d., https://www.macfound. org/fellows/class-of-2020/cristina-rivera-garza. Accessed 27 Oct. 2021. Sánchez, Prado. Ignacio M. Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Northwestern University Press, 2018. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “On the Different Methods of Translating.” Translated by Susan Bernofsky, The Translation Studies Reader. 1813. 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 43–63. Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. “The Politics of Translation.” The Translation Studies Reader. 1992. 3rd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 312–330. Stavans, Ilan. On Self-translation: Meditations on Language. State University of New York Press, 2018. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 1975. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 1995. 2nd ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Waisman, Sergio. “An Almost Invisible Scene: Collaboration and Co-Creation in the Task of Translating.” Translating Home: Migration, Refuge, and Belonging in World Literatures, edited by Isabel Gómez and Marlene Hansen Esplin. Manuscript under review. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Further Readings Antunes, Maria Alice Gonçalves. Autotradução: breve histórico, razões, consequências, práticas. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2019. Recent monograph that examines self-translation broadly and provides case studies of works by Brazilian author João Ubaldo Ribeiro. Cordingley, Anthony, editor. Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Comprehensive edited volume that illustrates how self-translation challenges contemporary notions of “originality” and explores instances of self-translation by both canonical authors writing in major languages and lesser-known authors writing in minority languages and/or post-colonial contexts. Dasilva, Xosé Manuel and Helena Tanqueiro, editors. Aproximaciones a la autotraducción. Vigo, Spain: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2011. Edited collection that presents fourteen case studies on self-translation, with a slight emphasis on Iberian and Latin American authors.

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Gentes, Eva, editor. Bibliography: Autotraduzione/autotraducción/self–translation. XL edition, June 2021, https://self-translation.blogspot.com/. A fairly exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on “self-translation.” Munson, Marcella and Jan Walsh Hokenson. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self–­ Translation. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2006. An encompassing monograph of self-translation in a Western context, with readings of works by Latin American authors such as Sor Juana and Rosario Ferré. Stocco, Melisa. La autotraducción en la poesía mapuche. Peter Lang, 2021. An exploration of self-translation in Mapuche poetry, one of the few book-length studies on self-translation and an indigenous language.

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Part II

In & Out of Latin America Reception of Translated Literature

9 José Salas Subirat and the First Ulysses in Spanish Lucas Petersen

Introduction As soon as Ulysses was published in 1922, James Joyce and his editor Sylvia Beach began showing great interest in disseminating the work to the Spanish-speaking world. They prepared an announcement in Spanish and planned to send—or perhaps did send—copies to several bookstores in Madrid (Medina Casado 2009: 174). But despite their hopes, and the fact that the novel was an immediate source of fascination among certain literary circles (to say nothing of the widespread recognition that followed), more than two decades would pass before a full translation of the work became available. The Spanish-speaking world would have to wait until a disciplined insurance salesman with an erratic literary résumé and practically no experience as a translator named José Salas Subirat decided to take on the enormous task as a personal project. Although his translation was not well received by critics upon its initial publication in 1945, over the years, a number of well-known personalities within the Argentine literary space and beyond came to its defense. Perhaps Carlos Gamerro, an Argentine novelist who studied and taught Ulysses for decades, said it best when he argued that the novel’s subsequent two translations, both from Spain (the first by José María Valverde in 1976 and the second by Francisco García Tortosa and María Luisa Venegas in 1999), had “menos errores” [fewer misses] but also “menos aciertos” [fewer hits] (Gamerro 2008: 19). Even the Spanish critic Eduardo Lago made a similar comparison, arguing without even a hint of nationalism that “ninguna versión sea globalmente superior a las demás” [none of these versions was wholly superior to the others] (Lago 2002: 56, italics in original). In recent years, two new Argentine translations have been published: one by Marcelo Zabaloy (2015, revised in 2017) and the other by Rolando Costa Picazo (2017). Setting aside any critical assessments that could be made retrospectively, there is no doubt that Salas Subirat’s widely distributed Ulises, the only available version throughout the Spanish-speaking world for thirty-one years, became an essential work in the development of both Argentine and Latin American literature in the mid-twentieth century. This chapter explores how a man of modest upbringing and self-directed education— at once aesthetically conservative and curious—crossed paths with Ulysses and, even more

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-12

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extraordinarily, ended up translating it. To that end, the chapter will map out some cultural coordinates with special attention to the publishing industry, considered an essential piece of the context in which this first translation took place. After a description of the most important aspects of the novel and an attempt to reconstruct Salas’s translation process, the discussion will turn to the question of how to position the work in relation to the so-called “problem” of the Spanish language, which lies at the center of an intense public debate that persists to this day. It is the hope of this chapter, finally, to clarify the reasons why this translation of Ulysses can be considered a fundamental document in the incorporation of the immigrant voice into Argentine culture.

A Young Man from the Outskirts José Salas Subirat was born November 23, 1900 in San Cristóbal, a neighborhood that was at the time part of Buenos Aires’s inner peripheral ring. Starting at the end of the nineteenth century, this suburb brought together a heterogeneous social mix: poor criollos, skilled workers, an emerging middle class, and independent professionals, all of whom were attracted by the possibility of owning their own homes. His Catalan parents, Florentina Subirat and José Salas Puig, a knife sharpener by trade, built a family of fourteen children that never had enough money but was rich in cultural curiosity. Salas Subirat had to leave school at the age of twelve to start working and finished his primary school studies at the age of twenty-three. After leaving school, he embarked on a varied professional path: he worked in a shoe store and a printer’s shop, sold safes and advertising, founded a school of stenography and English (which he had taught himself with the aid of informal courses at local institutions), served as a customs clerk and translator at the South American subsidiary of the Soviet company Amtorg (Yuzhamtorg), and also founded a toy factory. Amidst these ebbs and flows, his most stable professional relationship was with the insurance company La Continental, which he first joined as a stenographer in 1919. He then returned to the company in the 1930s, after which he maintained close ties to the insurance world for the rest of his career. Salas Subirat was not only a skilled salesman; he also became the firm’s star trainer. From the 1940s onward, he traveled throughout South America and the Caribbean, offering sales classes and publishing a number of books about the industry. Some of them, like El seguro de vida: Teoría y práctica. Análisis de venta, which was published in 1944, only a year before Ulises, became classics throughout the continent. He even came to be known as a pioneer of the “self-improvement” genre in Latin America. As he cemented a professional direction that allowed him to leave behind the pressures of poverty and achieve a more comfortable life with a house in the suburbs, Salas Subirat began to develop two talents that proved fundamental to his literary life. The first was a passion for reading that knew neither limit nor prejudice, along with a drive for knowledge in the pursuit of personal growth. (He read everything, and a lot of it—his family remembered seeing him come home with books he bought by the kilo at a popular bookstore in downtown Buenos Aires.) The second was an incredible facility for teaching himself languages. This was how he learned English, French, Italian, German, Russian, and even the basics of others like Czech and Japanese. In one of his self-improvement books, El secreto de la concentración, he shares an interesting method for “aprender un idioma sin maestro en un plazo razonable, empleando como mínimo media hora diaria en escribir en ese idioma” [learning a language without a teacher in a reasonable amount of time, spending at least a half hour every day writing in the target language] (Salas Subirat 1953: 68). 158

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His system was to take a page in English and translate it into Spanish with the help of a dictionary, and translate it into English all over again the next day, “sin mirar el original” [without looking at the original] (68). He advised: “Aquí ponga mucha atención en lo que debe hacer: no se trata de que la traduzca bien. Escriba lo que salga. Tenga el valor de equivocarse” [Pay good attention to what must be done here: this is not about translating well. Write whatever comes out. Dare to be wrong] (68). After looking over the results, the next piece was to write the number of mistakes in big red letters. The process was to be repeated over and over, from one language to another, keeping track of the progress. With patience and discipline, little by little one could begin “conociendo en profundidad el idioma que se desea aprender” [understanding the depths of the language one wishes to learn] (68). In all probability, this was the method by which Salas learned English, although there is no evidence one way or the other. In fact, as will be discussed, he never spoke English fluently; he only read it. As a young man, Salas was an active member of Grupo Boedo, a meeting ground for young leftist writers who were more or less adherents of social realism, and many of whom favored the idea of art as social pedagogy over the modernists’ experiments. They understood cultural action as the dissemination of the treasures of high culture to the masses. The majority of them had a shared history as the children or grandchildren of immigrants; in other words, they were not part of the traditional Argentine cultural elite. During his association with the group (and slightly before it), Salas published two novels, two essays, and numerous articles in different magazines, particularly in Grupo Boedo’s own magazines: Los Pensadores and Claridad. The trajectory of Salas Subirat’s life and literary pursuits presents important questions, especially in relation to his being the first Spanish translator of a novel like Ulysses. How was it that this insurance salesman, a self-made man in the truest sense—and, incidentally, so similar in certain respects to Mr. Bloom—came to dedicate hours upon hours of his life away from the office and his family getting lost in Joyce’s labyrinth? Why did he get so involved in artistic experimentation despite his ostensible mistrust of it, as evidenced by his years with Grupo Boedo? How could someone with his self-taught English undertake one of the twentieth century’s greatest translation challenges?

The Path to Ulysses One of the keys to understanding how Ulysses sparked Salas Subirat’s interest can be found in his book-length nonfiction and in some of his articles relating to modernism, especially in A cien años de Beethoven (1827–Marzo–1927). A century after Beethoven’s death, modernist circles exhibited a palpable disdain for the composer. This was a particular source of irritation for Salas Subirat, who associated this attitude with the destructive zeal of anarchism. He decided to respond. In basic but eloquent language, Salas Subirat argued that the modernists staked their lives on reason alone, and that that was why they could never make real art. Salas Subirat recognized that all geniuses go against the grain of their era; the issue, however, was that instead of waiting patiently for the shockwaves inevitably unleashed by any new work, “las mentalidades anormales” [the abnormal mentality] of the modernists seeks the shockwave itself “como un medio de alcanzar la gloria y la admiración de sus semejantes” [as a medium to achieve the glory and admiration of their peers] (Salas Subirat 1927: 37). Basing his argument on the accessibility of Beethoven’s music, Salas also rejected the modernists’ exclusionary penchant for elitism and punditry, maintaining that art must be accessible to anyone open to receiving it. His project was not a rejection of innovation per se, but rather a rejection of 159

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the kind of innovation he saw as empty or gimmicky, the kind of innovation that rejects the achievements of classic great works without understanding (or acknowledging) them. This negative view of modernism was shared by a large part of Grupo Boedo. Nonetheless, in some of his work from that period, such as Marinetti: un ensayo sobre los fósiles del futurismo (1926) or his comments on a series of concerts conducted by Ernest Ansermet, one of Salas Subirat’s most unique characteristics becomes evident: without abandoning his prior opinions on the pedagogical function of art, he delves deeply into the question of what exactly the modernists’ protests have to offer us. He aims to immerse himself in the movement’s logic and experience and understand its innovations, if only to argue against them later. This attitude—the combination of an autodidact’s hunger for knowledge and an antidogmatic personality—was rare among his comrades and ended up pulling him into more than a few debates within pages of the group’s magazines. Meanwhile, Ulysses had been the talk of the literary chattering classes since 1922. The Spanish-speaking world’s relative unfamiliarity with the book—along with certain unseemly details about the author and his work—lent the book an aura of mystery and transformed it into a shibboleth of literary sophistication both in Latin America and Spain. Joyce’s work had gained enormous symbolic value among the youth who could read Ulysses in English or French, a fact that becomes even more evident when one looks to the other side of the coin, to those who lacked the linguistic ability to read it. And no one expressed this better than Roberto Arlt (an extraordinary writer who skirted around the edges of Boedo, although more because of his social heritage than any ideological affinity) in his famous prologue to Los lanzallamas: Variando, otras personas se escandalizan de la brutalidad con que expreso ciertas situaciones perfectamente naturales a las relaciones entre ambos sexos. Después, estas mismas columnas de la sociedad me han hablado de James Joyce, poniendo los ojos en blanco. Ello provenía del deleite espiritual que les ocasionaba cierto personaje de Ulises, un señor que se desayuna más o menos aromáticamente aspirando con la nariz, en un inodoro, el hedor de los excrementos que ha defecado un minuto antes. Pero James Joyce es inglés [sic]. James Joyce no ha sido traducido al castellano, y es de buen gusto llenarse la boca hablando de él. El día que James Joyce esté al alcance de todos los bolsillos, las columnas de la sociedad se inventarán un nuevo ídolo a quien no leerán sino media docena de iniciados. (Arlt 1995 [1931]: 8) [Changing course, other people are scandalized by the brutality with which I have expressed certain perfectly natural situations when it comes to relations between the sexes. Later, these same pillars of society spoke to me of James Joyce, practically swooning. This comes down to a sort of spiritual delight they take from a particular character in Ulysses, a man who breakfasts more or less aromatically, in a bathroom, breathing in through his nose the odor of the excrement he produced just a minute before. But James Joyce is English (sic). James Joyce has not yet been translated into Spanish, and it is currently tasteful to fill one’s mouth with words about him. The day James Joyce becomes attainable for everyone, the pillars of society will invent a new idol who shall not be read by anyone except by a half dozen insiders]. It is clear that Arlt’s anger was directed toward those who “practically swooned” over Joyce and not particularly toward the writer himself; there were defenders of Joyce running in the 160

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same circles as the Boedistas (although, granted, they were not at core of the group). For example, in the prologue to his anthology Cuentistas argentinos de hoy, José Guillermo Miranda Klix puts forward an interesting and illustrative—if a little naïve—theory of intellectual progress, placing Joyce at the summit: Sueño con un futuro en que la edad de los hombres se mida por el recorrido de su espíritu y no por el espacio comprendido entre el primero y el último proceso fisiológico. Así, cuando se hable de un artista adolescente se dirá: está en Tolstoy, y para las etapas sucesivas, los nombres de los que avanzaron más allá por el camino del Arte: Dostoiewsky, Proust, Joyce… (Miranda Klix 1929: 175) [I dream of a future in which a man’s age is measured by the breadth of his spirit’s journey and not by the time between the first and last physiological processes of life. Thus, when one speaks of an artist as a young man, one will say: he’s in Tolstoy. And for the subsequent stages, the names of those who made it further down the path of art: Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce…] Salas Subirat’s history poses important questions, and we can start to see some answers both in Miranda Klix’s idea of the path (the allusion to the “artist as a young man” can hardly be accidental) and Arlt’s idea of Joyce’s being a mystery to all but “a half dozen insiders.” Indeed, the most basic question is not “Why did Salas translate Ulysses?” but rather “Why did he read it in the first place?” In Miranda Klix, two answers become apparent: From one angle, Salas’s reading demonstrated a commitment to overcoming his own limitations and carrying out a project of self-directed education that was a clear source of personal pride from early on. Joyce was the end goal of this path, the non plus ultra of his learning. But from another angle, a close look reveals that what Miranda Klix is describing may be none other than a potential evolutionary lineage of realism. For Miranda Klix, as for most of the Boedistas (including Salas Subirat), there should be no distinction between art and realist representations of the world. In this respect, Joyce’s work was the peak of narrative technique inasmuch as it entailed a pursuit of a more perfect catalog of the world. In turn, although Ulysses was undoubtedly a modernist text, this idea connects with the fact that Joyce’s innovation was not based on a rejection of the past. On the contrary, while Joyce placed himself at the tip of the spear, at the leading edge of modernism, he nonetheless worked from the perspective of the evolution of English literature. As he hoped to demonstrate in episode thirteen (Nausicaa) of Ulysses, he knew he could write like any major writer that had come before him. His work was the distillation of all literature written in English. It was exactly what Salas argued about the modernists, at least from 1926 on: that for any kind of artistic experimentation to be more than empty gesture, it would have to move beyond mere rejection of historical forms and leave the space open for dialogue and the integration of old ideas into new works. Salas Subirat explained this himself in his “Translator’s Note” in the first edition of Ulises. For Salas, a “círculo vicioso” [vicious circle] could be found both in the adherence to “formas consagradas” [sacred forms] as well as the “afán de salirse de ellas” [zeal to distance oneself from them]. Salas wrote, “Joyce nunca sigue una línea de composición por la composición misma” [ Joyce never follows a line of writing simply for writing’s sake]. Rather, he suggests, Joyce uses “todos los medios de expresión” [all modes of expression] in a productive sense. As 161

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a result, “Ulises no es, como se ha afirmado, ningún engendro monstruoso [Ulysses is not, as has been argued, a mutant child]” (Salas Subirat 1945: XV). In other words, technique here is not deployed in the service of meaningless provocation or purely formal innovation, but rather for constructing a portrait of the world more precisely than ever before, with an eye toward the mechanisms of the “subconsciente” [subconscious]. Thus, as long as Joyce embodies the highest stage of realism, he embodies the highest stage of art as well. When Salas Subirat found his way to Ulysses at the end of the 1930s, the lack of a Spanish translation meant that the novel was still something of an unknown quantity. Over the years, only a few short passages had been rendered into Spanish in magazines published in Latin America and Spain. The most famous of these trailblazing attempts was a translation of the final stretch of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, published by Jorge Luis Borges in January 1925. The excerpt is translated into the colloquial Spanish of Argentina’s Río de la Plata region and intentionally erases any hint of the Dublin context, making it seem more like a personal translation exercise than a real attempt at communicating Joyce to the readers of Proa magazine, where it was published (Borges 1925: 8–9). There were some attempts to acquire the rights and translate the entirety of Ulysses, but the Spanish edition that Joyce and Beach had hoped for never materialized. Borges himself was involved in several of these attempts (Medina Casado 2009; Petit de Murat 1980; Saer 2004). He was also a member of an obscure committee that met to analyze the work. Borges referred to this in a conversation with a Brazilian journalist in 1977: “Me acuerdo que en torno a los años 40 querían hacer una traducción de Ulises. Para eso crearon una comisión. Infelizmente o felizmente, Salas Subirat tradujo el libro antes y acabó con aquel martirio de reuniones sin fin” [I remember that around the 1940s they wanted to do a translation of Ulysses. So they created a committee. Unhappily or happily, Salas Subirat had already translated the book, which put an end to the calvary of endless meetings] (Beuttenmüller 2003). According to Ulyses Petit de Murat’s account, the meetings were interrupted when the group got word from Europe that the rights had already been sold to a small publisher, Santiago Rueda, a name that would become a symbol of the so-called “golden age” of Argentine publishing.

An Adventurous Publisher The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) had plunged that country’s publishing industry into a crisis of such proportions that it could no longer support the Latin American market. Spurred on by this opportunity, the Argentine publishing houses—which, at the time, were the hardiest in South America—reoriented much of their activity in order to cover the newly open market. New imprints also appeared during this time, some of which ended up becoming the most innovative presses the Argentine publishing industry has ever seen. The three most emblematic of them—Sudamericana, Emecé, and Losada—were established between 1938 and 1939. One thing these new businesses all shared was an active program of translation, which granted the Spanish-speaking public a substantial portion of the literature that had brought Western letters into the twentieth century (see Sagastizábal 1995, Willson 2004, De Diego 2006, Larraz 2015, Giuliani 2018). Among these new publishers, Santiago Rueda (1905–1968) achieved an important position. He was a bold editor with little formal education but a keen intuition and an unquestionable sense of opportunity who brought some of the key works from Europe and the United States into Spanish for the first time (Petersen 2019). Rueda would not only publish the first Spanish edition of Ulysses but also En busca del tiempo perdido by Marcel Proust and 162

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Sigmund Freud’s Obras completes, the publication of both having been interrupted in Spain. He would introduce the first translations of some major works of the new American realism (Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Anderson, Caldwell, Lewis, etc.) and the key works of Søren Kierkegaard. He would publish the most successful novels of Hermann Hesse and undertake a massive printing of titles by D.H. Lawrence and Jakob Wassermann. Finally, he would publish Henry Miller for the first time in Spanish, including Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Rueda never abandoned its roots as a small, almost artisanal press. During its most influential period, between 1940 and 1960, the press’s small staff comprised Santiago Rueda himself, his part-time literary consultant Max Dickmann, a distribution clerk, one of his brothers (who drove the truck), and three salespeople on commission. The rest of the chain—translators, copyeditors, illustrators (rarely), layout editors, and printers—were not on staff. Rueda’s translation policy was irregular, even disorganized. In her essay “Página impar: el lugar del traductor en el auge de la industria cultural” (2004), Patricia Willson explains how new modes of publication of foreign literature were coming into play during this time, with well-known writers or translators often hired in order to lend credibility to the translation and to the press at the same time. Rueda turned to translators with distinction in the field, prioritized translations from the original language (up until the 1930s, it was common to translate off of the French version or the English version when the original was written in another language), and followed the trend described by Willson of putting the translator’s name on the odd-numbered title page, under the name of the author, in contrast to the established norm of putting the translator’s name on the (even-numbered) copyright page, mentioning it only in the prologue, or omitting it entirely. However, Rueda sometimes still clung to more traditional, less sophisticated hiring practices, namely the use of translators with minimal translation experience and questionable fluency in the source language—translators whose skills and experience were not always up to some of the challenges they would face. This is most evident in Rueda’s longest and most complex projects, such as José Salas Subirat with Ulises, Marcelo Menasché with En busca del tiempo perdido, and Ludovico Rosenthal with Freud’s Obras completas. Presumably, this practice was a way for Rueda to lower the costs of publishing projects whose complexity might have otherwise been prohibitive, whether due to the higher costs of experienced translators or because those translators might have been less willing to put up their symbolic capital for such risky prospects. Santiago Rueda’s ability to snag books like Ulysses that the whole world was talking about (in many cases very controversial ones), and which the biggest presses were unwilling or unable to sign, is one of the clearest signs of his audacity. Shortly before the publication of Ulises, Santiago Rueda explained the difficulties the press experienced in reaching an agreement for the translation rights. First, there were the concerns of Joyce’s representatives, who wanted to include a “garantía literaria” [literary guarantee] for the translation. Given that Rueda’s consultant, Max Dickmann, had translated and written prefaces for a number of authors from the United States and Britain, his name was offered as an assurance. Joyce’s representatives accepted, the idea being that Dickmann would act as the director of a “cuerpo de traductores” [corps of translators]. However, when it came to the actual process of translation, the challenges multiplied. The editor confessed: Solo yo sé de cuántas pruebas, conversaciones, estudios y hasta fracasos significó poder encontrar en Buenos Aires tres o cuatro personas que, aparte de conocer la obra de Joyce, 163

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pudieran consagrarse con la voluntad, la fe y el entusiasmo necesarios para verter al castellano las setecientas y pico de páginas maestras del Ulises [I alone know how many translation tests, conversations, studies, and even failures led to finding the three or four people in Buenos Aires who, apart from being familiar with Joyce’s work, could have devoted themselves with the faith, will, and enthusiasm necessary to bring into Spanish the seven hundred and some masterful pages of Ulysses]. (Rueda 1945: 29) Only a stroke of luck could get the project moving again. Meanwhile, in the late 1930s or early 1940s, Salas Subirat tried and failed to read Joyce’s work in English. Although he was used to reading in English (and other languages), undoubtedly, the complexity of the work at every level prevented him from untangling its meaning. Nevertheless, instead of giving up the task, Salas made a surprising next move: he started translating the book, with the sole intention of trying to understand it. As he stated in his introductory note to the first edition: “Traducir es el modo más atento de leer, y en realidad el deseo de leer atentamente es el responsable de la presente versión” [Translation is the most attentive mode of reading, and in truth the present translation is all down to the desire to read attentively] (Salas Subirat 1945: IX). Rueda’s account continues: “Por ese entonces, un común amigo me hizo conocer a un hombre que resultó providencial en esta obra en que estaba empeñado” [Around the same time, a mutual friend introduced me to a man who ended up being the answer to my prayers for the book to which I had already committed so much]. When he learned that Salas Subirat, “a manera de ejercicio espiritual, había traducido, para mejor comprensión propia, muchas páginas del Ulises” [through something of a spiritual exercise, had translated a good deal of Ulysses in order to understand it better himself ], Rueda gave the pages to Max Dickmann to look over. Dickmann approved the work and they decided to finish and publish the translation (Rueda 1945: 30). Salas Subirat was a complete unknown in translation circles: his only other published translations in book form were a handful of children’s titles about classical music with the popular press Anaconda between 1940 and 1943. As he was working on the Joyce translation between 1940 and 1945, he also went to press with six very diverse works of his own authorship, from insurance and “superación personal” [self-improvement] manuals to poetry and short story collections, and there is evidence of at least three other works in advanced stages from this period. Even if parts of these works were written beforehand, this array seems extraordinary for someone who worked eight hours a day, with a family and a house in the suburbs. In fact, he accomplished much of the reading and translation of Ulysses during his daily train commute into the city. He even unfastened the binding of the eight-hundred-page Modern Library edition in order to turn each signature into a portable installment. In response to this, surely, when in September 1945, Ulises made its way into the world with a note that it was published “under Max Dickmann’s supervision,” the allusion to Rueda’s consultant was not simply a sign of the compromise that had been reached with Joyce’s agents. Dickmann provided an important seal of approval for a work undertaken by someone without serious prior experience in the industry and with a scattered and seemingly overly ambitious literary résumé for the work at hand.

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The (Hypothetical) Story of a Translation As might be expected of an amateur translator faced with such a task, Salas Subirat’s work was uneven. In El traductor de Ulises (Petersen 2016), beyond reconstructing Salas’s biography, I attempt a close reading of the two versions of the translation (a revision was published in 1952), comparing it with various sources in which the translator wrote about his working methods, as well as with the margin notes in the English version he used as his reference. As a result of this analysis, in addition to the recent discovery of an article written by Salas Subirat in the journal Contrapunto, which until recently could only be consulted through a tertiary source, it is possible to outline a hypothesis about how he approached the job. In Contrapunto, the translator explains his idea of translation: Para traducir es necesario cumplir dos etapas. La primera consiste en lo que corrientemente se entiende por traducir: dar el significado de lo que dice el original en otro idioma. La segunda etapa impone escribir y adecentar lo que se ha traducido. Tal cosa no puede cumplirse de una sola vez (por lo menos yo nunca he podido hacerlo); porque, al dar el primer paso, la lengua en que está escrito el original lo tironea a uno y le hace poner cosas que son de una fidelidad espeluznante. (Salas Subirat 1945, junio: 12; los destacados son propios) [In order to translate one must move through two stages. The first consists of what is understood these days as translation: to present the meaning of what the original says in another language. The second stage requires writing and polishing what has been translated. Such a task cannot be accomplished all at once (at least I have never been able to do so), because while you are still on the first pass, the language of the original tugs at you and makes you commit horrifying fidelities]. (emphasis added) In Ulysses, Salas continues, “la dificultad mayor se presenta en la primera etapa, durante la cual debe desentrañarse el sentido del original. Esto equivale a decir que Ulises es un libro de ardua lectura en inglés” [the greatest difficulty lies in the first stage, during which the translator must disentangle the meaning of the original, which is to say that Ulysses is an arduous read in English]. The article is accompanied by two images of his now-lost manuscript pages, corresponding to passages in episodes thirteen (Nausicaa) and fourteen (Oxen of the Sun). The images show a typewritten text that proposes, in parentheses, alternatives for the translation of certain words. For example: “una petición, (solicitud, ruego, for request).” These typed words would correspond to the first stage, that of presenting the meaning. Both images show handwritten corrections above the typed line, in many cases approaching complete rewritings of the typed text. This corresponds to the second stage, that of writing and polishing what has been translated. But this categorical, somewhat naïve, and perhaps reckless distinction between the two stages—as if meaning and writing existed in two separate dimensions—might seem less than a perfect foundation on which to base the entire task. Some years later, Salas Subirat would go a little further in explaining his idea of translation: Es preciso reconocer que las traducciones no pueden cumplir más oficio que el de información. Y no existe información –testimonio– que pueda valer por la vivencia directa. La vanidad contenida en el traductor sólo puede ser neutralizada con ese reconocimiento

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de que se oficia en calidad de informante. El texto original no puede ser reemplazado totalmente. La versión puede ser mejor o peor que el original, pero nunca exacta. Es por esa razón que suele aconsejarse ir al original; pero este consejo tiene un sentido limitado por el conocimiento del idioma extraño que tenga cada lector. Si ese saber, de parte del lector, es insuficiente, una traducción tan sólo decente será siempre más útil que el original indescifrable. (Salas Subirat septiembre–octubre 1954: 95–96) [It is essential to recognize that translation can fulfill no greater purpose than that of information. And there exists no information—no testimony—more valuable than lived experience. The translator’s arrogance can be neutralized only by the recognition that they are working as an informant. The original text cannot be completely replaced. The new version can be better or worse than the original, but never exactly the same. It is for this reason that readers are often advised to consult the original, but this advice is limited by a given reader’s knowledge of the foreign language in question. If the reader’s knowledge is insufficient, even a merely decent translation will always be of greater use than an indecipherable original]. In short, the translator must never aspire to be more than an “informant”—without vanity, without claiming the impossible, and keeping in mind that the most a translator can give any reader who is not one of the “número reducidísimo de personas ungidas de poliglotía” [tiny number of people anointed at the polyglot altar] is a truthful (albeit secondhand) understanding of the work. Adding this to the idea he put forward in the 1945 article, it becomes clear that what Salas really meant by “writing and polishing what has been translated” was a sort of bearing witness—that is, a process more concerned with the pursuit of truth than with mere decoration. In various ways, “writing and polishing” meant becoming an informant on the Joycean prose in order to inventively convey the playfulness of the original. Take this one small example: “The wheels rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway.” A literal translation already would have yielded the possibility of emulating the repetition of the r in ruedas (wheels) and rodando (rolling), but Salas repeated it again in the verb resonaban (echoed): “Las ruedas resonaban rodando sobre la calle empedrada de guijarros.” Salas made use of Joycean insertions wherever he could. But we see that the move between the first stage (which sometimes led him to commit horrifying fidelities) and the more literary stage that followed was not the same in all cases. On the contrary, there is a clear change in tone that may coincide with the moment when Salas’s goals themselves changed. When this was still a private project designed to help Salas understand the text he was reading, his translation remained merely a tool (and at times, a slapdash one): his only interest was in untangling the story, lifting the veil obscuring Joyce’s technical innovations in order to more fully experience what Joyce had written in English. The translation is almost always literal. Remnants of this stage—we believe—did manage to get published. For example, instead of maintaining compound words, Salas explained them. This is how “shell-­ cocoacoloured” became “color de concha y cacao” [color of shell and cocoa] to cite just one example. When the meaning escaped him, Salas produced an approximation, a guess, or a complete invention, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere. Although some of these errors were undeniably forced by the opacity of the text, his rush to make headway led to a series of mistakes and unfortunate choices that eventually ended up in the readers’ hands. 166

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It is important to remember that Salas Subirat, as a reader, jumped almost blindly into Ulysses. He had to understand its grammar, feel its rhythm, uncover the logic of its plot, and untangle its project all at once. All Salas had was his own self-taught encyclopedic knowledge, an understandably minimal grasp of the deeper aspects of Irish culture, and spotty command of English. (How exactly could he capture the musicality of Joyce’s prose if, as Max Dickmann’s son of the same name pointed out in a 2011 interview, he only read and barely spoke the language?) In addition to these personal failings, he dealt with an almost complete lack of reference materials—something his defenders have pointed out many times. All he had was the French translation to make comparisons. Perhaps as the process went on, he was able to consult a few supporting resources. One of them—of dubious utility—was ¿Quién es Ulises?, Carl Jung’s essay that Rueda published in 1944. Another was Herbert Gorman’s biography James Joyce, which Salas read in English. The opening episodes of the translation are mostly literal, suggesting that his write and polish was a fairly superficial operation. Yet there comes a moment when the tone changes. We see some possible signs already in the fourth chapter (Calypso), but the change is clearly in effect by the end of the fifth (Lotus Eaters). From then on, the translation adopts a more liberal and creative—even playful and transgressive—attitude. There is a shift from simply untangling the meaning to truly attempting a recreation of the Joycean prose. For example, here Salas begins to solve the problem of English compounds with similar constructions in Spanish and allows himself to introduce popular local expressions as stand-ins for the Dublin slang. The following example—one of many—comes from the sixth episode (Hades). At Paddy Dignam’s funeral, Bloom—both pragmatic and Jewish—must endure his acquaintances’ predictable comments on the ceremony and respond cordially, while inside he reflects on the uselessness of religious discourse in the face of the ruthless materiality of death. Mr. Kernan said with solemnity: —I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s inmost heart. —It does, Mr. Bloom said. Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure. ( Joyce 1952: 113) Compare this with Salas Subirat’s translation: El señor Kernan dijo con solemnidad: —Yo soy la resurrección y la vida. Eso llega a lo más íntimo del corazón humano. —Es verdad –afirmó el señor Bloom. Tu corazón tal vez; pero ¿qué le importa al tipo metido en un metro cuadrado haciéndole raíces a las margaritas? No le alcanza. Asiento de los afectos. Corazón destrozado. Una bomba después de todo, bombeando miles de galones de sangre cada día. Un buen 167

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día se atasca y estás listo. Por aquí los hay a montones: pulmones, corazones, hígados. Viejas bombas enmohecidas: lo demás son cuentos. La resurrección y la vida. Una vez muerto estás bien muerto. La idea del juicio final. Hacerlos salir a todos de sus tumbas. ¡Levántate y anda, Lázaro! Y llegó quinto y perdió el puesto. ¡Levántate! ¡Es el último día! Luego cada uno de los tipos ratoneando por ahí su hígado y sus bofes y el resto de sus bártulos. ¡La pucha, como para encontrar todos sus cachivaches esa mañana! Un pennyweight de polvo en un cráneo. Doce gramos un pennyweight. Medida Troy. The shift in tone could be the result of two non-mutually exclusive possibilities. On the one hand, this could certainly be evidence of a lack of respect, an erosion of the ritual relationship between Salas and the literary monolith. On the other, we cannot dismiss the idea that this is the part of the translation Salas was already working on when he met Rueda, when suddenly there was a chance that it might be published; this may have been the point at which a personal translation became one for an audience. The change in tone here also suggests that the move from a literal translation (first stage) to a literary translation (second stage) was done chapter by chapter, and with more confidence each time. After finishing the entire book, he was likely planning to go through the text for a second time. But for reasons to be discussed later, it seems his edits never made it past the second chapter. This is how the translation went to press, with the first print run of the first Spanish Ulysses finished on July 14, 1945. Years later, in a statement to the Caracas Daily Journal, Salas would reveal that he translated the entirety of this first version for free, just for the love of it (Salas 1957, September 27).

Critics and Interrupted Revisions At least in his first version, Salas Subirat tackled the novel with the same zest for learning, determination, and open-mindedness that had been a hallmark of his entire life. Though he was already speaking out against “el complejo de inferioridad de los traductores” [the translator’s inferiority complex] in his Contrapunto article (Salas Subirat 1945, June: 12), his “Translator’s Note” for Ulysses indicates an ever-bolder stance. In the note, he maintains that, “leído con atención, Ulises no presenta serias dificultades para traducirlo” [read with attention, Ulysses does not present serious translation difficulties] and that “no es un trabajo difícil, pues los inconvenientes con que se tropieza son nada más que los que existen para su lectura en el idioma original” [it is not difficult work, and any stumbling blocks are no more than what one would encounter when reading it in the original language] (Salas Subirat 1945: IX). He almost seems to be saying that moving between two distinct linguistic systems should be no trouble at all. Salas then touches on some of the specific challenges he faced and the ways he resolved them. He discusses these solutions with a sort of flippant, almost naïve tone. Owing to the fact that this first version of the translation contained more than a few errors, his hubris would cost him later on. Many of these issues were the result of the obvious difficulty of the work, from the scant (or nonexistent) availability of reference materials, and from his lack of a proper understanding of English (to say nothing of the Irish dialect). As an amateur, Salas also lacked a methodical process, which led to a number of inconsistencies. But there are also some truly rookie mistakes, problems that could have been avoided simply by opening up a decent dictionary, which suggests that some of his many hypothetical solutions—the ones he wrote down when the translation was still a personal project—somehow ended up in the finished product. 168

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Despite all this, Salas’s casual approach may have also been responsible for his translation’s greatest virtue. In a number of passages, once he set aside his rigid adherence to—or reverence for—the sacred original, Salas Subirat hit upon an undeniably Joycean tonality and the inventive approach for which he would eventually be recognized. This alone is enough to place Salas’s version, at least in one respect, on an equal footing with later translations. But many important critics of the day were unimpressed by these successes. To them, this Ulysses was a clear transgression of the institutional norms and rituals of the literary establishment. The way Salas described the ease of his work was a slap in the face not only to the establishment as a whole but also to the experienced translators who had combed through the translation and found all of his many errors, some of which were completely inexplicable. In the abovementioned 1977 interview with a Brazilian media outlet, Jorge Luis Borges displayed his anger over how “todo el mundo aplaudía aquella tontería” [everyone applauded that nonsense] when Salas’s “pésima” [horrendous] translation first came out (Beuttenmüller 2003, March 12). Borges’s reaction suggests that the Spanish version of Joyce’s novel was well received by the public when it was finally published. The disapproval mainly came from members of the literary establishment, who, like Borges, were experienced translators themselves. Borges’s critiques in a contemporary article in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, along with those of the younger critics Juan Rodolfo Wilcock and Emir Rodríguez Monegal (all published in 1946), were so derisive as to be almost disrespectful. That is not to say their objections—­ especially Borges’s and Wilcock’s—were not legitimate. And if one reads these critiques with an eye toward what Borges remembers as the almost celebratory atmosphere following the translation’s release, they start to seem like a warning to the reading public to take this new and far-from-perfect work with a grain of salt. Despite couching their objections behind a polite recognition of the magnitude of the task, on the whole, the critiques alternated between sympathy, scorn, mockery, and sarcasm. This appraisal of Salas Subirat persisted for a long time in some literary circles throughout Argentina and the rest of Latin America—and can be seen, for example, in an article by Gabriel García Márquez titled “Los pobres traductores buenos,” in which he labels Salas Subirat’s translation as “inexistente” [useless]. But García Márquez still remembered the translator fondly, having crossed paths with him probably in the late fifties or early sixties: “a Salas Subirat lo conocí pocos años después en Caracas trepado en el escritorio anónimo de una compañía de seguros y pasando una tarde estupenda hablando de novelistas ingleses, que él conocía casi de memoria” [I met Salas Subirat a few years later in Caracas, where he was spread out behind an anonymous desk at an insurance office, and we spent a wonderful afternoon talking about English novelists, which he knew almost by heart] (García Márquez 1982, July 20). As García Márquez’s anecdote makes clear, Salas Subirat was seen, from 1945 on, as “el traductor de Ulises” [the translator of Ulysses]. His fame preceded him when he traveled the continent to participate in insurance conferences or trainings. Local newspapers always introduced him by his new moniker. He would lend his services as a Joyce specialist on request, speaking about the novel with newspapers in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. He also responded to requests from the Argentine press. Nevertheless, his life remained mostly unchanged. After the publication of the first version, the amount of time he spent on intellectual work stayed basically the same as it had been before and during his work on the book. The daily life of the “the translator of Ulysses” revolved mainly around insurance sales. By no means did he renounce the label, but by the looks of it, he was not particularly interested in milking his newfound fame. 169

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In 1950, ahead of the release of the second edition, Salas Subirat undertook a revision of the translation in order to address some of the errors that had been pointed out by his critics. But the revision work was interrupted a few months later, presumably for personal reasons, and was never fully completed. This half-revised second version was published in 1952 and is still possible to find in libraries, as it was more widely distributed than the first. It is also a clear step forward from its predecessor. Almost all compounds have now been translated into an analogous form; editing mistakes have been corrected; verb tenses have been tightened; new interpretations are offered for words that initially disrupted flow of the interior monologue or else were simply poorly translated, including a number of Irish colloquialisms; ambiguities, rhetorical devices, and poetic licenses that before were translated without much care are rectified; local language is more fully incorporated in order to convey the novel’s urban pulse; and rhythm and concision are improved when the language permits it, although this is one of the greatest challenges in moving from English to Spanish. Surprisingly, though, some moments in the first version were closer to the original meaning than in the second, more definitive edition. There are dozens of examples. For one: the phrase “Good idea a postmortem for doctors” is translated literally and correctly in the first edition as “Buena idea, un postmortem para doctores.” However, in 1952, Salas replaced this with a sentence that means something quite different: “Buena idea que los médicos hagan las autopsias” [It’s a good idea for doctors to do autopsies]. The notes written in the volume his family preserved as well as the changes to the translation reveal that, beyond a few small interventions, the edits for the second version begin in earnest with the third chapter (which leads us to assume that the first three chapters were already revised for the first edition). The edits then begin to peter out by the end of the eighth chapter (Lestrygonians). There are only a few small and inconsequential changes from the eleventh episode (Sirens) to the end. Molly’s soliloquy, an example of one of the most difficult passages, went unchanged between 1945 and 1952. Starting in 1952, Salas Subirat’s intellectual focus shifted almost entirely to the writing of insurance manuals, “self-improvement” books, and philosophical works like Carta abierta sobre el existencialismo (1954). However, at some point during this decade, he decided to return to Ulises for the third time, with the aim of finishing the work he had left pending in 1950. He was in the middle of the third version in November 1957 when, as he was relocating to take advantage of Venezuela’s oil boom–fueled insurance industry expansion, his airplane suffered an engine fire and was forced to make an emergency water landing off the coast of Brazil. Although the passengers were rescued by fishermen and the water was shallow, it was deep enough for the plane’s baggage compartment to be completely submerged. The translator’s personal library, including the manuscript for the third version of Ulises, was a total loss. When the third edition was printed in 1959, the “Translator’s Note” would be replaced with a text by Jacques Mercanton, suggesting that Salas Subirat no longer felt his original introduction, somewhat cavalier and self-congratulating, was representative.

The “Problem of Language” José Salas Subirat died on May 29, 1975, at the age of seventy-four. Just one year later, more than three decades after his trailblazing translation first appeared, a second translation of ­U lysses—by Spanish writer José María Valverde—was published. In the prologue, Valverde did not even mention the existence of a previous translation, and as Saer ( June 11, 2004) points out, “las opciones tienen como único justificativo la obsesión de no parecerse a la traducción anterior” [the only justification for the choices made is an obsession with appearing different 170

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from the previous translation], alluding to the many instances in which Valverde seems to have simply replaced words used by Salas Subirat with synonyms. For example: Salas Subirat

Valverde

—Es verdad –afirmó el señor Bloom. Tu corazón tal vez; pero ¿qué le importa al tipo metido en un metro cuadrado haciéndole raíces a las margaritas? No le alcanza. Asiento de los afectos. Corazón destrozado.

—Eso es —dijo el señor Bloom. Tu corazón quizá pero, ¿qué le importa al tipo en el seis pies por dos con los dedos de los pies en las margaritas? Eso no lo toca. Sede de los afectos. Corazón partido.

[Salas Subirat —It’s true – stated Mr. Bloom. You heart maybe; but what does it matter to the fellow stuck in one square meter putting down roots with the daisies? It’s not enough. Seat of the affections. Destroyed heart].

[Valverde —That’s it —said Mr. Bloom. Your heart perhaps but, what does it matter to the fellow stuck in the six feet by two with his toes in the daisies? That doesn’t touch it. Place of the affections. Shattered heart].

This silent contest between Valverde and Salas Subirat pointed out by Saer raises one final and fundamental question. As the years passed and the young writers who had come to know Ulysses through the translation took up relevant positions in the literary world, the most inventive aspects of Salas Subirat’s translation gained some important defenders. An anecdote relayed by Saer (1937–2005) tells the story of an afternoon in 1967, when a group of young writers were sitting in a café with Jorge Luis Borges, who had traveled to the city of Santa Fe, Argentina, to give a talk about Joyce. The author of Ficciones told the story of the committee that had been convened to discuss translating the novel, until they found out about Salas Subirat’s version: Borges, riéndose de buena gana de la historia, y aunque nunca la había leído (como probablemente tampoco el original), concluyó diciendo: ‘Y la traducción era muy mala’. A lo cual uno de los jóvenes que lo estaba escuchando replicó: ‘Puede ser, pero si es así, entonces el señor Salas Subirat es el más grande escritor de lengua española’ [Borges, laughing heartily, and despite never having read it (probably never having read the original, either), closed by saying, “And the translation was very bad.” And one of the young writers who was listening replied, “Maybe, but then that would make Mr. Salas Subirat the greatest writer of the Spanish language”]. (Saer 2004, June 11) Saer’s article sums up the worthiest element of Salas’s translation, beyond the simple fact of the ground it broke: el río turbulento de la prosa joyceana, al ser traducido al castellano por un hombre de Buenos Aires, arrastraba consigo la materia viviente del habla que ningún otro autor—aparte quizás de Roberto Arlt—había sido capaz de utilizar con tanta inventiva, exactitud y libertad [The white-capped rapids of Joyce’s prose, when translated into Spanish by a man from Buenos Aires, whisked the living matter of everyday speech along with it in a way that no other writer—perhaps aside from Roberto Arlt—had been able to capture with such inventiveness, precision, and freedom]. (Saer 2004, June 11) 171

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It is easy to imagine where the living, breathing personality of Salas’s text came from when considering the fact that he wrote most of it while commuting to work on the train. Reading on public transit is a constant struggle to not get distracted by the reality of daily life. The world inevitably i(nte)rrupts in the middle of one’s reading, and the text can only be read through the prism of the moment’s material context. It is not easy translating into a neutral, spotless, highbrow register when the border between the translator and the world around them is so porous. When the reading process opens up to one’s surroundings, the translation process does too. Ulysses’s stream of consciousness narrative, continually interrupted by daily life, can never be as effective for a reader sitting in an armchair as for a reader on the move. Ricardo Piglia (1942–2017), an important writer who started publishing in the 1960s like Saer, took a similar view. Piglia defended Salas in his book El último lector, in which he describes Ulysses’s first translator as “el mejor y el más joyceano” [the best and most Joycean] and “el que mejor transmite los tonos de su prosa” [the one who best conveyed his prose’s tones] (Piglia 2005: 182). This has to do, in part, with an aspect of Piglia’s theory of reading as presented in the book: “Un lector es también el que lee mal, distorsiona, percibe confusamente. En la clínica del arte de leer, no siempre el que tiene mejor vista lee mejor” [A reader is also someone who reads poorly, distorts, perceives confusedly. In the clinic of artful reading, the best eyesight doesn’t always make for the best reader] (Piglia 2005: 182). Salas was unfamiliar with a large part of Joyce’s system of references and even part of his lexicon. To compensate, he made things up, took risks, and refused to get stuck on elusive turns of phrase in the name of precision. His limitations—mainly linguistic but also personal and temporal—drove him to find solutions, to make decisions based on a unique creative force: the text right in front of him. In its strongest passages, Salas Subirat’s Ulises demonstrates the grit of someone with nothing to lose, following his own path without fear of consequences or judgment of others. Salas discovered that it was impossible to understand Joyce (much less convey the meaning of his text to others) without making use of the flood of everyday language that surrounded him. Perhaps without even meaning to, Salas Subirat found his way into the nerve center of Joyce’s writing, which also happened to be at the center of a debate about the Spanish language itself. Carlos Gamerro argues: El Ulises original está escrito, no en una lengua o dialecto, sino en la tensión entre una variante desprestigiada (el inglés de Irlanda) y otra dominante (el inglés británico imperial): relación que puede compararse, aunque no homologarse, a la que existe entre el español de España y el de los demás países de habla hispana. Al menos en teoría, entonces, cualquier traducción hispanoamericana del Ulises deberá ser más fiel al original que una española, lo cual puede comprobarse en la versión de Salas Subirat, que reproduce en todas sus imperfecciones el tironeo del original. Vacilante, políglota, revuelta: esa es la fricción que enciende el inglés del Ulises, y que hace que el español de nuestro Ulises criollo posea una vitalidad parecida. (Gamerro 2008: 19, énfasis en el original) [The original Ulysses is written not in a language or dialect, but rather in the tension between a disfavored linguistic variant (the local Irish English) and a dominant one (the English of the British Empire), a comparable relationship (albeit not entirely equivalent) to the one between the Spanish of Spain and that of all other Spanish-speaking countries. At least in theory, then, a Latin American translation of Ulysses should be more faithful to the original than one from Spain. We see this in Salas Subirat’s version, which 172

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reproduces the tug of the original in all its imperfections. Unsteady, multilingual, upside down: this is the friction that ignites the English of Ulysses and that gives the Spanish of our own vernacular version, an Argentine criollo Ulysses, a similar vitality]. (italics in original) Salas Subirat’s Ulises is forever tangled up in this issue. On one side are the “correct” ways of the old metropolis, still dominant in vast stretches of Argentine literature, the result not just of relations between the linguistic center and periphery but also of the fact that Argentine writers of Salas’s generation were brought up on translations that came from Spain, thus coloring their experience of foreign literature. On the other side, you have the language of the streets, holding dominion inside the train Salas rode as he waded through the text. The resulting linguistic interpolation proved critical to translating a work as complex as Ulysses, although given Salas’s inexperience, this was most likely unplanned. By way of example, the informal you in nearly all of Argentina is not tú, as it is in Spain and most of the rest of Latin America; it is vos. But, at the time, tú was the pronoun used in translations and most other literary texts intended to fit the supposed linguistic norms of acceptable modes of expression, even in realist stories set locally. When the informal second person pronoun is pluralized, in Argentina, it does not become vosotros, as it does in Spain; it becomes ustedes, a completely American expression. Salas Subirat’s Ulises plays host to a tense coexistence between the literary tú and the more local ustedes; between the trans-Hispanic muchacha and the Argentine chica (both of which Salas uses as a translation of girl); between the high-register verb propinar (to administer, deliver, provide) and the lunfardo noun used to describe a beating (soba) in sentences like “le propinaban una buena soba en el calabozo” [he was provided with a good whack in the jail cell]. This ambivalent language that appears almost by accident in Ulises can also be seen in other books translated in Argentina around the same time. The phenomenon was not only an expression of market forces (which demanded the most “international” register possible for translators who were completely immersed within Argentine culture) but also of a linguistic debate between Argentina and Spain. Exacerbated by the early years of Franco’s regime, the conflict over the question of whether the Spanish language should be monocentric or pluricentric had begun as early as the 1920s and was still in full swing decades later. Alejandrina Falcón addresses this problem in “Un español sin patria ninguna: el idioma de los libros en tiempos de auge editorial,” covering the arguments of several intellectuals over the question of how the language should operate in Hispanic America. Considering the obvious geographical dispersion of Spanish, should these nations continue to accept Madrid’s role as their linguistic supervisor? Should they counteract the centrifugal forces pulling their language away from the metropolis? Or should the old system give way to a new Spanish with three regulatory centers based in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City (Falcón 2010)? This question was especially pressing for translators like Salas Subirat, whether they admitted it or not. Translators who came from immigrant families and grew up with little cultural capital of their own had carved their owns paths into the literary world, often resulting in a more reverential stance toward academic institutions and the power relations that established linguistic norms. For those who came from other social contexts, things were a bit different. Jorge Luis Borges—who grew up surrounded by a rich cultural environment in a family with deep roots in Argentina—again provides us with the perfect example. In “El idioma de los argentinos,” Borges calls for the founding of an Argentine literature characterized not by specific themes but by the recognition and reproduction of a certain local tonality (Borges 2012 173

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[1928]), referring to a particular set of lexical and grammatical traits along with a specific cadence of everyday speech—without costumbrismo, affectation, and melodrama, without españolismos (linguistic elements specific to Spanish from Spain) but also without lunfardismos (Argentine slang words born at the margins of the law and influenced by local Italian languages). This was the register in which Borges had translated Molly’s soliloquy in 1925, and which he believed could only be precisely intoned by those traditional keepers of the local language who had known its secrets since birth, as opposed to those who had to learn it later and incorporate it into an unstable language of immigration. For Borges, according to Beatriz Sarlo (1996: 178), “la voz argentina elige a sus enunciadores antes que ellos puedan elegirla” [the Argentine voice chooses its speakers before they can make the choice themselves],” which “marca con el fuego de la diferencia social, de la precariedad y la insuficiencia de cualquier asimilación voluntarista” [is imprinted onto social difference, economic precarity, and the inevitable inadequacy of the desire for assimilation]. As we can see, the center–periphery relationship is not simply a path into the Hispanophone Latin American space. There is also a center–periphery within Argentina’s own literary space, where those who inherited a certain tonality (who, incidentally, also tended to be familiar with the key literary languages: English and French) stood ahead of those who spoke in a different register and were outsiders in relation to the so-called great literature. The existence of Salas Subirat’s Ulises threw into doubt the whole idea that only “legitimate” speakers of both foreign and domestic language could translate such literature (or translate, period).

Conclusion: Crossed Tensions It could be said that Salas Subirat’s Ulises lies at the intersection of multiple constraints: the unique personality of the translator, his inconsistent understanding of English, the inopportune absence of support materials, a Peninsular Spanish that is considered a kind of educated literary norm even today, and a local language that is also the subject of an internal dispute between the last gasps of the old Rioplatense Spanish from before the nineteenth century’s great influx of immigrants and the new languages they brought to the streets of Buenos Aires. In Salas Subirat’s Ulises, there exists no pure Peninsular Spanish, Rioplatense Spanish, or pre- or post-immigration Spanish. What does exist is a back and forth that never manages to settle into definitive agreement. It remains pure turmoil, tension, oscillation between indecision and adventurousness. Paradoxically, as a result, in Salas Subirat’s version, this ­neither-here-nor-there register succeeds by way of its dynamic uncertainty. The living matter Saer spoke of includes vestiges of Borges’s pined-for criollo tonality as well as an aspiration toward the supposedly literary norm of the Iberian dialect mixed with the unmistakable features of the new lexicon, the new rhythm, and the new melody that had been simmering together since the linguistic tsunami of immigration changed Argentine culture forever. This is a Spanish of hybridization and neologism. Across the ocean, for reasons discussed above, Joyce’s work had been forged in the same crucible. Despite appearances, Salas Subirat’s translation of Ulysses is not so much reckless and eccentric as it is intellectual and animating: a life’s work that calls on his heritage and self-directed education, with a philosophical basis in the Boedo generation’s spirit of social pedagogy and a project organized around the principle of the dissemination and democratization of high culture. Salas translated Joyce first in order to understand him and second so that others could too. In this sense, Salas’s Ulises fits right in with his essays on Marinetti and Beethoven and his later Carta abierta sobre el existencialismo, but also with his insurance and self-improvement 174

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manuals, through which he sincerely hoped to be able to share his discoveries and successes in what he called the “lucha por la vida” [fight for life]. Salas Subirat gave the world a text as enjoyable to read as it is difficult to judge: uneven, witty at times and dull at others, with solutions that sometimes pay close attention to formal structures, musicality, sound, rhythm, and tonality, but other times, stick to the flattest possible translation of a given word. Around every corner, brilliant turns of phrase and inexcusable mistakes lie. But above all, Ulises intones a completely Argentine register, although clearly not in the sense Borges intended. An amalgamated language of immigration, replete not only with its complicated relationship to “Peninsular norms” but also to the tonality of the old Argentina. We might consider Ulises a result of the long process of linguistic crystallization that occurred mainly in Argentina’s urban spaces between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. The symbolism should not be lost on anyone that another period of profound cultural change with new social players and voices in public life—Peronism—was beginning in Argentina just as the book was published in 1945 (see James 1988). Salas Subirat’s Ulises can thus be seen to close the circle of the fraught processes of incorporating the children of immigration—and their voices—into local Argentine culture. Translated from Spanish by Will Morningstar

Works Cited Arlt, Roberto. Los lanzallamas. 1935. Buenos Aires: Altamira, 1995. Beuttenmüller, Alberto. “Segundo encontro con Borges.” Digestivo Cultural, 12 March 2003, https:// www.digestivocultural.com/ensaios/ensaio.asp?codigo=51&titulo=Segundo_encontro_com_ Borges. Borges, Jorge Luis. “El ‘Ulises’ de Joyce.” Proa (second era), vol. 2, no. 6, January 1925. ———. “Nota sobre el Ulises en español.” Los Anales de Buenos Aires, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1946, p. 49. ———. “El idioma de los argentinos.” El idioma de los argentinos. 1928. Buenos Aires: Debolsillo, 2012, pp. 223–236. De Diego, Jorge Luis, editor. Editores y políticas editoriales en Argentina, 1880–2000. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. Dickmann, Max. Personal interview. 30 April 2011. Falcón, Alejandrina. “Un español sin patria ninguna: el idioma de los libros en tiempos de auge editorial.” IX Congreso Argentino de Hispanistas: El hispanismo ante el bicentenario, 27–30 Apr. 2010, La Plata. http://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/trab_eventos/ev.1069/ev.1069.pdf. Gamerro, Carlos. Ulises. Claves de lectura. Buenos Aires: Norma, 2008. García Márquez, Gabriel. “Los pobres traductores buenos.” El País, 20 July 1982, https://elpais.com/ diario/1982/07/21/opinion/396050405_850215.html. Giuliani, Alejandra. Editores y política: Entre el mercado latinoamericano de libros y el primer peronismo (1938– 1955). Temperley: Tren en Movimiento, 2018. James, Daniel. Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Joyce, James. Ulises. Translated by José Salas Subirat, 1st ed. Buenos Aires: Rueda, 1945. ———. Ulises. Translated by José Salas Subirat, 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Rueda, 1952. ———. Ulises. Translated by José María Valverde. Barcelona: Lumen, 1976. ———. Ulises. Translated by Marcelo Zabaloy. Buenos Aires: Cuenco de Plata, 2015. ———. Ulises. Translated by Rolando Costa Picazo. Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2017.Lago, Eduardo. “El íncubo de lo imposible.” Revista de libros, no. 61, January 2002, pp. 49–56. https://www.revistadelibros.com/articulo_imprimible.php?art=4010&t=articulos. Larraz, Fernando. “1938, año cero de la ‘Edad de oro de la edición argentina’. Política y cultura en la gestación de las editoriales Losada y Sudamericana.” Jornadas sobre la Historia de las Políticas Editoriales en la Argentina, 2–3 July 2015, Museo del Libro y de la Lengua, Buenos Aires. 175

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Medina Casado, Carmelo. “Spanish Translations of Ulysses: A Teaching Approach.” New Perspectives on James Joyce: Ignatius Loyola, Make Haste to Help Me, edited by María Luisa Suárez Castiñeira, Asier Altuna García de Salazar, and Olga Fernández Vicente. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 2009. Miranda Klix, José Guillermo, editor. Cuentistas argentinos de hoy. Buenos Aires: Claridad, 1929. Petersen, Lucas. El traductor del Ulises: Salas Subirat. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2016. ———. Santiago Rueda: edición, vanguardia e intuición. Temperley: Tren en Movimiento, 2019. Petit de Murat, Ulyses. Borges Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Municipalidad de Buenos Aires, 1980. Piglia, Ricardo. El último lector. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. “Panorama bibliográfico de 1945.” Marcha, vol. 8, no. 315, 8 January 1946, pp. 14–15. Rueda, Santiago. “Acerca del Ulises de James Joyce.” Gaceta del Libro, vol. 1, March 1945, pp. 29–30. Saer, Juan José. “El destino en español del Ulises.” El País, 11 June 2004, https://elpais.com/diario/2004/06/12/babelia/1086997822_850215.html. Sagastizábal, Leandro de. La edición de libros en la Argentina: una empresa de cultura. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1995. Salas Subirat, José. Marinetti: un ensayo para los fósiles del futurismo. Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor, Biblioteca de Exposición y Crítica, 1926. ———. A cien años de Beethoven (1827–Marzo–1927). Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor, Biblioteca de Exposición y Crítica, 1927. ———. “Apuntes con motivo de la traducción de Ulises.” Contrapunto, no. 4, June 1945, p. 12. ———. “Nota del traductor.” Ulises, by James Joyce. Buenos Aires: Santiago Rueda, 1945. ———. El secreto de la concentración. Buenos Aires: Américalee, Biblioteca de Superación Personal, 1953. ———. “La obra poética de James Joyce.” Davar, no. 54, September–October 1954. Sarlo, Beatriz. “Oralidad y lenguas extranjeras. El conflicto en la literatura argentina durante el primer tercio del siglo XX.” Orbis Tertius, vol. 1, no. 1, 1996, pp. 167–178. “Translator of James Joyce, Also Prof. of Salesman.” Daily Journal, 27 September 1957. Wilcock, Juan Rodolfo. “James Joyce: Ulises (Traducción de J. Salas Subirat, Editorial Rueda).” Disco, no. 4, 1946, pp. 30–31. Willson, Patricia. La constelación del Sur. Traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2004. ———. “Página impar: el lugar del traductor en el auge de la industria cultural.” Historia crítica de la literatura, no. 9, edited by Noé Jitrik. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2004, pp. 12–3142.

Further Readings Conde-Parrilla, María Angeles. “Ulises de James Joyce, en la traducción de José Salas Subirat (1945).” Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2012. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/ bmcd5173. A critical look at Salas Subirat’s translation Ulises. Lago, Eduardo. “El íncubo de lo imposible.” Revista de libros, no. 61, January 2002, pp. 49–56. Award-winning essay on the three then-available translations. Medina Casado, Carmelo. “Spanish Translations of Ulysses. A Teaching Approach.” New Perspectives on James Joyce: Ignatius Loyola, Make Haste to Help Me, edited by María Luisa Suárez Castiñeira, Asier Altuna García de Salazar, and Olga Fernández Vicente. Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 2009. A comparative and didactic exploration from the perspective of translation studies. Petersen, Lucas. El traductor del Ulises: Salas Subirat. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2016. A deeper and more expansive dive into the life and work of this singular translator. Salas Subirat, José. “Nota del traductor.” Ulises, by James Joyce. Buenos Aires: Santiago Rueda, 1945. In this historical document, Salas shares his thoughts upon finalizing the first version of his translation.

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10 Jorge Luis Borges’s Theory and Practice of Translation Efraín Kristal

Introduction In one of the essays from the 1936 Historia de la eternidad (A History of Eternity), Borges speculates that our literary experience is inevitably belated: “El primer monumento de las literaturas occidentales, la Ilíada, fue compuesto hará tres mil años; es verosímil conjeturar que en ese enorme plazo todas las afinidades íntimas, necesarias fueron advertidas y escritas alguna vez” [The first monument of Western literature, the Iliad, was composed some three thousand years ago; it is possible to conjecture that in this vast period of time all the intimate and necessary associations have been noted and written down at some point] (Borges 1989a: 384).1 Borges has also made connections between the belatedness with which we come to literature and the creative process, which is also a way of underscoring his views on translation, as perhaps the only method available to writers: “quizá nosotros apenas podemos ensayar algunas módicas, modestísimas variaciones sobre lo ya escrito: tenemos que contar la misma historia, pero de un modo ligeramente distinto, cambiando quizá los énfasis, y eso es todo, pero eso no tiene que entristecernos” [perhaps all we are able to rehearse are some moderate, rather modest variations on what has already been written: we have to tell the same story but in a slightly different way, changing some of the emphasis, perhaps, and that is all, but this does not have to be a source of sadness] (Borges and Ferrari 1998: 66–67).2 Telling the “same story,” but in a slightly different way, is an instructive description of literary translation, conceived by Borges as a creative process. For him, as for so many characters in his own fictions—and most of his fictions abound with translators, and with real as well as imaginary translations—the creator of a literary work is inevitably a recreator, or an editor who picks out and recombines elements of other works that are already there. If, as Borges believed, the themes and stories that can be addressed in a work of literature have likely all been exhausted after thousands of years of literary practice, translation is not only a privileged vantage point from which to appreciate the craft of writing literature, it is perhaps the only one. From this perspective, Borges never favored an original over a translation, as Suzanne Jill Levine underscored in The Subversive Scribe, a seminal book on the theory and practice of translating Latin American literature: “Borges has proposed, essentially, a tentative status for the original as one of many possible versions” (Levine 6).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-13

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It might not be possible to tell new stories, but it is always possible to tell the same story in a different way, or even a better way, or to add interesting touches to literary ideas that have been handed down by others. For Borges, an unfaithful translation that takes liberties can be better, more persuasive, or more satisfying than a faithful one. Borges went so far as to claim, famously, that an original can be “unfaithful” to a translation, when the translation treats the same content with greater and more thoughtful care than, say, a sloppy original, written in haste. Indeed, in his thoughtful assessment of Samuel Henley’s translation of William Beckford’s Vathek, Borges concludes: “El original es infiel a la traducción” [The original is unfaithful to the translation] (Borges 1989: 110). But Borges’s own translations were anything but sloppy. They often played a key role in his creative process, particularly in the creation of his own works of narrative fiction.

Translation as a Creative Art Borges’s own view of literary translation was a plea in favor of creative re-creation, and it suggests a definition of literary translation as “una variante que vale la pena ensayar” [a variation worth trying out] (Borges 1985). For Borges there are no perfect originals, any more than there can be perfect translations or perfect rough drafts. A translator ought to explore possibilities and potentialities in a text the original author did not try out for a myriad of reasons, including the limitations of the source language, or the possibilities of the target language to render a particular literary effect. Borges thought of a translation as a recombination of elements, or as a more advanced draft for purposes that may have nothing to do with the context in which the original was produced. Borges was inspired by Paul Valéry and Alfonso Reyes, for whom it is a mistake to assume that a published text is a definitive work. For Paul Valéry, the fact that a work of literature is in print does not mean that it cannot be subject to further modifications, and for Alfonso Reyes, publication is a way for a writer to move on and let go of what could have become an endless process of making further changes to manuscripts. Borges applied this way of thinking to translation, conceiving it as a stage in an ongoing process of literary creation, in which anyone can participate with their own versions or variations, and no one can make persuasive claims to originality in any absolute sense. With this kind of reasoning, Borges expressed a viewpoint—he reiterated on several different occasions with the same words—that a translator ought to treat the original as any writer would treat a draft: To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft 9 is necessarily inferior to draft H—for there can only be drafts. The concept of the ‘definitive’ text corresponds only to religion or exhaustion. (Borges 1999: 69) Borges affirmed the right of a translator to swerve away from the original and to interpolate, and he formulated a definition of translation, which he restated in several of his essays on translation: “translation is a long experimental game of chance played with omissions and emphasis” (Borges 1999: 69). In his incisive formulation, Borges affirms that translation as re-creation involves choice, chance, and experimentation. For Borges, the incommensurability of any two languages, or even any two modes of expression within the same language, provides stimulating possibilities for the literary translator, who must choose between registering the singularities of an original work and eliminating the details that obscure its general 178

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effects. Additions and omissions are as important to Borges as rendering what is already there because the purpose of a literary translation is not accuracy, but the creation of a literary work of interest that can stand on its own. Borges argued that the ideal arbiter of a translation is the unlikely reader who can resist bias in favor of the original. In his 1935 essay on “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights,” Borges reiterates his view that an original and a translation should be appreciated as variations on a theme in which neither original nor translation should be favored a priori, or perhaps at all, and he adds that translators often translate either against each other or “in the wake of literature” (Borges 1999: 109). To translate against another translation is to do something that goes against the grain of what someone else might have done. And, to translate in the wake of literature is to engage in a dialogue with literary resources fashioned by others. In his assessment of Enno Littman’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights, Borges laments the lack of interpolations, and the fact that the German translator never “omits a single word.” It bothers Borges that the translation is always “lucid, readable, mediocre” (Borges 1999: 108). Borges would have preferred a translation with interesting transformations, and in particular with transformations inspired by important developments in German literature that can allow us to read the literature of the past with fresh eyes. As Borges famously concludes in his assessment of the German translation, he dislikes his sense of what a better German translation could have been: “What might a Kaf ka do had he remade the Arabian Nights in line with the Germanic distortion, the unheimlichkeit of Germany?” (Borges 1999: 109). Borges would agree with George Steiner’s contention, in After Babel, that a translation can tap into potentialities unrealized in the original, precisely because the linguistic differences or incompatibilities between two modes of expression may bring forth aspects of the work that might be obscured in the language of the original. Borges was well aware that certain features in a poem may never be translatable, but he also knew that a poem could shine in a translation, where the original falls short, and that any text can be a pretext for the creation of another in the same language or in a translation. These views on translation as a creative process, and of the original as a draft, amount to a theory of translation that informs Borges’s practice as a translator.

Borges the Translator Borges was a prolific translator, and he often translated with others, particularly with friends, or family members. He worked on some translations with his mother, Doña Leonor Azevedo, and he also worked on some translations with his wife, María Kodama, including one of his final masterpieces, a translation of the literary section of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. Translating with the assistance of others became a necessity when he lost his sight from a progressive degenerative eye disease that made it impossible for him to read or write on his own by the 1960s. Borges’s most important translation is arguably the large volume in collaboration with Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares, the Antología de la literatura fantástica, first published in 1940. Almost as important was the 1943 volume of detective fiction Borges edited and translated with Adolfo Bioy Casares: Los mejores cuentos policiales. It is worth noting that the first volume of Los mejores cuentos policiales was all translated by Borges and Bioy Casares. A second volume of Los mejores cuentos policiales was published in 1951 with some translations by Borges and Bioy Casares and several translations by other authors, all of whom are credited. The anthologies of fantastic literature and detective fiction opened the floodgates to both 179

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fantastic and detective elements in Latin American narrative fiction. Today it is impossible to think of Latin American literature without the preeminence of these two genres, but before the publication of these two edited volumes, they were hardly practiced by Latin American writers, and—incidentally but not coincidentally—one of Borges’s own contributions to literature is the combination of fantastic and detective fiction, as in some of his signature tales, such as “La Muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”) and “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”). What was hardly noticed when the Antología de la literatura fantástica was published is that Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares were not simply introducing works of fantastic literature through their work as translators and editors of this influential volume—they were actually transforming the originals they were translating in significant ways, along the lines of Borges’s view that a translation is a variation worth attempting, or a creative process in which the translators can take liberties. In Borges’s translations—those he signed with his own name and those in which he ­collaborated—he would modify the original whenever he saw fit. In some cases, the very same translation published in one venue could read like a different work when published someplace else. In collaboration with his friend Ulises Petit de Murat, Borges translated The Moon of the Caribbees, a play by Eugene O’Neill, whose title they changed to Donde está marcada la cruz. It is instructive to summarize the markedly different role this translation played in future projects by these two writers. In the culminating scene of the original play by Eugene O’Neill, there is a moment in which characters appear on stage who represent the delirium of one of the protagonists. This is exactly how Petit de Murat worked on an equivalent scene in the filmscript he wrote for Mario Soffici’s 1939 film Prisioneros de la tierra, a film Borges praised in the highest of terms, and whose influence in Borges’s own writings has not been noticed. By including the translation of the play in the anthology of fantastic literature, the culminating scene is no longer a projection of a delirium on a stage, but a fantastic appearance of ghosts or supernatural beings. It is not a coincidence that Borges published “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in 1939, the same year in which Prisioneros de la tierra was released, and a few months before the publication of the anthology of fantastic literature. “Pierre Menard” explores the possibility that two identical texts can have different meanings, which is exactly what happens to the translation of O’Neill’s play by Borges and Petit Murat, which is a fantastic work of literature when it appears in Borges’s anthology, but an antecedent to the portrayal of a psychological condition in Petit de Murat’s screenplay. Borges, Silvina Ocampo, and Bioy Casares knew exactly what they were doing when they were putting together their anthology of fantastic literature. They knew they were taking many liberties in their translations, and they also knew they were creating fantastic readings of works that were not necessarily intended to be read as fantastic works of literature in their original contexts. Years later, their translation practice generated an awkward situation when they agreed to publish an Italian version of the Antología de la literatura fantástica. Borges was disappointed that the Italian editors did not translate their translations; that they had looked for, or commissioned, Italian versions of the source texts. According to Bioy Casares, Borges said the following when he felt regret and disappointment that the Italian editors had not translated the translations: “Me hice leer algunos cuentos breves de la edición italiana de nuestra Antología de la literatura fantástica. No tradujeron nuestra antología: buscaron las fuentes y tradujeron. Procedieron con seriedad, a costa del lector” [I had someone read me some of the short stories from the Italian edition of our Antología de la literatura fantástica. They did not 180

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translate our anthology. Instead, they looked for the sources and translated those. They proceeded with a seriousness that was to the detriment of the reader] (Bioy Casares, 1561–1562). As Bioy Casares makes abundantly clear, even when Borges was in his eighties, he did not believe in the concept of the rights of the author because he thought that literature was a collective activity, and that originality in literature is an illusion in our time. Bioy Casares recalls that not Borges, Silvina, or Ocampo had given any thought to intellectual property when they undertook the project of their Antología de la literatura fantástica. As Bioy Casares indicated, their attitude to intellectual property was one of glibness even when it mattered to Victoria Ocampo (Borges’s editor and Silvina Ocampo’s sister), who wrote an article against literary piracy: En 1940 no teníamos conciencia de la propiedad intelectual. Recuerdo que nos reíamos de un irritado artículo de Victoria en que hablaba de ‘piratas chilenos’. La palabra pirata, en ese contexto, nos parecía cómica; el asunto miserable. Cuando compilamos la Antología de la literatura fantástica, no nos preocupamos de asegurarnos los derechos [In 1940 we had no awareness of the notion of intellectual property. I remember that we were even amused by an article by Victoria (Ocampo) in which she expressed her irritation with ‘Chilean (literary) pirates.’ The word pirate, in this particular context, felt amusing to us, and the whole thing was inconsequential to us. When we compiled the Antología de la literatura fantástica, we did nothing to secure any rights]. (Bioy Casares, 1374–1375) In time, Bioy Casares began to get a better grip on these matters, especially when he was working with Borges on the collection of translations of detective novels called “El séptimo círculo,” another editorial initiative by Borges and Bioy Casares that had a transformative impact on the history of Latin American narrative fiction, which had until then ignored the genre of the detective novel. Because Bioy Casares took it upon himself to deal with foreign literary agents, as Borges had no interest in these practical matters, he came across legal issues, particularly with American literary agents. Bioy Casares remembers an incident in which he and Borges were not able to publish a Spanish translation of Death to the Rescue (1933) in their collection of detective novels because its American author, Milward Kennedy, had lost a lawsuit in which his novel was condemned as slanderous of an individual who argued that a character in this work of fiction was intended to depict him (Bioy Casares, 1375). Bioy Casares also recalls that even when he began to take the matter of intellectual property more seriously, Borges did not: La ansiedad con que yo esperaba a veces la noticia (de novelas) que no pudimos publicar me convenció de la existencia de los derechos. Borges todavía no cree en ellos, aunque tuvo más de un ingrato despertar (con estos asuntos) [The anxiety with which I was waiting for news about (novels) we were unable to publish convinced me of the existence of these rights. Borges still does not really believe in them, even though he has already had more than one unhappy awakening with these matters]. (Bioy Casares, 1375) As can be gleaned from Bioy Casares’s book on Borges, his friend never truly believed in the author’s rights, even toward the end of his life, when he was well aware that these matters were dominant in the publishing industry. When Borges became upset with the Italian 181

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editors for not translating his translations in the anthology of fantastic literature, ignoring the effort he and his friends had made to transform many originals, Bioy Casares persuaded him not to insist. Bioy Casares recalls telling Borges: “Nos jorobaron. No podemos protestar” [They got us, and we can’t protest] (Bioy Casares, 1562). According to Bioy Casares, Borges finally agreed and put the matter to rest when he said “hoy el noventa y nueve por ciento de la gente les daría razón” [today 99% of the people would agree with the editors] (Bioy Casares, 1562). Borges’s views about literature as a collaborative enterprise are incompatible with editorial practices, but they were in tune with the views of some of his contemporaries, including those of Robin Collingwood, the British philosopher for whom the intellectual property was not conducive to artistic and literary creation as the kind of collaborative process he thought they were: If we look candidly at the history of art, or even the little that we happen to know, we shall see that collaboration between artists has always been the rule. I refer especially to that kind of collaboration in which one artist grafts his own work upon that of another. […] This fooling about personal property must cease. Let painters and writers and musicians steal with both hands whatever they can use, wherever they can find it. (Collingwood, 319–320) All of Borges’s literary projects are collaborations in one way or another. Indeed, the notion of drafting one’s own work onto that of another was part and parcel of his approach to translation from the outset. One of the earliest existing manuscripts by Borges, belonging to the Helft family of Buenos Aires (a family of distinguished art collectors, literary scholars, and promoters of the arts), is a notebook he filled when he was around seven years old. The notebook includes some mythological texts in English, a language Borges had not yet mastered. In an interview with André Camp, Borges has referred to this notebook as “le premier livre, ou plutôt le premier cahier que j’ai jamais écrit. C’est une mythologie greque écrite dans un très mauvais anglais” [the first book, or rather the first notebook I ever wrote. It is a Greek mythology written in very poor English] (Camp, 67). It is actually an exercise of translation of sorts, because the proper names of some of the mythological characters are in Spanish as if the boy had consulted a mythological manual in Spanish, his first language. In these literary exercises, words in Spanish sometimes remain, as if he could not find an English equivalent. In these texts, the boy appears to summarize contents and translate fragments, but he also adds personal bits. One of these exercises is a summary of the myth of the Minotaur in the labyrinth, a theme to which Borges would return for decades to come. Here is a transcription of a section of this text: When Teseo Was young, his father went to another country and was made king, liveing nothing to his son but his sword and sandles. One day his mother gave him the sandles and sword. So he went in serch, in serch of his father. Soon he went there, and soon find himself his father’s castle. There have had been a war in Creta and Thepas, and Creta was victory, Dedalo made a great laberinto, on which live the moster called minotauro. (Helft and Pauls, 99) The versions of the boy in his notebook are not mere transcriptions or paraphrases. He sometimes intervenes with his own voice, as when he adds a lament in his rendering of the episode in which Acteon is transformed into a deer and killed by Diana’s hounds. Borges’s text is all the more moving because of his spelling and grammatical errors: “Oh Action, why did you 182

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went to look at Diana?” (A facsimile of this text is reproduced on page 12 of the exhibition catalog Borges, the Time Machine, curated by Nicolás Helft and Alan Pauls). As a child, Borges also learned that the vicissitudes of a translation can be subject to the incompatibilities between two languages, as when a certain noun in one language is associated with the female gender, but with the masculine gender in another. This happened in Borges’s first published work, the translation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” which he published in La Nación, a Buenos Aires newspaper, in 1910, when he was around ten years old. In Wilde’s original, a male bird, a swallow, falls in love with a female bird, a reed-bird. In Spanish, swallows are called “golondrinas” and their grammatical gender is female. There is also a strong tradition in Spanish poetry for which the bird has female connotations. Little Borges translated “swallow” as “golondrina,” but he also changed the gender of the character, who in his story becomes female. In Spanish, the word “reed” is masculine, and can be translated as “junco.” Borges called his “reed-bird” a “junco” and changed the gender of the character to a male. After changing the genders of the two birds, Borges had to make other minor adjustments to his translation, and his changes also imply a significant modification to the story, in which the swallow kisses the statue of the prince. Borges’s translation eliminates the homoerotic connotations of the kiss. In the future, Borges would take these kinds of l­iberties—and many others—even when there were no such compatibilities. In his translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” for example, Borges erases all indications that the victim of a theft is a woman, much less the Queen of France, in order to shift the emphasis of his translation away from the victim of the theft to the cat and mouse game between the detective and the thief, which is the primary focus of his translation.

A Case Study: Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” Roberto Bolaño considered “Enoch Soames” by Max Beerbohm to be “un cuento perfecto” [a perfect story] (Bolaño, n.p.). According to Bolaño sections of Beerbohm’s short story are narrated “como un sueño, como una pesadilla, como si Borges hubiera escrito el relato” [like a dream, like a nightmare, as if Borges had written the tale] (Bolaño, n.p.). There is a sense in which the story Bolaño read and admired is not a story Borges could have written, but one Borges actually did write, in at least three ways: The first is that Bolaño read the story in Spanish, in a translation by Borges, so in that sense Bolaño did read a story written by Borges. Indeed, the translation appeared in the Antología de la literatura fantástica, which was first published in 1940; and Borges’s signature tales began to appear in book form in 1941 when “The Garden of Forking Paths” (later incorporated into Ficciones in 1944) was published. The anthology was a collective project with Silvina Ocampo and her husband Adolfo Bioy Casares. Translating all of the stories was a collective project, and all three deserve credit for their work, but for the sake of convenience, but also because Borges was the senior and established writer of the group, this chapter will do as Bolaño has done, and refer to the translation as Borges’s. The second is that the story that Bolaño read reads like a story that could have been written by Borges because some elements of the translation, including several additions and cuts, are Borgesian touches, which are not found in the original. Finally, the third is that there are elements in Max Beerbohm’s original that read like Borges because Borges used some of those very same elements in other stories he wrote after translating “Enoch Soames.” In the story, and in the translation, Enoch Soames is a writer convinced of his literary greatness, but frustrated by his lack of fame. He makes a pact with the devil that allows him 183

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to travel one hundred years into the future for just five hours to assess his literary posterity and is devastated to discover that he had none. His name does appear in a comprehensive literary history of the period in which he wrote, but instead of appearing as an author, he appears as a fictional character in a short story by Max Beerbohm, which is ostensibly the story being read. In the original, Max Beerbohm introduces himself as a character in his fictional world. Within his fiction, the tale being read is presented as a nonfictional account. All this being said, Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” and Borges’s translation are, in many significant ways, different stories: they share a similar plot, but they are about different things, they do different things. The tone of the two stories is not the same; the protagonist of the original has another kind of pathos than the protagonist of the translation, and there are significant literary effects in the translation that are not in the original. While Beerbohm goes out of his way to avoid the infinite regress, the possibility that time travel may alter the future, or the possibility that a character who travels into the future may meet individuals he knew in the past, or more disturbingly, that he may meet himself, Borges’s translation opens the door to all of these possibilities. In fact, Borges’s translation opens the door to the possibility that each time the time traveler returns to the present, his account of his experiences in the present may alter the future. In Borges’s version, the time traveler is real when he travels, and he will be real when he returns. But since he does return to the present, and his return to the present will affect the reality of the future, the future that awaits him after his first return can no longer be the same future as it was the first time he traveled there, and, therefore, an infinite regress is suggested in Borges’s translation. The possibilities that open up in Borges’s translation, however, are not evident in the original, which was intended and read as a parody. Max Beerbohm was a humorist, a satirical and ironic observer of England’s literary scene. He loved literature, but he also knew how to keep a distance from it, and it amused him to parody the eccentrics that inhabit London’s literary world, some charming and some not so charming, especially those who take literature too seriously, in the way he thought that the French symbolists took their literary seriousness beyond the pale. From this point of view, the protagonist of “Enoch Soames” was intended to be an object of laughter and ridicule, at least in the first-half of the story, when his literary hopes have not yet been dashed, and when the young and inexperienced Max Beerbohm of the story does not have the literary chops to determine whether he may be dealing with a great but misunderstood genius, or with a literary fake. But the first-person narrator trades some of the satire and ridicule for pity and compassion when he perceives that Enoch Soames may be feeling despair. The story shifts gears from the description of a proud writer who longs for fame to the misery he feels when his hopes are dashed in the world of his contemporaries, and then in the world of posterity, which he is able to visit through the conceit of time travel. In Borges’s translation, the Argentine master transformed a humorous, satirical tale with fantastic twists about writers who take themselves and literature too seriously into a work of fantastic literature pregnant with possibilities that Beerbohm meticulously avoided or downplayed, precisely of the kind that were about to emerge in Borges’s fictional world, in stories he was about to write. Indeed, Borges’s translation of Beerbohm’s story first appeared in 1940, as he was just beginning to publish the signature tales that made him famous—that is to say when he had not yet developed the Borgesian potential of the literary possibilities in Max Beerbohm’s tale. A reading of Beerbohm’s original with Borgesian inflections is compatible with Borges’s approach to literature in general, to translation in particular, and to his suggestive doctrine by which writers can create their own precursors, and works of literature can modify “our 184

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conception of the [literary] past” (Borges 1999b: 365). The casting of ulterior light on a work of the literary past, and even the distortion of a work of literature in light of another, is also, according to Borges, something translators ought to consider if they can generate a literary work worth reading. Borges’s suggestion that writers can “create” their own precursors and his conviction that a translator has the license to transform an original if it serves a worthwhile literary purpose both apply to his translation of Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames.” Borges’s translation participates in the process of making Beerbohm’s original into an antecedent to some of his own works.

Commonalities and Differences In the original story by Max Beerbohm, and in Borges’s translation, Enoch Soames is a writer convinced of his literary greatness and certain of his significance to posterity. Soames’s longing for public recognition is as intense as his contempt for the work of his contemporaries, and for most major figures of the literary past. His favorite poet is Milton, and his admiration for the writer of Paradise Lost loosely sets the groundwork for the fantastic twist of the story: Soames makes a Faustian pact with the devil that allows him to travel one hundred years into the future for just five hours to assess the reception of his literary legacy. He expects to bask in the glory of his overwhelming fame but is devastated to discover how wrong he was about his hopes of literary immortality. His three published works are listed in the catalog of the British Library, and his name does appear in a comprehensive literary history of the period, but instead of appearing as an author, he is mentioned as a fictional character in a short story by Max Beerbohm. In the original, Max Beerbohm introduces himself in the first person as a character in his own fictional world (whom this chapter will call “Max Beerbohm” in quotation marks to differentiate the character from Max Beerbohm, the author), and in that fictional world, the tale being read is presented as a nonfictional account by “Max Beerbohm” of Enoch Soames, a pathetic curmudgeon. The irony, the fantastic element (time travel), and the supernatural element of the story (a pact with the devil) are signaled by “Enoch,” the protagonist’s first name, an allusion to the Book of Enoch in which the holy man is granted the opportunity to have a vision of God’s future judgment on mankind. Like his namesake, Enoch Soames in Beerbohm’s tale is granted a wish by a supernatural being, but the supernatural being is the devil of the Faustian tradition, and the fulfillment of his wish is demoralizing. Beerbohm’s Soames did not intend to bargain away his life for such a humiliating disappointment when he was expecting to bask in the joy of his posthumous fame. Notwithstanding the identical plot, Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames,” and Borges’s translation are, in significant ways, different stories. Indeed, the original and the translation belong to different literary genres and the books in which they appeared would be rightly found in different sections and shelves of libraries or bookstores. Any reader who does not project their own assumptions about Borges’s literary conceits into the original would immediately notice that the tone of the two stories is appreciably different, and that the literary vision that informs the original jars with the literary vision that informs the translation. The Faustian pact with the devil is the supernatural conceit, thanks to which Enoch Soames can be disabused of his conviction that he will be recognized as a great literary figure in the future, but Beerbohm meticulously goes out of his way to avoid developing the literary potential of time travel, and hence renders his work a fantastic tale precisely as Borges would have in stories that explore cyclical time, the infinite regress, the possibility that the past could be altered by the future, the possibility that a character who travels into the future 185

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may meet individuals he knew in the past, or more disturbingly, that an individual may meet his own self in the future. To ensure Soames does not encounter himself in the future, Beerbohm lets the reader know that Soames vanished shortly after his return to the present when the devil takes his soul to hell, with no mention of what happened to his body. To ensure Soames does not meet anyone he might have known in his lifetime, Beerbohm sets the time travel to a date beyond the possible lifetimes of his acquaintances. In Beerbohm’s original, Soames travels to the future, returns to the past, and dies on the same day, and the only human being who knows that Soames has traveled to the future is “Max Beerbohm.” Beerbohm leaves open the possibility that some individuals in the future may have reason to believe that Soames might appear among them, but he forecloses the possibility that Soames could have any contact with them or they with him in ways that would change the course of events in either the past or the future. In Beerbohm’s original, the narrator makes the arbitrary claim that a time traveler is a creature of flesh and blood when they travel to the future and when they return to the past, but a ghostly semblance when they appear once again in the future. In the original, Beerbohm’s narrator knows that Soames’s disappearance from the world of the living is definitive when the devil takes him to hell, even though he wishes things could turn out differently for the sake of Soames: “I wish I could think him destined to revisit the world actually, physically, consciously. I wish he had this one brief escape, this one small treat, to look forward to” (Beerbohm, 40–41). But this is not possible in Beerbohm’s story because the “next time, that building and those creatures will be real. It is of Soames that there will be but the semblance” (Beerbohm, 40). When Soames returns from the future, and before the devil takes him to the netherworld to fulfill his part of the bargain, Soames begs Beerbohm to do something to change his posthumous fate: “try to make them know that I did exist” (Beerbohm, 36). “Max Beerbohm’s” effort to make the literary world know about Soames’s existence is to write a “memoir” about Soames, identical to the story readers are reading, and one that had no impact in changing posterity’s view of Soames when Soames traveled to the future. Beerbohm makes it clear that “Beerbohm” did nothing else that would have had an impact on Soames’s legacy for the sake of Soames because the ­“memoir” was composed in 1919, fifteen years after Soames’s demise, when a book about the literary life of England in the 1890s has recently appeared. “Max Beerbohm” notices that the book does not mention Soames, who had published his only three books in that decade. The memoir “Max Beerbohm” writes is a response to this book, but neither it, nor anything else “Max Beerbohm” may have done in his lifetime, had an effect on Soames’s literary legacy.3 In Borges’s translation, on the other hand, the narrator is not definitive in foreclosing the option of a return by Soames to life after his death. Instead of offering Beerbohm’s counterfactual (“I wish I could think him destined to revisit the world”), Borges uses a simple conditional verb tense, expressing a hope that could be realized: “Me gustaría pensar que está predestinado a visitar el mundo realmente, físicamente, conscientemente” [I would like to think that he is predestined to visit the world really, physically, and consciously].4 Borges famously said that “I tend to return eternally to the Eternal Return” (Borges 1999a: 225), and in keeping with this tendency, his translation opens the door to a return of a living Soames to existence in a hundred years’ time, and even to an eternal return into the future every hundred years, since a character of flesh and blood could return to a present he could alter, and from which he could return again to the future that could be altered by the fact that he has returned. Consistent with the opening up of a possibility of the eternal return, there is a significant change of emphasis in the passage describing “Max Beerbohm’s” five-hour wait until Enoch Soames returns from the future. In the original, “Max Beerbohm” finds the afternoon of his wait to be “endless” (Beerbohm, 27), emphasizing his psychological state as 186

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he anxiously awaits Soames’s return from the future. Borges uses a different adjective more in keeping with the possibility of an eternal return, and with the language of his own literary world, when he calls it an “infinita” [infinite] afternoon (Borges 1981: 44). As with his own cyclical writings (see for example the poem “The Cyclical Night” in Poems of the Night), Borges’s translation leaves the door open to the possibility of an eternal return, and in his own literary world, characters who travel to the future or to the past are able to meet versions of themselves with the understanding that when the younger of the two becomes older, they will meet the younger version of themselves, thus creating an eternal return. An example of this conceit is found in the story “The Other” from The Book of Sand, in which a teenage “Borges” meets the person he will become some four decades later, who will in turn meet his teenage self, four decades later, and so on and so forth. There is another aspect of Beerbohm’s story, which cannot help but feel Borgesian to readers of Borges, and which may have been instructive to Borges himself as he was beginning to write his signature tales, especially those that blur the lines between the conventions of fiction and those of the essay. Beerbohm’s story is a work of fiction, which presents itself as a work of nonfiction, which is misread as a work of fiction within its fictional world. The misreading of the nonfictional narrative as a work of fiction is done by Mr. Nupton, a literary critic of the future who mistakenly reads “Max Beerbohm’s memoir of Enoch Soames” as a short story. “Max Beerbohm” deduces that Nupton must have only read the first pages of his memoir, but not its last pages in which Nupton is mentioned by name and quoted verbatim. Had Nupton read those last pages, he would have realized that the text he was reading was not fiction, but an actual account with implications worthy of a fantastic work of literature. It is worth noting that “Max Beerbohm” does not discuss how disconcerting it would be for Nupton to realize that an individual who wrote many years before he was born could have quoted a book he would write in the future. The avoidance of this speculation is in keeping with Beerbohm’s downplaying of this uncanny potential in his own tale, one that Borges took advantage of in the story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and which inspired a similar conceit in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude when the magician Melquíades offers a book to a character that is identical to the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and which includes aspects of the character’s life he has not yet lived, including the fact that he will read the book that anticipates the end of his own life. In the original story by Beerbohm, this possibility is not emphasized. What is emphasized is simply Nupton’s inability to determine that the text he was reading is a “memoir,” and not a work of narrative fiction, something “Max Beerbohm” considers to be a gross mistake, “a serious fault in anyone who undertakes to do scholar’s work” (Beerbohm, 39). As Beerbohm’s story comes to an end, “Max Beerbohm” is beginning to gain a foothold in the same literary world that rejected Enoch Soames. “Max Beerbohm” has also gained a greater confidence in his own literary judgment than he had when he first met Enoch Soames and was unable to determine his literary merits. Indeed, when “Max Beerbohm” writes his account of “Enoch Soames,” he is more concerned about his own literary reputation than he is about Enoch Soames. “Max Beerbohm” knows that his “memoir” will not be particularly helpful to Enoch Soames’s reputation because his memoir makes it clear that he does not have much regard for Soames’s writings and has come to the conclusion that he was dealing with a ridiculous character, a literary hack. That being said, he is upset that in Nupton’s “repulsive book” (Beerbohm, 39), his own “memoir” is considered to be a work of fiction. “Max Beerbohm” hopes that in the future, some contemporary rival to Nupton will discover Nupton’s mistake and undo his reputation as a literary historian, but he also knows that if this were to happen, Soames would not be considered any less ridiculous than what he appears to be in his 187

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memoir: “How can I write about Enoch Soames without making him ridiculous. Or rather how am I to hush up the horrid fact that he was ridiculous?” (Beerbohm, 4). The main reason why the Borgesian possibilities that open up in Borges’s translation of the story are not in Beerbohm’s original is because “Enoch Soames” was intended to be read as a humorous satire of the English literary world with bittersweet elements, rather than a tale of fantastic fiction. Max Beerbohm was a humorist and a satirical and ironic observer of England’s literary scene.

From Parody to Fantastic Literature Beerbohm’s original was intended to be humorous, and Seven Men (the short story collection by Beerbohm in which “Enoch Soames” appears) can be found in a collection of literary humor advertised with the slogan “hard laughs for soft prices.” In this edition, the blurb by David Cecil on the back cover calls the collection “the finest expression of the comic spirit produced by any English writer during this century,” and the edition also includes a quotation from W.H. Auden in which the poet makes the following assessment of Beerbohm: “as a parodist, he is probably the finest in English.”5 In his prologue to the book—written in the twenty-first century—the playwright and novelist Nigel Williams called it “the funniest book about literature ever written,” adding that “‘Enoch Soames’ is as funny today as it ever was” (Williams, xii). Borges’s translation captures none of Beerbohm’s “laugh out loud humor” because the translation is rendered in a somber, rather than comedic, register. What remains of the original’s hilarity in the translation are touches of irony. Borges’s translation was first published in 1940 in The Anthology of Fantastic Literature he co-edited with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, and its presence in that collection overdetermines its reading as a work of fantastic fiction. In the context of a book in which Max Beerbohm pokes fun at the vanities and foibles of certain literary types, his description of Enoch Soames’s literary projects can be amusing. In the original, for instance, the mention of Enoch Soames’s story about a Parisian seamstress who murders a mannequin she had used to display clothes has a ridiculous air that can make a reader laugh, but in the context of a book on fantastic literature, the story of a criminal seamstress who murders a mannequin feels uncanny rather than humorous, as it plays on the conceit of some fantastic or horror tales in which dolls come alive and become dangerous to humans. Some of the satirical descriptions of Soames in the original are transformed into disconcerting touches in the translation. If in the original Soames is described as “odd-­looking” (Beerbohm, 6), the translation emphasizes his “aspecto extraño” [strange appearance] (Borges 2001: 28). And if Beerbohm calls Soames “dim” (Beerbohm, 6) to suggest that we are not dealing with a bright literary light, Borges uses the uncannier word of “impreciso” [imprecise] (Borges’s “Enoch Soames,” 28), suggesting the presence of a being who is difficult to grasp. When, in the original, Soames “utters the snort that was his laugh” (Beerbohm, 13) before calling Baudelaire a bourgeois poet, the satire of an odd character in the London literary scene unable to offer a measured judgment about the art he practices is as obvious as it is comical because his own dark poetry is clearly influenced by Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Indeed, the samples of Soames’s poetry included in the story read like a parody of French symbolism. But in Borges’s translation the “snorting” sound disappears, and therefore the description of the laugh becomes more somber and eerie because it is undefined: “emitió el sonido que era su risa” [he uttered the sound that was his laugh] (Borges’s “Enoch Soames,” 33). In the original, Soames’s laughter is also described as “a short, single and mirthless sound from the throat” (Beerbohm, 12). The description of an unpleasant shriek is subtly 188

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transformed in Borges’s version to the uncanny guttural sound of a lonesome individual: “La risa de Soames era un sonido gutural, solo y triste” [Soames’s laugh was a guttural sound, alone and sad] (Borges 2001: 32). Borges’s translation of Soames’s laughter suggests a disquieting presence that resonates with the fantastic literature of H.P. Lovecraft in which voices and laughter can be disconcerting because they have the air of the inhuman, often because they are undefined, or defined in ways that evoke inhuman sounds. According to the French novelist Michel Houellebecq: quand un personnage, en posant les mains sur la table devant vous, émet un faible bruit de succion, vous savez que vous êtes dans une nouvelle de Lovecraft; de même quand vous discernez dans son rire une nuance de caquètement [when a character places his hands on the table and emits a sucking noise you know you are in a Lovecraft story, the same is true when you can discern a crackling noise in his laugh]. (Houellebecq, 67) In his Book of Sand, Borges wrote “There are More Things” (a story written in Spanish but with an English title) dedicated to Lovecraft, and the following descriptions of voices and laughter from Lovecraft stories are akin to Borges’s translation but not to Beerbohm’s original: “a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor” (Lovecraft 2004: 96), “[a] hollow and timberless voice” (Lovecraft 1999: 133), or “he laughed hollowly” (Lovecraft 1999: 133). Even when describing laughter, the humor of the original dissolves into a poignant pathos in Borges’s translation. The translation is also not humorous because the anguish of a writer struggling to find recognition is considerably different in the original and in the translation. The original is funny because it stacks a ridiculous misfit against a respectable literary establishment to which he does not belong because his work does not meet its standards. The translation is not funny because the misfit is stacked against a literary world that is not particularly capable of making reliable literary judgments. In the original, “Max Beerbohm” is incensed by the work of a sloppy literary critic who mistook his memoir of Enoch Soames for a short story. In the translation “Max Beerbohm” is skeptical about the methods of literary historians, and not just about the failures of particular literary critics. Borges does not translate the positive language with which Beerbohm’s narrator speaks of a “scholar’s work” (Beerbohm, 39), and his contempt for the work of the academic study of literature is evident in other ways that jar with Beerbohm’s respect for both the British academic establishment and its publishing milieus. In the original, for instance, the narrator discovers how to read the spelling conventions of the future in a text that was copied by Soames, by murmuring the words out loud. He calls his method: “a device which I commend to my reader” (Beerbohm, 34–35). In his translation, Borges transforms Beerbohm’s text in order to express skepticism about the methods of philologists and literary historians when he says that the writing conventions of the future are “Artificios que demuestran la progresiva incompetencia de los filólogos” [artifices that demonstrate the progressive incompetence of philologists] (Borges’s “Enoch Soames,” 50). The humor predicated on the disparity between Enoch Soames’s assessment of his own work and that of the milieu that judges literary history is dissolved in a translation that casts skepticism, rather than respect, on the methods of literary historians. Some of Beerbohm’s humor is also predicated on the comfort he feels with a conservative British literary establishment that does not value innovation for innovation’s sake. In the original, the thought that Soames’s complexities remind “Max Beerbohm” of Mallarmé is as 189

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much a joke on Soames as it is a gentle British snub on the purported complexities of French literature: “I had read ‘L’Après midi d’un Faune’ without extracting a glimmer of meaning. Yet Mallarmé—of course—was a Master. How was I to know that Soames wasn’t another?” (Beerbohm, 10–11). Literary competence for Beerbohm goes hand in hand with a distance from literary practitioners that overvalue their art, and when the story begins, “Max Beerbohm” did not yet have the ability to discern literary pretense in either French symbolist poetry or in the writings of Enoch Soames. The fantastic elements of the original serve the satire, but not for Borges, who was keen to experiment with the impossibilities of a fictional world. Borges had said, in an interview with Antonio Carrizo, that “si la imaginación lo acepta, qué importa lo que la mera lógica diga” [if the imagination accepts something, it does not make a difference what mere logic might say] (Carrizo, 45), but in “Enoch Soames,” Beerbohm was not interested in exploring literary impossibilities the imagination might accept. The supernatural elements of his story are vehicles for satire because Beerbohm needs to come up with a conceit for his protagonist to travel to the future to be disabused of the idea that his works will be appreciated by posterity. Compassion also plays a role in Beerbohm’s original. Behind the ridiculous vanity of his protagonist, there is the humiliation and suffering of an individual who lives alone and is in pain. “Max Beerbohm’s” commiseration with Enoch Soames is also evident in Borges’s translation, but the humor is traded for the metaphysical possibilities of the story. This is why one can appreciate the fantastic potentialities of the story with greater assurance in the translation, and even more so, from the vantage point of Borges’s future writings. One of his last stories, “August 25, 1983,” his most searching exploration of the theme of “the double,” is especially instructive to show how Borges explored and developed the potential of his own translation.

Conclusion: “August 25, 1983” The aftereffects of Borges’s translation of “Enoch Soames” are salient in stories that combine a fantastic element with the fictional premise that they are not fictions, but first-person autobiographical accounts of an experience that involves time travel and the evaluation of a literary life. The most important of these is “August 25, 1983.” As with Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames,” the experience of time travel in “August 25, 1983” is an examination of a fraught literary life, but Borges exploits the very possibilities Beerbohm avoided in his story, most notably the encounter of a character with his own self at a different point in time. Like Beerbohm, Borges needs a mechanism that would allow for time travel in a work of fiction, but he rejects the cliché of a Faustian pact with the devil. Borges’s alternative is time travel that takes place in the realm of dreams. One could add that Borges’s “August 25, 1983” also owes a debt to Giovanni Papini’s “Two Reflections on a Pond,” a story of fantastic literature in which, inexplicably, a man meets his own self as he was seven years earlier, and finds himself insufferable. In “August 25, 1983,” set the day after Borges’s birthday, the narrator, a sixty-one-yearold “Borges,” meets his own self when he is eighty-four years old. The meeting takes place while each of them is dreaming. The younger Borges goes to a hotel room in Adrogué, which the real Borges had frequented in his youth (but which no longer existed when he was in his sixties), and in that hotel room he meets his older self. The eighty-four-year-old Borges has just taken a lethal dosage of pills in his Buenos Aires apartment. The two men are dreaming and meet in a dreamworld. The old Borges finds it amusing that even though he is about to die, he keeps dreaming of the double, and is having a conversation about literary fame. The younger Borges is not entirely surprised that this encounter could happen in a dream 190

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because he had written a story anticipating a suicide of this kind. In a striking statement that underscores the multiple infinite regresses of this story, the older, lovelorn Borges says to the younger one, concerned about his literary fame, that one day he will write the story, the story we are now reading, but that he himself will think it is a fantastic tale. This is a brilliant variation on the destiny of Enoch Soames—whose life is taken to be a fiction—which fully takes advantage of the infinite regress involving lived experiences, dreams, and fictions alternating in a dazzling array of constellations. The literary genealogy of this literary masterpiece can be traced back to Borges’s translation of “Enoch Soames,” and with all due respect, the author of this chapter would venture a slight correction to Roberto Bolaño’s assessment of Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames” as a perfect story that could be Borgesian: Beerbohm’s story is pregnant with unrealized possibilities, some of which Borges worked out in his translation, and others when he wrote stories like “August 25, 1983,” which, in the end, do justify the retroactive reading of “Enoch Soames” as Borgesian.

Notes 1 All translations from items listed in Spanish or French are by the chapter’s author. All translators in published translations are credited in the bibliography. 2 Conversations, by Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari, has been translated into English by Jason Wilson. The present translation is, however, by the chapter’s author. 3 “Beerbohm” indicates that Nupton’s book was published in 1992, but Soames read parts of it in 1997, seventy-eight years after “Beerbohm” wrote his memoir about Soames. This means that “Beerbohm” wrote his account of Soames in 1919, which corresponds to the date of its 1919 publication in book form. In the first edition of the story published in 1916, “Beerbohm” indicates that Nupton’s book was written eighty-two years after he wrote his memoir. In short, Beerbohm made adjustments to his text to make sure that the date of its publication of his story would correspond to the date in which “Beerbohm” wrote his “memoir” about Soames. The story was first published in the May 1916 issue of The Century Magazine. It is clear that Borges translated the book version of the story because it includes the figure of seventy-eight years rather than the original eighty-two years. 4 Beerbohm, Max, “Enoch Soames,” in Borges’s translation, of “Enoch Soames,” in Antología de la literatura fantástica (in which Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo must have collaborated), Barcelona, 1981, p. 54. From now on, this chapter will quote this Spanish translation as Borges’s “Enoch Soames” but wants to acknowledge that this was a collaborative project in which the specific contributions of the three collaborators were not specified. It should also be noted that the translations are often significant transformations of the originals, and the collaborators make no mention of these changes in the book itself, although this chapter will quote clear evidence that they were aware of what they were doing as seen in Bioy Casares’s memoir quoted in this piece. 5 These comments by W.H. Auden appear as a blurb in Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men and Two Others. London: Prion Books, 2001.

Works Cited Beerbohm, Max “Enoch Soames.” Seven Men and Two Others. London: Prion, 2001. Bioy Casares, Adolfo. Borges, edited by Daniel Martino. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2006. Bolaño, Roberto. “Un cuento perfecto.” Tijeretazos, http://tijeretazos.org/Literaria/Enoch/Enoch001. htm. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Mis libros.” La nación, 25 Apr. 1985, n.p. ———. “La metáfora.” Historia de la eternidad, Obras completas, vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1989a. ———. “Sobre el ‘Vathek’ de William Beckford.” Otras inquisiciones, Obras completas, vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1989b. ———. “August 25, 1983.” Translated by Andrew Hurley. Jorge Luis Borges Collected Fictions. New York: Penguin, 1998. ———. “Circular Time.” Translated by Esther Allen. Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin, 1999a. 191

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———. “Homeric Versions.” Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin, 1999b, p. 69. ———. “Kaf ka and his Precursors.” Translated by Eliot Weinberger. Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin, 1999. ———. “The Cyclical Night.” Translated by Alastair Reid. Poems of the Night, edited by Efraín Kristal. New York: Penguin, 2010. Borges, Jorge Luis, Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares, editors and translators. Antología de la literatura fantástica. Barcelona: Edhasa, 1981. Borges, Jorge Luis and Osvaldo Ferrari. En diálogo II. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1998. Camp, André. Entretien avec Jorge Luis Borges. Paris: HB Éditions, 1999. Carrizo, Antonio, editor and interviewer. Borges el memorioso. Conversaciones de Jorge Luis Borges con Antonio Carrizo. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982, p. 45. Collingwood, Robin. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Helft, Nicolás and Alan Pauls. El factor Borges: nueve ensayos ilustrados. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000. ———, editors. Borges, the Time Machine. Hong Kong: C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd, 2001. Houellebecq, Michel. H.P. Lovecraft. Contre le monde, contre la vie. Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1999. Levine, Suzanne Jill. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1991. Lovecraft, H.P. “Cool Air.” The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. New York: Penguin, 1999. ———. “The Shunned House.” The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. New York: Penguin, 2004. Wilde, Oscar. “El príncipe feliz.” Translated by Jorge Luis Borges. El País, Buenos Aires: 25 June 1910. Williams, Nigel. Introduction. Seven Men and Two Others, by Max Beerbom. London: Prion Books, 2001.

Further Readings Esplin, Emron. “Translating Poe: Jorge Luis Borges’s Edgar Allan Poe Translations.” Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America. University of Georgia Press, 2019, pp. 67–100. In a chapter of this important book, Emron Esplin shows the fascinating role Borges’s translations of Edgar Alan Poe played in Borges’s conceptions and reconceptions of the American writer as a precursor to his own writings, with implications for the reception of Poe in Latin America. Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. In this book Kristal offers an account of Borges’s views on translation and an account of Borges’s methods as a translator, and he also shows Borges’s creative process in many of his signature tales, which can be traced back to specific translation projects Borges had already undertaken on his own, or in collaboration with others, such as his work with Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo in the Antología de la literatura fantástica. Levine, Suzanne Jill. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1991. In this pioneering book Suzanne Jill Levine persuasively argues that Borges’s approach to translation must be understood as a specific kind of creative process in which literary translation is an art form that is not, in theory, inferior to creative writing. The book exemplifies this approach in Levine’s distinguished trajectory as a translator of Borges and many others. Olea Franco, Rafael. “Una infidelidad creadora y feliz: El civilizado arte de la traducción.” Los dones literarios de Borges. Madrid: Vervuert, 2006, pp. 67–98. In this major article Olea Franco demonstrates the extent to which translation is, for Jorge Luis Borges, the primordial activity of literary creation, rejecting the negative connotations of the notion of “infidelity” often applied to translations and underscoring the benefits of swerving away from an original work of literature in the pursuit of literary possibilities. Waisman, Sergio. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of Periphery. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. This important book underscores Borges’s approach to translation, giving pride of place to the role of rewriting and mistranslating in order to then show the implications of these practices in broader Argentine and transnational contexts, and in literary theory writ large.

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11 The Boom of the Latin American Novel in French Translation Gersende Camenen

Introduction The “boom” of the Latin American novel, a complex editorial and literary phenomenon, has imposed itself on the history of Latin American literature as one of the key moments of its internationalization. Its image became fixed in the success of a series of novels written between the mid-1960s and the beginning of the following decade, which propelled their authors (Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others) to the forefront of the world literary scene. Very early on, some critics tried to define the contours of what was then called with a certain fervor the “nueva novela latinoamericana” [new Latin American novel], for which a kind of manifesto can be found in the interview that Carlos Fuentes gave to the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal for the first issue of his magazine Mundo nuevo: rejection of a regionalist literature embodied in the much-maligned “novela de la tierra” [novel of the land], choice of urban and “pop” themes, explosion of the spatiotemporal frameworks of the classical narrative, and linguistic experimentation (Fuentes 1966). A quick examination of the leading novels of the period, however, relativizes the relevance of this portrait: if Cambio de piel (1967), Rayuela (1963), or Tres tristes tigres (1967) correspond to it in broad strokes, Cien años de soledad (1967), the icon of the period, dialogues with a tradition of the rural novel, whereas Vargas Llosa’s novels are mainly indebted to a Sartrean model of the novel. Moreover, this aesthetic criterion alone makes it difficult, if not impossible, to delimit a period and a corpus (who occupies the fifth place in the “elite” of writers crowned by José Donoso in his Historia personal del boom (1972): Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Juan Carlos Onetti, or Manuel Puig?). It is therefore necessary to distinguish the movement of renovation of the Latin American novel—which goes back to the 1940s with short stories by Borges, Carpentier, Asturias, or even Rulfo—from the heterogeneous phenomenon that is the boom (King 2006 63–68). In a collective work with a significant title, Mas allá del boom: literatura y mercado, Ángel Rama was one of the first to emphasize the transformation of the book market and the massive consumption of novels from the mid-1960s onward as a definition of the boom, choosing the year 1964, when print runs soared, as the starting point for this phenomenon (Rama 1981: 86). It is known that, in addition to the factors of demographic growth and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-14

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urbanization, the history of the boom is linked to the aggressive policies of some Latin American and Spanish publishing houses to share the increasingly profitable novel market. In Barcelona, Carlos Barral founded the Biblioteca Breve prize, which ensured the circulation of the winners’ titles beyond the Spanish-speaking market, while in Argentina and Mexico, large publishing houses (Losada, Sudamericana, Espasa Calpe, FCE) intensified the circulation of Latin American texts and smaller publishers ( Joaquín Mortiz, Jorge Álvarez) launched new authors. Finally, news magazines and journals inspired by Anglo-American models, such as Primera Plana in Argentina or Siempre! in Mexico, ensured the dissemination of new novelists to an ever-larger middle-class readership. Indeed, it is against the backdrop of the cultural and political modernization of the continent that the boom stands out and takes on its full meaning, far beyond the image of a purely commercial operation, to which its detractors have tried to reduce it (Harss and Dohman 1967). From this point of view, one of the catalysts of the boom was the Cuban Revolution, which in its early years imposed itself on a large part of the Latin American intelligentsia as an anti-imperialist model of development offering the utopian promise of a union of the political and cultural avant-garde. Now that more than sixty years have passed, it is difficult to measure the enthusiasm that the barbudos, as the bearded combatants of the Cuban Revolution were known, aroused—an enthusiasm that the revolutionary regime was able to encourage for its own benefit around the Casa de las Américas, through the organization of round tables and other conferences that strengthened what Claudia Gilman has called the “vínculos de familia” [“family ties”] that united the writers of the boom (2003). Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the politicization of literary exchanges was illustrated both in the translation policies and the reception of the boom in the United States (Franco 2002; Levine 2006 Mudrovic 2012) and in the polarization of the intellectual field, of which Mundo nuevo in particular was a victim (McQuade 1992; Mudrovic 1997). It is agreed that the boom ended around 1972, a year after the Padilla affair (1971), which shattered its unity, a process that had already begun, as Fuentes and Llosa broke with Cuba while Cortázar and García Márquez reaffirmed their attachment to its revolution and regime. What role did Paris play in this complex phenomenon that was distributed among several poles (Mexico, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Barcelona) and involved a multiplicity of actors? Certainly not that of the “hegemonic meridian” that Pascale Casanova ascribes to it in La république mondiale des Lettres (1999; published in 2004 in English translation by M. B. Debevoise as The World Republic of Letters). There is no need to repeat here the critique of the Eurocentric vision of Casanova’s study (Sánchez-Prado 2006). Nevertheless, despite its limitations, this polemical book has had the virtue of reviving the study of the circulation of Latin American literature in the context of the debate on World Literature. It has been pointed out that Casanova’s narrative is woven into a framework in which three constitutive moments of Latin American modernity stand out: the literary independence that Rubén Darío might have gained through his French parentage, then the liberating discovery of an “authentic” Latin American identity that would be attained in the Paris of the avant-garde, and, finally, the global recognition that would come in the 1960s with the boom generation (Guerrero 2013). It is the simplicity of this linear narrative that, over the past decade or so, various studies inspired by the history of publishing, the sociology of translation, and translatology have attempted to question by bringing to light its complex interweavings. It is known, among other things, that the boom would not have taken place without the true revolution that literary agent Carmen Balcells brought about in the field of copyright. By negotiating contracts with a renewal date (previously many of the contracts did not have an end date) and a sharing of secondary rights, the Barcelona literary agent allowed the writers 194

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she represented, whose sales often soared in Europe and the United States, to earn substantial profits and thus gain a form of intellectual and political independence from their home countries (Catelli 2010). For all that, there is no denying Paris its place in the diffusion of the boom, and no need to rehash the old refrain of French decline. In the 1960s, for a Latin American writer, being translated and published in Paris may no longer have been synonymous with instant consecration, as the case of García Márquez illustrates (Marling 2016; Santana-Acuña 2020), but it was still the best way to increase one’s chances of being translated in other countries, the French edition of a novel often continuing to be the only translation available, thus serving as a relay to its translation into English or other languages and as an obligatory passage on the road to the Nobel Prize. It was still in France that the novels of the boom were, in general, the most systematically and rapidly translated (Steenmeijer 2002). In order to understand the role played by the French capital, it is necessary to address two complementary movements. On the one hand, to trace the itinerary of the books and their authors through the meanderings of the French publishing world and literary field and to examine their participation (or not) in its polemics, in order to identify their promoters and gatekeepers—publishers, editors of collections, readers, translators, and critics—and the readings they made of them; in other words, to restore the complexity of a translation and its reception in its multiple facets, literary but also cultural and political, and on the other hand, to insert this national fabric into the wider horizon of the worldwide circulation of these same books and their authors. It is by interweaving these different scales that the history of the boom will not fade away in a pssssch… that could be described, paraphrasing Borges in El idioma de los argentinos, as “gaseoso, abstraído, internacional” [gaseous, abstract, international] (1928/2012: 236). The following pages offer the reader an opportunity to follow this path.

Before the Boom To grasp the density mentioned above, one must first place the boom within the longterm time frame of literary exchanges between France and Latin America, of which the boom represents just one of the episodes. This big issue relates also to the history of the presence of Latin American writers in France (Weiss 2003) and to the more or less fantastic representation of Paris and its “myth” (Pera 1997). A pioneering work emerges for the question of interest here: La diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France (1972). Its author, Sylvia Molloy, distinguishes three periods. The years 1900–1920 are those of the “discovery,” still timid, in a France that feeds essentially on itself and perceives in “Spanish” America the scattered fragments of an Empire. It was a time of paradoxes: Paris was central to Spanish-language publishing, but few French people, like the writer and critic Rémy de Gourmont in the magazine Le Mercure de France, distinguished and appreciated this emerging literature. The fate of two writers illustrates the misunderstandings of this period: Gómez Carrillo, a writer of the second rank who was seen by Parisians as a brilliant and superficial talker who amused the salons (or, worse, a mere rastaquouère), was more famous than the principal poet of the modernist movement Rubén Darío, who remained the platonic lover of France. The years 1920–1940 were those of the beginning of a dialogue. The first organized effort to disseminate the literature was the Ibero-American collection (1930) of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (1926), which was created by the League of Nations, and which undertook the publication of classics such as Facundo, translated by the eminent Hispanist Marcel Bataillon in 1934. The number of translations increased during this period. They were still often the result of friendships, for example, 195

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Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes, which was translated in 1927 by Marcelle Auclair, supervised by Jules Supervielle, and then carried on by Valéry Larbaud, though that friendship in particular rested on personal connections and on networks that made it known beyond the specialized reviews, as it appeared in publications such as the prestigious Nouvelle Revue française (Carvallo 2001). The postwar period opened a new stage: the rhythm of translations accelerated, and their reception extended to general newspapers (Le Monde, La Croix, Le Figaro littéraire) and cultural newspapers (Les nouvelles littéraires, Les Lettres françaises, Les lettres nouvelles). That is, Latin American literature moved from a restricted domain of knowledge to the broader domain of culture (Molloy 1972: 190). Two collections symbolize this period: the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works and La Croix du Sud (1951–1970). Roger Caillois directed the Latin American section of the former and created the latter at Gallimard upon his return from Argentina, where he had stayed during the war at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo (Louis 2013; 2020). By publishing more than fifty Latin American authors, La Croix du Sud served as a “springboard” for Latin American literature in France (Fell 1992). The prestigious collection was nevertheless characterized by a very specific project of pedagogical divulgation. Following the editor’s ideas, literature was seen there above all as a document that allowed the reader to understand the societies it depicted (Bastide 1958; Fell 1992; Louis 2013; Guerrero 2018). Caillois’s desire, “no exento de paternalismo, de perservar cierta d­ iferencia latinoamericana” [not devoid of paternalism, to preserve a certain Latin American difference], to give it its quintessence, thus explains the foundation of a specialized collection, a kind of “laboratorio o vivero donde se asistía al desarrollo y a la eclosión de la literatura latinoamericana al margen de corrientes que pudieran afectarlas” [laboratory or breeding ground where one saw Latin American literature blossoming on the margins of the currents and influences that could affect it], while there was also, at Gallimard, Du Monde entier, the collection of foreign literature, which had been publishing Latin American writers since the 1930s (Guerrero 2018: 206). It is understandable that the formation of its catalog explicitly excluded authors such as Adolfo Bioy Casares, Carlos Fuentes, or Manuel Puig, considered too “urban” and not “representative” enough of the idea that Caillois had of a certain Latin American singularity that literature should reflect (Camenen 2020a) or that the translation, publication, and reception of the works by Jorge Luis Borges, whose publication of Fictions in 1951 (published in 1962 in English by various translators) inaugurated La Croix du Sud, led to numerous misunderstandings in France (Louis 2020). At the end of the 1960s, the collection appeared more and more as an anachronistic enterprise in the eyes of many Latin American writers, especially those of the boom, who refused to be locked in a “ghetto” (Fuentes 1966). Several of them, whose first texts had appeared in La Croix du Sud, went over to Du monde entier. This was the case of Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Cabrera Infante, and, for the generation of writers that preceded the boom, Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, who changed publishers to Albin Michel. Finally, as a sign that times were changing, the collection became the target of French critics, eager to make known the new paths that literature from the Latin American continent was taking outside the documentary reading promoted by Caillois. A special 1961 issue of the journal Les lettres nouvelles dedicated to “New Writers of Latin America” illustrates this desire to update the climate in which the novelists of the boom would arrive. In the introduction, the director of the publication, Maurice Nadeau, historian of surrealism and talent scout for writers such as Georges Perec, Witold Gombrowicz, and Malcolm Lowry, announced: 196

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Ce qu’on connaît bien, c’est la littérature d’inspiration folklorique, la littérature de revendication ou d’engagement politique. Elle présentait donc moins d’intérêt pour nous qu’une littérature de recherche, d’imagination ou de création, qui s’efforce de découvrir ses fins en elle-même. Nous présentons celle-ci, qui est moins connue ou même tout à fait ignorée, et qui, où que ce soit, signale en général le vrai niveau de développement des techniques poétiques ou romanesques. (Nadeau 1961: 4, quoted in Molloy 1972: 190 and Guerrero 2018: 206) [What we know well is literature of folk inspiration, literature of advocacy or political commitment. It was therefore of less interest to us than a literature of research, imagination, or creation, which strives to discover its ends in itself. We present the latter, which is less well-known or even altogether unknown, and which, wherever it may arise, generally signals the true level of development of poetic or novelistic techniques]. The selection of texts, presented by Octavio Paz, was made by two key actors of the boom in France: Julio Cortázar and Claude Couffon. The latter was already an influential critic in the main French magazines and newspapers (Les Lettres françaises, Le Monde, Les lettres nouvelles). Soon to be a translator of Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, and Neruda, and close to the Cuban Revolution, he was to become a figure of authority and legitimation in the decade that was beginning.

The 1960s: A New World and New Actors in Publishing From the beginning of the 1960s, the new wind that was already blowing in the special issue of Lettres nouvelles gradually redistributed the cards of the intellectual, cultural, and editorial world. The Cuban Revolution attracted a large part of the French intellectual and political field. The focus of a part of French anti-Americanism against the North American embargo, the staging of the trip to Cuba by a part of the intelligentsia in the wake of the one made by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1960 (Verdès-Leroux 1989)—relayed by a plethora of articles, books, and films (such as Chris Marker’s Cuba Sí or Agnès Varda’s Salut les Cubains)—and the emergence of a romantic mythology of the revolutionary guerrilla fighter around the character of Che Guevara (whose name was one of the rallying cries of the Parisian students of 1968) all tended to modify the image of Latin America and Latin Americans (Chonchol and Martinière 1985: 131–143). Finally, Latin America was an essential geopolitical terrain, as illustrated by President Charles de Gaulle’s trip there in 1964. France, once again playing the old card of latinité, was trying to regain a place on the world stage of the Cold War, advocating a “third way” between the blocs. From an editorial point of view, the Cuban Revolution—and other guerrilla movements followed by liberation theology—revived Third World thought, particularly imbedded in the French intellectual field, and revitalized the decolonization movement by providing a model and icons. The number of books on Cuba and the political situation in Latin America increased. François Maspero, who published Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Régis Debray, was at the forefront of the struggle, but the niche was wide, and many magazines devoted special issues to it. General publishers created new collections with evocative titles (Contestation at Robert Laffont, Lutter at Stock, La France sauvage at Gallimard and Combats at Le Seuil) to invest in this new market between current affairs and political reflection, and which captured the middle-class readership, the one that bought news magazines such as L’Express or Le Nouvel Observateur, or watched Cinq colonnes à la une, the flagship television program of the 1960s. 197

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It was in this profoundly changed landscape, where Latin America became the theater of history in progress, that new publishing actors emerged. The two main French collections that published the novelists of the boom were Du monde entier at Gallimard and Cadre vert at Seuil. The first, which we have already mentioned, was a collection of general foreign literature with a universalist aim that claimed, since its creation in 1931, to offer the French reader the great names of World Literature. The decline of La Croix du Sud revived the Spanish-speaking sector, which counted on the collaboration of great readers such as ­Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, who translated Hemingway, Faulkner, and Dos Passos, introduced North American literature from the 1930s, and was advised on Spanish literature by Juan Goytisolo, who lived in exile in Paris and who worked very early on to get to know writers he often later befriended, such as Fuentes and Cabrera Infante. Goytisolo distanced himself from the collection when the direction was taken over by Ugné Karvélis, Julio Cortázar’s companion (Goytisolo 1988: 119). It is also worth mentioning Héctor Bianciotti, the Argentine writer and later novelist and French academician who became the director after Ugné Karvélis’s departure. Among others, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Trois tristes tigres translated by Albert Bensoussan in 1970), and Manuel Puig (La trahison de Rita Hayworth translated by Laure Bataillon in 1969) were published in the collection.

The Boom in the Cadre vert Collection of Le Seuil Latin American literature made a later entry in the Cadre vert, the collection of foreign literature at Le Seuil, but the place that it occupied illustrates well the editorial renewal of the period of the boom as well as the cultural and political stakes that were tied up there. Nothing seemed to predispose Le Seuil to publish Latin American novels. Born in progressive Catholic circles before the war and then refounded after the Liberation, Le Seuil kept, at least until the end of the 1950s, the spiritualist and somewhat austere imprint of its beginnings, illustrated by its religious and then progressively humanities-based collections. Lacking a heritage (which Gallimard had) or the prestige of an avant-garde publishing house (which Minuit enjoyed), Le Seuil played a key role in foreign literature, initially Italian and German. Then, toward the end of the 1950s, the Cadre vert, meaning “green frame,” named so for its cover design—a white background framed by a simple green border—followed the trends of French literary publishing (especially those of its elder brother, the Cadre rouge) and opened up to literature from the Americas with the enthusiastic discovery of the work of the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa (Aguiar and Riaudel 2021). Nevertheless, it took the arrival of editor Claude Durand (1938–2015) as director of the Spanish-language section for the collection to really take off. His first project, the publication in 1968 of García Márquez’s Cent ans de solitude—of which he was also the translator with his Cuban-born wife Carmen Perea Jiménez—was a master stroke. While the Colombian author’s novel was not as successful as it was elsewhere, and while this edition was not enough to explain its worldwide distribution (despite winning the French prize for the Best Foreign Novel in 1969 and a good critical reception that will be mentioned later), it did, however, establish the authority of its publisher and launch the Latin American literature collection that Durand directed until his departure from Le Seuil. From 1967 to 1979, his selections, alongside Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, constituted a true catalog of Latin American literature within the foreign literature collection because, although the proportions of the selection were rather modest (sixteen works in fourteen years), the high ambitions of its editors were not. Durand and Sarduy indeed created a specific collection of Latin American 198

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literature, which, although it might seem to have repeated the gesture of Roger Caillois with La Croix du Sud, was diametrically opposed to it in its editorial choices. In the eyes of the editors of the Cadre vert, the “aesthetic criterion” and the concern to respond to the “current taste” prevailed (Bareiro Saguier 1968: 65). This choice was in part a strategy of opposition to La Croix du Sud, whose documentary line served here as a repellent. It must also be said that Caillois’s pioneering collection was no longer profitable in a market of foreign literature where the supply was more abundant every day (Sapiro 2019). Creating a Latin American selection within a collection of foreign literature was commercially a less risky solution. Durand and Sarduy’s bet on topicality and aesthetics was, however, not a mere commercial strategy; on the contrary, it reflected an interpretative reading of the works and a certain idea of what the Latin American novel of those years was or should be. The novel of the Cadre vert selection was thus conceived by its editors as a culmination of Western (and not only Latin American) culture and of the novelistic genre. Cent ans de solitude is presented on the back cover of the book as “le théâtre géant où les mythes engendrent les hommes qui à leur tour engendrent les mythes, comme chez Homère, Cervantes ou Rabelais” [the giant theater where myths generate men who in turn generate myths, as in Homer, Cervantes, or Rabelais]. José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966) is presented on the back cover as “tout autant la Connaissance que ce qui fut connu et se trouve au carrefour de tous les mondes, de toutes les croyances et de toutes les civilisations” [as much Knowledge as what was known and is at the crossroads of all worlds, all beliefs, and all civilizations]. The term novela total—“total novel”—was also applied to other novels that, in their original version and presentation, did not display such ambition. That is the case Reinaldo Arenas’s novel El mundo alucinante (1969), presented to French readers as a novel with multiple facets and inexhaustible readings. The editorial discourse of Cadre vert was thus carried by a critical ambition that drew a kind of utopian horizon, something beyond the novel genre and literature in general. This ambition was nourished by the readings of Severo Sarduy, who arrived in Paris at the beginning of the 1960s, was then immersed in the new criticism, and who was close to the literary review Tel Quel and a friend of Roland Barthes, whose seminars he followed assiduously at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. This is evident in the article he published in the Quinzaine littéraire in 1968 to promote Cent ans de solitude. From a critical scaffolding typical of his time, Sarduy believed that with García Márquez’s novel, literature was “libérée de sa fonction représentative” [freed from its representative function] and became “écriture” [writing]. Therefore, the novel should be read as “un code de papier” [a paper code], “une succession de variantes et de dissemination … qui pratique l’intertextualité” [a succession of variants and dissemination… that practices intertextuality] (Sarduy 1968: 3–4). Generally, Sarduy thus offered with the novels of his collection a very updated interpretative framework and propelled the Latin American literature of the Cadre vert to the most advanced point of the French literary and editorial field. This last example shows the distance that separated the Cadre vert from La Croix du Sud. While the latter established a hierarchy among literatures and refused to allow Latin American literatures access to the aesthetic experience as manifestation of general and universal literature, this difference had completely disappeared with the Cadre vert, for which, as for a growing number of French critics, such as Maurice Nadeau, Alain Bosquet, or Max-Pol Fouchet, Latin American literature dialogued on an equal footing with other literatures and with contemporary criticism. This is also the vision of the magazine Mundo Nuevo, which Emir Rodríguez Monegal directed from Paris between 1966 to 1968. There is no doubt that the editorial line of Cadre vert owes much to the ties that bound Sarduy to its director. The magazine also announced the publication in French of novels, reviews, and interviews with the authors of Cadre vert. 199

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The repetition of names and titles in the magazine and the collection was based on a common reading of the recent Latin American novelistic tradition. Indeed, it is not too much to think that the Cadre vert catalog owed its organization in part to the famous historical picture of the Latin American novel of the second-half of the twentieth century that Monegal drew up on the occasion of a literary congress in Caracas in July of 1967 and that he reproduced shortly afterward in his magazine (Rodríguez Monegal 1967). The four generations of authors that he distinguished in it can be found in the Seuil collection. Moreover, Borges, published in the collection and canonized by the publication of Borges par lui-même in the famous collection Écrivains de toujours from Le Seuil—Monegal participated in both cases, as author of the first and author of the preface of the second—played the role in the catalog of the fundamental criterion of modernity and quality that the magazine attributed to him. One can thus estimate that Cadre vert was not satisfied with publishing novels just because they were trendy, but aimed to offer its French readers a small critical library of the Latin American novelistic tradition that allowed them to read the novels of the boom in historical perspective. Finally, this aesthetic purpose was served by an active commercial policy, which was, as mentioned, one of the characteristics of the boom. The two French editors, Claude Durand and Severo Sarduy, were the first promotion agents of its novels. This strategy paid off: awards and critical recognition established the collection in the French publishing landscape. In 1979, however, the Latin American selection was merged with the Hispanic one and in only a few years the Spanish titles became the majority. Why did this “Latin American moment” come to an end (Camenen 2021)? There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that the entire publishing sector began to lose steam after the first oil shock in 1973. But there was another factor that directly affected the fate of the collection: after losing a battle with the Carmen Balcells agency over the rights to García Márquez’s novels, Durand saw his favorite author move to another publisher, Grasset. What came to be known as the “Gabo affair” cut short the momentum of the collection, which from then on only included authors who were not represented by the Barcelona agency and whose sales were far lower than those of Cien años de soledad. Paradoxically, the change in the rules of the market, which had favored the boom on an international scale, considerably restricted the field of action of a collection that, in France, had been one of its standard-bearers.

Two Translators of the Boom: Albert Bensoussan and Laure Bataillon In the 1960s, a new generation of translators entered the profession. Albert Bensoussan, probably the most famous among them, recalls: Ce fut un choc pour les lecteurs, pour les éditeurs… et pour les traducteurs. Ces derniers, hispanisants souvent universitaires, convertis sur le tard aux Lettres latino-­a méricaines, n’étaient pas toujours armés pour faire passer ces textes, et l’on se gausse encore – à tort – de certains contresens qui ne sont rien d’autre que les boutons de puberté de la jeune école des traducteurs français. Par-dessus le marché, il fallait à ces traducteurs inventer un nouveau langage et là aussi la hardiesse leur manquait parfois: ils n’étaient pas forcément écrivains. Ce fut un apprentissage difficile et une tâche parfois ingrate où les moulins à vent s’appelaient éditeur, lecteur d’édition, correcteur d’épreuves, critique littéraire. Mais aujourd’hui où tout a rejoint sa juste place, on peut jeter sur ces années soixante, la décennie pionnière, un regard serein et, peut-être, objectif. (Bensoussan 1999: 45) 200

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[It was a shock for readers, for publishers… and for translators. The latter, often university Hispanicists, converted to Latin American literature late in life, were not always equipped to translate these texts, and we still laugh—wrongly—at certain misunderstandings which are nothing more than the adolescent pimples of the young school of French translators. On top of that, these translators had to invent a new language, and here too they sometimes lacked the boldness to do so: they were not necessarily writers. It was a difficult apprenticeship and a sometimes thankless and Quixotic task, where the windmills were called editor, proofreader, literary critic. But today, when everything has returned to its rightful place, we can look back on the sixties, that pioneering decade, with serenity and, perhaps, objectivity]. Contrary to what Bensoussan remembers, the translators of the 1960s were probably not pioneers, and it was in fact one of his elders in the profession, Claude Couffon, who gave him a foot in the door by suggesting that he translate a text by Guillermo Cabrera Infante for the December 1967–January 1968 special issue of Lettres nouvelles dedicated to “Écrivains de Cuba” [Writers from Cuba] (Bensoussan 2017). However, Bensoussan’s memory reflects something important: a generational consciousness. This feeling of belonging is evident in the bonds of friendship that gradually gave rise to a professional organization, which contributed greatly to giving visibility to the translation profession in France. Albert Bensoussan (1935–) and Laure Bataillon (1928–1990) became central figures. Born in the polyglot milieu of the Jewish community of Algiers, Albert Bensoussan taught from 1963 to 1966 at the Sorbonne, where he rubbed shoulders with Claude Couffon and the poet and translator Claude Esteban (1935–2006), and then at the University of Rennes until 1996. Albert Bensoussan belongs to a well-established French tradition, that of university translators (Wuilmart 2019: 201–205). His first translation, Trois tristes tigres (1970), was a seminal experience, first because it drew the attention of boom writers in search of a translator, such as Vargas Llosa or Puig, and second because it launched his long and prolific career. For two years, he collaborated closely with Cabrera Infante, with whom he stayed in London on several occasions in order to penetrate the mysteries of this “new language” and of the functioning of this work, which is frighteningly difficult in its constant games of invention and parody (Bensoussan 1999; 2017). Bensoussan drew from this the conviction that “une œuvre n’est sûrement pas séparable de son créateur et le traducteur, s’il veut accéder à cette empathie qui lui permettra de mieux restituer l’original, doit aussi entrer dans l’intimité de l’auteur” [a work is certainly not separable from its creator and the translator, if he wants to reach this empathy which will allow him to better restore the original, he must also enter into the intimate world of the author] (1999: 47). From this conception of translation as a personal and intersubjective relationship, a practice, even a method, emerges the collaboration with the author, which Bensoussan practiced with certain writers such as Manuel Puig (Camenen 2019). An example of this can be found in the correspondence they maintained throughout the translation of El beso de la mujer araña, published by Seuil in 1979, whose love story between a political prisoner and a homosexual would make it one of the author’s most famous novels. Puig gives his translator precise indications about each of the characters. The language of Molina, a lover of Hollywood movies and boleros, is described with particular care: the tone must be “ligeramente agramatical, o simplemente ‘popular,’ con tendencia a lo melodramático barato, kitsch. Pero ante todo ágil, su lenguaje debe tener una especial fluidez en su torpeza” [slightly agrammatical, or simply ‘popular,’ with a tendency to easy melodrama, to kitsch. But above all, lively, his language must have a special ease in its gaucherie] (Romero 2006: 420). The careful modulation of 201

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tone explains the importance Puig places on rereading the translated text aloud. This would also help to solve the other difficulty pointed out by Puig: the translation of boleros. Thus, the author uses the first translation made by Bensoussan of the lyrics of the bolero “Mi carta,” which opens Chapter 7 of the novel. The song is a letter in which a woman’s voice speaks to her beloved in the night. The accuracy of her words strikes Valentín, who has just received a letter from his fiancée. From that moment on, he becomes more open to Molina’s stories, to the psychological and sentimental truths contained in the boleros and Hollywood films. Puig corrects the translation of the first lines “Querido vuelvo otra vez a conversar contigo… la noche trae un silencio que me invita a hablarte” [Beloved I have returned again to converse with you… the night brings a silence which invites me to talk to you] (1976: 137). He rejects Bensoussan’s first version and explains his refusal in French: the night “est propice à la confidence” [is conducive to confidence] which, he believes, “fait penser qu’il est question d’une relation amoureuse nouvelle à cause du mot ‘confidence’ alors qu’il s’agit d’une relation ancienne” [makes people think that we are talking about a new love relationship because of the word “confidence,” when we are talking about an old relationship]. He proposes instead that the night “porte un silence propice” [carries a propitious silence] (Romero 2006: 422). Puig’s justification is questionable (how could one not have confidence in an already long-standing romantic relationship?), and his proposed translation is rather clumsy, since “porter un silence” [carry a silence] is not an established lexical expression in French and smells like a translation of Spanish. However, it reveals what bothered him in the first version: the over-translation of “hablar” [speak] by “se confier” [confide] which, in seeking semantic precision, loses the simple, direct, oral tone of the dialogue. It is as if Puig were speaking here, in French, like Molina. And as for his character, the clumsiness of the writer in French contains a truth, more emotional than semantic. What did Bensoussan do? Assuming there was no outside intervention (from proofreaders or editors who intervene in the long chain that leads from the manuscript to the book), the published text reads: “Mon chéri, je viens à nouveau te parler…La nuit nous apporte un silence qui m’invite à me confier” [My darling, I come to speak to you again… The night brings us a silence that invites me to confide] (Puig 1979: 135). The final solution is a compromise. The incriminating verb “to confide” is kept, but the accuracy is still there, mainly due to the respect of the cadenced rhythm of the bolero, which was dear to Puig and which he wished to keep in the translation (Romero 2006: 423). The collaboration also guides Bensoussan’s reading of the novels of the boom and the difficulties of translating them, which are their orality and the constant play with language. It is probably not surprising that Bensoussan shares with American translator Suzanne Jill Levine—in addition to some authors (Cabrera Infante and Puig) and friends (Néstor Almendros and Severo Sarduy)—a taste for collaboration with the author that becomes a source of creativity (Levine 1998) and the hope—perhaps illusory—that the translation will stand the test of time (Actes des deuxièmes assises de la traduction littéraire 40). The collaboration between translator and author is thus undoubtedly one of the outstanding features of the translation of the boom in France. It allowed the construction of expectations that were more or less synchronized between the original and its translation. This is what Laure Bataillon worked on in her translation of Boquitas pintadas, Manuel Puig’s second novel, published in French under the title Le plus beau tango du monde (1972) in Lettres nouvelles, the collection edited by Maurice Nadeau at Denoël. In order to recreate for French readers the universe of this epistolary novel, which recounts the amorous intrigues of a small provincial town in a bundle of written and oral speeches set to the rhythm of boleros and tangos, the translator drew from the repertoire of popular music. The title of the novel 202

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in French, borrowed from a famous song by Tino Rossi, is not, as one might think, based on an easy cliché, but functions instead as a fair and effective equivalent, since it evokes a whole sentimental world close to that of the original. It is possible, as the American translator of the novel has pointed out (Levine 1998: 158–171), that the French translation could not rely on the deep affinity of the fictional world of the novel with Hollywood films, an affinity that made the English translation, Heartbreak Tango, so successful. The world of French songs referred to in the French translation was perhaps a little more outdated for French readers than the Hollywood films were for the Anglo-American reader, but it was nonetheless extremely present in their emotional memory. The French translator knew how to handle this memory with flexibility and an intelligent reading of the original text that can be appreciated in a key and complex passage of the novel: the monolog of La Raba, the servant who kills the father of her child after he has seduced and abandoned her. While doing the laundry of Mabel, the middle-class señorita who employs her, La Raba sings passages from tangos with stories that are an almost-literal version of her own. Song lyrics, memories, and thoughts are mixed together in a fragmented discourse, which recounts all the strength of desire, crossed with frustrations, sufferings, and murderous impulses. In the French translation of the novel, instead of the lyrics of the original tango, which evokes the fate of an abandoned woman, the French reader finds those of a very famous song from the realist repertoire Les Roses blanches, first performed by Berthe Sylva in 1926 and popularized by Tino Rossi in 1956. The song tells the story of a “poor kid” from Paris who steals white roses, his mother’s favorite, to bring to her hospital bed until the day she dies, when the child puts them on her bed for her to take to heaven. In order to integrate the lyrics of the French song into the discursive fabric of the passage, the translator changes the original text: in the French version, the lyrics of the song are intertwined with Raba’s thoughts about the fate of her son if she were to disappear. In the original text, it is the abandoned woman’s revenge that is in the foreground, while in the translated text it is mainly the mother who is heard. It is possible that the French translation loses some of the violence of the original and softens it by choosing this more melodramatic song, but it still manages to reproduce the mechanism of identification of the Raba character with the fictional universe of the songs, and to play with the associations of ideas and words that constitute the poetic and psychoanalytical spring of the passage (the whiteness of the roses also recalls the whiteness of the linen with which the maid is obsessed from the very first words of her monolog). It does so by being able to rely on the musical memory of French readers. This freedom in translation is probably not unrelated to the fact that Laure Bataillon’s name is so closely linked to the dissemination of literature from the Río de la Plata region in France and, in particular, to the work of Julio Cortázar, which she began to translate at the end of the 1950s. Encouraged by Cortázar himself, this freedom can be observed at different levels of the text. It applies first of all to the treatment of the famous “untranslatable”—the local fauna and flora or gastronomy, for example—which is treated delicately because its non-translation can make a translation fall into easy exoticism, while the search for equivalents can provoke cultural inconsistencies and make the footnotes feel burdensome because they are more suitable for a scientific text. At this point, the translator proposes a compromise solution that makes it possible to balance the necessary understanding of the realia of the story and the requirements of the writing. For example, the cry of a tero, a typical bird of the Río de la Plata, appears at a key moment in the short story “Los pasos en las huellas” (Octaèdre 1976; French translation of Octaedro 1974), when the protagonist, a literary critic, feels “invaded” by the revelation that he has been mistaken in his interpretation of the life of a forgotten poet. The original name of the bird is preserved, but supplemented by a 203

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clarifying-yet-not-explanatory phrase: “un tero, l’oiseau gardien” [a tero, the guardian bird] (Cortázar 1976: 53). This solution preserves the mystery in the passage about the bird, whose physical and symbolic presence, familiar to Argentine readers, is made intelligible to French ones. This strategy does not interrupt the reading nor narrative tension of the story, where the duplicity characteristic of Cortazarian fantasy is gradually felt. Such a choice, explains Bataillon, responds to Cortázar’s concern for composition, inspired by the lessons of Edgar Allan Poe (Bataillon 1991: 56). Another strategy that frequently appears in Bataillon’s translations is the reinforcement of orality, which is particularly observed in the dialogues and is so important in Cortázar’s novels, beginning with Rayuela. Urged on by Cortázar, who appreciated the “lightness” of French slang—for which he felt there was no equivalent in Argentina—the translator accentuated the lexical and syntactic marks of spoken French (Bataillon 1991: 69). This is the case in her version of the short story “Réunion,” published in Tous les feux le feu in 1970 (translation of Todos los fuegos el fuego, published in 1966), which rewrites the armed struggle of Che and the barbudos in the Cuban sierra. Bataillon’s Che is significantly slangier than he is in the original version. When he curses the fate that befalls the guerrillas’ boat, he rages against “la foutue barque” [the fucking boat], “la saloperie de barque” [the filthy boat] that “brinquebale” [smashes up] (Cortázar 1970: 66), whereas in the Spanish version, it is only a “condenada” [condemned] or “maldita lancha” [damned boat] that “tambalea” [wobbles] (Cortázar 1966: 66). A little further on, the original “tristeza” [sadness] that overwhelms Che and his companions becomes “cafard” [black dog melancholy] when the enemy plane “se ramène” [comes back like a bad smell] and they have to go through the “foutus marécages” [fucking swamps] up to the “côtelettes” [armpits] (Cortázar 1970: 66–68). It is thus remarkable that this short story, which marks the political turn in Cortázar’s production, has a significantly more spoken tone in its French version, as if accentuating that change. This “effet de vernacularisation” [vernacularization effect]—to use the term spread by the translatologist and translator of Latin American novels Antoine Berman since the beginning of the 1980s in French translation circles (Camenen 2020b)—contrasts with a French tendency toward “ennoblissement” [ennobling], another “tendance déformante” [deforming tendency] pointed out by the translator (Berman 1985) and which Bataillon explains as due to a structural difference between the two languages. While in Spanish meaning is accommodated by a loose syntax, the more rigid French imposes a “flattening” of the original text. This “re-sharpening” work is particularly visible in the reflective monologs of Cortázar’s novel 62 modelo para armar (1968), but it does not prevent the syntax from galloping and even from bristling here and there with daring lexical creations that vernacularize the text, such as when the very Argentinian bife (a large chunk of pampas beef ) that triggers a game of verbal associations in Juan, the interpreter-poet at the Parisian restaurant, becomes a very strange bif, a word that does not exist in French but is marginally comprehensible as half of “rosbif,” the French spelling and pronunciation of “roast beef ” (Cortázar 1971: 11). The translator lucidly assumes this discrepancy: to ennoble a text is not “ethnocentric”; it is translating literally that would have been “colonialist” (Bataillon 1991: 69), she said when commenting on her translations of the 60s and 70s during debates between translators organized beginning in the early 80s. In a way, it was Laure Bataillon who encouraged technical and poetic debates among translators, because she was one of the main actors in the organization, defense, and recognition of the literary translation profession in France. The Association of Literary Translators of France, which she chaired from 1981 to 1985, quickly became an interlocutor for the other actors in the book industry, the Syndicat national des éditeurs (SNE) [National Publishers’ 204

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Union] and the Centre national du livre [National Book Center]. In 1984, “convinced that translation can be learned” (Actes des deuxièmes assises de la traduction 1986: 15), she created the Assises de la traduction littéraire en Arles-Collège International des Traducteurs (ATLAS) [Literary translation Conference in Arles-International College of Translators], which brings together translators, critics, publishers, and readers every year, and whose debates and workshops are a precious testimony to the life of translation in France, in its many aspects.1 Did Bensoussan and Bataillon draw from the prestige of the boom, which they made known in France, the necessary authority for their collective and institutional commitment to their profession? Perhaps, but it is quite possible that the reciprocal effect is also seen, and that their presence at the forefront of translation in France, both institutionally and theoretically, contributed to the dissemination of the boom novels.

The Boom in the French Press The writers of the boom enjoyed an important presence in the French press. In addition to the numerous reviews of their books, they were given long interviews. Theirs constitutes a complex and nuanced reception, of which only the main lines are traced here. The first is the weight maintained by extra-literary phenomena. This is, for example, the case of the Cuban Revolution, which drew attention to the American continent and maintained the idea that all the novelties and ruptures, both political and cultural, came from it. More temporarily, the Olympic Games of Mexico City in 1968 were the explicit occasion of a special issue of Nouvelles littéraires that claimed, somewhat naively, “révéler à nos lecteurs ces romanciers mexicains si mal connus en Europe” [to reveal to our readers those Mexican novelists so little known in Europe] (1968: 5). This example, more situational than the first one, shows that the reception of a peripheral literature in the cultural centers remained (and remains) dependent on nonliterary factors. But the authors of the boom also benefited from another situation, this one literary. From the beginning of the 1960s, the hope of a renewal of the novel agitated French critics. The nouveau roman had become the target of all attacks: for the supporters of the traditional novel, it embodied the sterility of formal research that had lost sight of the core of the novel, which is adventure or psychological analysis; for the defenders of a political literature, it disavowed the humanist mission of the novel, which is to dialogue with the world. And as for the representatives of a new avant-garde, they considered the nouveau roman to be a set of worn-out procedures. The repercussions of the first novel of J.M.G. Le Clézio, Le procès-verbal (1963), illustrates the climate in which the authors of the boom landed: L’attente de renouveau, de l’air frais et du grand large a sûrement favorisé le retentissement du livre de Le Clézio. Il croit au roman, il en écrit de vrais. … chez ces auteurs [français] aux origines très diverses, une nouvelle tentation investit l’espace de la fiction, celle d’un recours de plus en plus net à l’imagination, accompagné d’une nouvelle utilisation de la culture à des fins romanesques … afin que le trésor d’une connaissance empoussiérée revienne à la vie comme chez J.-L. Borges, il faut que cette culture bascule, retrouve son pouvoir d’enchantement, s’émerveille d’elle-même. (Hallier 1964) [The expectation of renewal, of fresh air and the open sea has surely favored the impact of Le Clézio’s book. He believes in novels, he writes real ones…. in these [French] authors of very diverse origins, a new temptation invests the space of fiction, that of an 205

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increasingly clear recourse to imagination, accompanied by a new use of culture for novelistic purposes… in order for the treasure of a dusty knowledge to come back to life as in J.L. Borges, it is necessary that this culture topples over, to find its power of enchantment, to marvel at itself.] The reception of Cent ans de solitude is the one that relied most on this “expectation of renewal” which, as we shall see, was not without its pitfalls. A journalist thus recommended: “Pour qui bâille devant les coquetteries de la littérature occidentale, ce gros roman aura les pouvoirs et les charmes des histoires interminables de califes ou de chevaliers qui ne devraient jamais se terminer” [For those who yawn at the coquetries of Western literature, this big novel will have the powers and charms of endless stories of caliphs or knights that should never end] (Sorin 1969). Another noted: “Pour vivre, le roman, lui aussi a besoin d’air. C’est peu de dire qu’en France, il en manque à l’heure actuelle. Un grand souffle romanesque nous vient fort heureusement d’Amérique du Sud” [To live, the novel also needs air. It is an understatement to say that in France, it is lacking at the present time. A great novelistic breath fortunately comes to us from South America] (Le Clec’h 1969). As for García Márquez, his discourse was well practiced. From one interview to the next, the key words “intuition,” “impulsiveness,” “adventure,” and “imagination” were repeated, echoing those of the critics, as if the Colombian was willingly offering himself up in what often seemed like the game of the “good savage:” Chez nous, le nouveau roman n’aurait aucun sens. Nous en sommes au stade épique. La vie nous tombe dessus de façon baroque. Nous n’avons pas le temps de réfléchir que déjà les faits nous entraînent. L’Amérique du Sud, c’est le pays de l’imagination. Tout y est possible. La pensée ne se trouve encadrée par aucune méthode. (Le Clec’h 1969) [In our country, the nouveau roman would not make sense. We are at the epic stage. Life comes at us in a baroque way. We don’t have time to think, but the facts are already pulling us along. South America is the land of the imagination. Everything is possible. The thought is not framed by any method]. The use of clichés is always double-edged and Cent ans de solitude also ended up being a victim of it. Apart from the articles by specialists—Severo Sarduy, Claude Couffon, and Claude Fell—the enthusiasm of the reviews was often tinged with a more or less concealed or unconscious condescension: Cent ans de solitude was presented as the novel of a writer “haunted by his childhood” or as a “galéjade” [tall story] full of “baroquisme” [baroque touches]. It is perhaps not surprising that Cent ans de solitude crystallized the ambiguities of the thirst for renewal that revived the old American utopia in Europe. García Márquez was then almost unknown to the French readership, and his novelty lent itself to an exoticizing reading by critics who felt invigorated by the discovery of a continent. This was less the case with Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar. Their reception was more consistent and less dependent on the decline of the nouveau roman or exoticism, especially for the latter, because it could rely on a long-standing knowledge in France of Mexican and Argentine literature and on the fact that both writers lived or had stayed for a long time in the French capital and were extremely familiar with its literature, culture, and codes. Undoubtedly, Laure Bataillon’s translations of Cortázar’s books also contributed to this. His familiarity was such that the reviewers of his books seemed to make a point of recalling that 206

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he was Argentine, before glossing over his readings of French authors—such as Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry. In one of the first articles dedicated to him, a French mirror was used to identify what was perceived as Cortázar’s specificity—his fantasy—read as a counterpoint to surrealism: L’imagination de Cortázar se meut dans l’évidence d’un merveilleux qui, comme celui des surréalistes, est la vraie vie. Cependant, chez l’écrivain argentin, l’étrangeté n’est pas due à une crispation de la faculté créatrice; il ne cherche pas par la provocation de l’image à causer un trouble libérateur dans le réel. Le réel, tout au moins pour les esprits voyeurs, coule invinciblement vers sa fin de merveilles. (Miguel 1963) [Cortázar’s imagination moves in the evidence of a marvelousness that, like that of the surrealists, is the real life. However, in the case of the Argentine writer, the strangeness is not due to a tightening of the creative faculty; he does not seek by the provocation of the image to cause a liberating disorder in the real. The real, at least for the voyeuristic spirits, flows invincibly towards its end of marvels]. When Marelle (French translation of Rayuela by Laure Bataillon and Françoise Rosset, published in 1966) came out, the journalists again compared the novel with the nouveau roman, but Cortázar, unlike García Márquez, dialogued with a movement that seemed familiar to him and that he even approached closely enough to point out its limits. In Le Monde, Cortázar explained to the journalist Paul Morelle: J’ai bien aimé cette tentative du nouveau roman, qui a essayé de liquider le vieux roman psychologique en créant un nouvel univers d’expression sur des choses encore inexplorées. Mais ce nouveau roman n’est jamais métaphysique, et c’est ce qui, à mes yeux, en marque les limites. (Morelle 1967: 12) [I liked this attempt of the nouveau roman, which tried to liquidate the old psychological novel by creating a new universe of expression about things still unexplored. But this new novel is never metaphysical, and this is what, in my eyes, marks its limits]. By pointing out the limits of the nouveau roman, Cortázar suggested its necessary overcoming, an overcoming that French critics welcomed precisely in the Latin American novels, although they did it with the ambiguities that have been mentioned here, such as the fact that the taste for exoticism and a certain paternalism persist in the reception of the novels by the press.

Conclusion At the end of this journey along the paths of the Latin American boom in France, if not an assessment, at least a map can be drawn out that will guide the reader through this dense maze. The first line is the one traced by the long-term view of the translation and diffusion of Latin American literature in France: the boom was not a movement that came out of nowhere but an acceleration that could rely on old editorial and critical networks, reactivated since the postwar period with the pioneering collection of La Croix du Sud. The end of the 1960s nevertheless saw a turning point that was based on at least two factors. On the one hand, 207

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the armed struggle movements that propelled Latin America to the forefront of the political and cultural scene of a France shaken by decolonization and the emergence of the so-called Third World. On the other hand, the publication of new collections of translated literature whose editors, like those of Le Seuil, offered an aesthetic, rather than ethnographic, reading of the Latin American novel while navigating the rules of the market. The Latin American novel appears from then on, in the eyes of one segment of the critics, as a source of literary renewal after the exhaustion of the nouveau roman, even if this reading is not devoid of the very old ideological ambiguities of the American utopia as seen from Europe. In this cluster of elements, the role played by translators such as Albert Bensoussan and Laure Bataillon was no less decisive, even if it would be misleading to look for systematic traces of a politics or a poetics of translation. Their collaboration with authors, however, opened up fruitful avenues for translation in France by germinating theoretical thought, creative practice, and the professionalization of literary translators. Translated from French by Christopher Lord

Note 1 Since the Liberation, literary translation in France has benefited from a favorable policy, led by the CNL (Centre national du livre/National Book Center, founded in 1946), which notably grants aid for translation. A 2011 report showed that although the material condition of translators in France had deteriorated over the past twenty years, it appeared to be extremely advantageous when viewed from Europe and even the United States. For example, in 2011, in Spain, the remuneration for one sheet of paper was 8 to 10 euros on average, compared with 20 euros in France, or even 23 euros for rare languages. This is partly due to the place translation occupies in the overall book economy. In 2011, 13% of translations done worldwide were done in France, compared with 3% in the United States. In France, translation represented 18% of books sold in bookstores at that time. https://centrenationaldulivre.fr/donnees-cles/la-condition-du-traducteur.

Works Cited Actes des deuxièmes assises de la traduction littéraire. Arles: Actes Sud/Atlas, 1986. Aguiar, Márcia and Michel Riaudel. “João Guimarães Rosa et la France.” La literatura latinoamericana en versión francesa, edited by Gustavo Guerrero and Gersende Camenen. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2021, pp. 247–271. Bareiro Saguier, Rubén. “La literatura latinoamericana en Francia.” Mundo Nuevo, no. 30, 1968, pp. 52–66. Bastide, Roger. “Sous ‘La Croix du Sud’: l’Amérique latine dans le miroir de sa littérature.” Annales, no. 1, 1958, pp. 30–46. Bataillon, Laure. Traduire, écrire. Paris: Arcane, 1991. Bensoussan, Albert. Retour des Caravelles. Lettres latino-américaines d’aujourd’hui. Rennes: PUR, 1999. ———. Une conversation avec le traducteur Albert Bensoussan/Una conversación con el traductor Albert Bensoussan. Paris: Université Cergy Pontoise, ENS & Instituto Cervantes, 2017, https://www.projet-­ medetlat.com/entretiens. Berman, Antoine. “La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain.” Les tours de Babel. Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1985. Borges, Jorge Luis. “El idioma de los argentinos”, La Gaceta Literaria, Madrid, published in El idioma de los argentinos (1928). Buenos Aires: Delbolsillo, 223–236. Camenen, Gersende. “Manuel Puig et Albert Bensoussan: les débuts d’une collaboration.” Crisol, no. 10, 2019, http://crisol.parisnanterre.fr/index.php/crisol/article/view/207/224. ———. “De pop a naïf: la mediación editorial francesa de La traición de Rita Hayworth (1964–1969).” World Editors: Dynamics of Global Publishing and the Latin American Case between the Archive and the Digital Age, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Benjamin Loy, and Gesine Müller. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020a, 279–296. 208

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———. “Roberto Arlt, un grand écrivain français? Traduction et valeur littéraire.” Scènes de la traduction France-Argentine, edited by Béhar, Roland and Camenen, Gersende. Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm, 2020b, pp. 211–234. ———. “El momento latinoamericano de Seuil: la colección Cadre vert de Claude Durand y Severo Sarduy.” La literatura latinoamericana en versión francesa, edited by Gustavo Guerrero and Gersende Camenen. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2021, pp. 195–218. Carvallo, Fernando. L’Amérique latine et la ‘Nouvelle revue française’ 1920–2000. Paris: Gallimard/Maison de l’Amérique latine, 2001. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Catelli, Nora. “La élite itinerante del boom: seducciones transnacionales en los escritores latinoamericanos (1960–1973).” Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina II. Los avatares de la “ciudad letrada” en el siglo XX, directed by Carlos Altamirano. Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2010, pp. 712–732. Chonchol, Jacques and Guy Martinière. L’Amérique latine et le latino-américanisme en France. Paris: ­L’Harmattan, 1985. Cortázar, Julio. Todos los fuegos el fuego. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1966. ———. Tous les feux le feu. Translated by Laure Bataillon. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. ———. 62, maquette à monter. Translated by Laure Bataillon. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. ———. Octaèdre. Translated by Laure Bataillon. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Couffon, Claude. “Une heure avec Julio Cortázar.” Les Lettres françaises, 19 Jan.1967, pp. 3–4. Donoso, José. Historia personal del boom. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1972. Fell, Claude. “La collection ‘La Croix du Sud’, tremplin de la littérature latino-américaine en France.” Río de la Plata, no. 13–14, 1992, pp. 173–189. Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin American in the Cold War. Cambridge: ­Harvard University Press, 2002. Fuentes, Carlos. “Situación del escritor en América Latina.” Mundo Nuevo, no. 1, 1966, pp. 5–21. Gilman, Claudia. Entre la pluma y el fusil: Debates y dilemas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editors, 2003. Goytisolo, Juan. Les royaumes déchirés. Translated by Joëlle Lacor. Paris: Fayard, 1988. Guerrero, Gustavo. “The French Connection: Pascale Casanova, la literatura latinoamericana y la República mundial de las letras.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, no. 75, 2013, pp. 111–123. ———. “Génesis y contextos de la primera colección francesa de literatura latinoamericana.” Re-­ mapping World Literature, edited by Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, and Benjamin Loy. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 199–208. Hallier Jean-Edern. “La jeune littérature n’existe pas.” L’Express, Apr. 2, 1964, pp. 26–27. Harss, Luis and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin American Writers. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. King, John “The Boom of the Latin American Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to The Latin American Novel, edited by Efraín Kristal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 59–80. Le Clec’h, Guy. “Gabriel García Marquez, l’aventurier du baroquisme.” Le Figaro littéraire, Aug. 25–31, 1969, p. 21 Levine, Suzanne Jill. Escriba subersiva: una poética de la traducción. Translated by Rubén Gallo. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998. ———. “The Latin American novel in English Translation.” The Cambridge Companion to The Latin American Novel, edited by Efraín Kristal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 297–317. Louis, Annick. “Étoiles d’un ciel étranger. Roger Caillois et l’Amérique latine.” Littérature, no. 170, 2013, pp. 71–81. ———. “El Aleph de Roger Caillois en Gallimard o cómo salir del laberinto.” World Editors: Dynamics of Global Publishing and the Latin American Case Between the Archive and the Digital Age, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Benjamin Loy, and Gesine Müller. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 125–146. McQuade, Franck. “Mundo Nuevo: la nueva novela y la guerra fría cultural.” América: Cahiers du Criccal, no. 9–10, 1992, pp. 17–26. Marling, William. Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature & the 1960’s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Molloy, Sylvia. La diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle. Paris: PUF, 1972. 209

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Miguel, André. “Julio Cortázar, les armes secrètes.” Nouvelle revue française, no. 131, 1963. Morelle, Paul. “Marelle, de Julio Cortázar ou le roman de l’intelligence qui se détruit.” Le Monde, Apr. 5, 1967, p. 12. Puig, Manuel. Boquitas pintadas. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969. ———. Le plus beau tango du monde. Translated by Laure Bataillon. Paris: Denoël, 1972. ———. El beso de la mujer araña. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1976. ———. Le baiser de la femme araignée. Translated by Albert Bensoussan. Paris, Seuil, 1979. Mudrovic, María Eugenia. Mundo nuevo: cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1997. ———. “Reading Latin American literature abroad: agency and canon formation in the sixties and seventies.” Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, edited by Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz. Albany: State of New York University Press, 2012, pp. 129–143. Nadeau, Maurice. “Nouveaux écrivains d’Amérique latine.” Les lettres Nouvelles, no. 16, 1961, pp. 4–5. Nouvelles littéraires, n°2138, 1968. Pera, Cristóbal. Modernistas en París: el mito de París en la prosa modernista hispanoamericana. Berne: Peter Lang, 1997. Rama, Ángel. “El boom en perspectiva.” Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado, edited by Ángel Rama. Mexico: Marcha, 1981, pp. 51–110. Rodríguez Monegal, Emir. “Diario de Caras.” Mundo Nuevo, no. 17, 1967, pp. 4–24. Romero, Julia. Puig por Puig. Imágenes de un escritor. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2006. Sánchez-Prado, Ignacio. América Latina en la “literatura mundial.” Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh IILI, Serie Biblioteca de América, 2006. Santana-Acuña, Álvaro. Ascent to Glory: How ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Was Written and Became a Classic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Sapiro, Gisèle. “Les grandes tendances du marché de la traduction.” Histoire des traductions en langue française XXe siècle, edited by Bernard Banoun, Isabelle Poulin, and Yves Chevrel. Paris: Verdier, 2019, pp. 55–176. Sarduy, Severo. “L’écriture autonome.” La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 63, 1968, pp. 3–4. Sorin, Raphael. “Le miroir magique de Gabriel García Márquez.” Les Nouvelles littéraires, no. 2161, 20 Feb. 1969, p. 27. Steenmeijer, Maarten. “How the West Was Won: Translations of Spanish American Fiction in Europe and the United States.” Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, edited by Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwarz. Albany: State of New York University Press, 2002, pp. 144–155. Verdès-Leroux, Jeannine. La lune et le caudillo. Le rêve des intellectuels et le régime cubain (1959–1971). Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Weiss, Jason. The Lights of Home, a Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. New York & London: Routledge, 2003. Wuilmart, Françoise. “Traducteurs et traductrices.” Histoire des traductions en langue française XXe siècle, edited by Bernard Banoun, Isabelle Poulin, and Yves Chevrel. Paris: Verdier, 2019, pp. 177–238.

Further Readings Bataillon, Laure. Traduire, écrire. Paris: Arcane, 1991. Testimony and reflections on translation by one of the major translators of the boom period. Bensoussan, Albert. Retour des Caravelles. Lettres latino-américaines d’aujourd’hui. Rennes: PUR, 1999. Memories and analyses of the novels by the principal translator of the boom. Guerrero, Gustavo and Gersende Camenen, editors. La literatura latinoamericana en versión francesa. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. Collects case studies, including some on the translation of the boom in France. Molloy, Sylvia La diffusion de la littérature hispano-américaine en France au XXe siècle. Paris: PUF, 1972. Pioneering work and still a reference for understanding the reception of Latin American literature in France up until the beginning of the 1960s, the eve of the boom. Villegas, Jean-Claude. La littérature hispano-américaine publiée en France 1900–1984: répertoire bibliographique. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1986. Collection of works of Latin American literature translated and published in France between 1900 and 1984. 210

12 Chinese Translation of Latin American Literature (1950–1999) Teng Wei

Introduction The relationship between Latin American literature and contemporary China constitutes a fertile field of research, as Latin American literature is undoubtedly linked to the history of socialist China from the 1950s to the 1970s. Not only was the first large-scale translation of Latin American literature in China directly motivated by political concerns, but the establishment of Spanish as a subject in Chinese universities was also fostered by political necessity. In the 1980s, as China entered its period of reform and opening, with economic growth as the main focus, the political significance that Latin American literature once had gradually faded away, along with the political use of translation and literature. However, Latin American literature succeeded in erasing its historical imprint and continued to be widely translated. Additionally, and especially in an era when the achievement of ­Western-style “modernization” fed the grand national narrative and was presented as a goal, Latin American literature—written in Spanish, a “minor language” in the local cultural context, and from the “Third World”—caused a sensation of reading and discussion that made an impact on the Chinese literature revolution in the 1980s. What was known as “Latin American literature fever” in the 1980s was closely related to the Nobel Prize in Literature, and also to other national slogans such as “going global” (走向世界), “modernization” (现代化), “nationalization” (民族化), and “pure literature” (纯文学). This “fever” also gave way to two important literary phenomena in the Chinese literature of the 1980s, namely, root-seeking literature and avant-garde literature. In the 1990s, once the heat of international literature had died down, Latin American literature fell back to a marginal position. Due to China’s increasing marketization and deeper involvement in the international community, Latin American literary translations became increasingly subject to the laws of the market and international copyright conventions, and therefore became more and more constrained. But at that time, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges entered the spotlight. In China, he was respected as one of the literary masters, and his works became a kind of fashion chased in the cultural market. The Borges craze of the 1990s was closely related to some critical cultural phenomena such as the rise of postmodernism and the strategy of naming cultural heroes.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-15

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The translation of Latin American literature over the past half-century has formed a rather interesting isomorphic relationship with the literary and social changes in contemporary China. Therefore, this chapter sorts out and studies the history of translation and reception of Latin American literature in contemporary China, not only to describe the routes through which literary influences have passed in the sense of comparative literature, but also to focus on the complex and delicate relationship between translation and politics, and translation and ideology in the history of translation of Latin American literature into Chinese, and to reveal various misreadings and misplacements, rewritings, and misappropriations in the process of translation and reception, with the aim of shedding some light on a few crucial topics in contemporary Chinese literature and history studies from different perspectives, such as the relationship between literary translation and China’s national identity and world imagination, among others.

Beginnings: A Literature of Resistance Latin American literature was first introduced to Chinese readers in the 1920s. In 1921, Mao Dun（茅盾）published an article titled “A Novel by a Brazilian Writer” (No. 2, 4) to present Brazilian novels. This could well be considered the beginning of Latin American literary studies in China. In the same year, he published a translated poem, “El Velo de la Reina Mab” (under the pen name Feng Xu 冯虚), in the same magazine and briefly introduced the poet Rubén Darío. He mentioned Rubén Darío’s representative poetry collection Azul and pointed out that “Rubén Darío is one of the most famous and pioneering symbolist writers” (No.11, 3).1 This poem may be the first record of a Chinese translation of Latin American literature. In 1921, in the foreword to the “Special Issue on Bullied Peoples” of Fiction Monthly (小说月报), Mao Dun considered Latin American literature as bullied peoples’ literature. He pointed out that although Latin America used the same language as their ex-suzerains, Spain and Portugal, their literature was utterly different. We should “treat them differently,” he said (No. 11, 3), and stressed the sovereignty of Latin American literature (No.10, 2–7). However, in 1934, Literature magazine (文学), edited by Zheng Zhenduo (郑振铎) and Fu Donghua (傅东华), published a special issue on “marginalized nations,” including Peru, B ­ razil, and ­A rgentina. Furthermore, considering that “in recent years, the anti-imperialist national liberation movements in Latin America are developing,” the editors selected three Latin American novels that illustrated this situation. The editors argued that “although Latin-Americans have long been separated from the European suzerainty and have become independent republics, they are not politically and economically independent and are subject to British and American imperialism” (Hua 1934: Vol.2, No.5, 792). Thus, this special issue introduced the literary developments and works of what were considered “small and weak nations.” The chosen novels, all retranslated from English, showed, however, “the recent boom in anti-imperialist national liberation movements in Latin American countries”: Matalaché by Peruvian writer López Albújar (tr. Yu Sheng), Os jagunços by the Brazilian Afonso Arinos (tr. Yu Zhongchi), and La lluvia de fuego by the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones (tr. Wu Lifu). This selection by influential Chinese editors and critics shows that they are neither attracted by the splendid achievements of Latin American literature nor do they want to absorb from its artistic experiences that which can influence Chinese literary creation, but they are eager to introduce these literary works as a true presentation of Latin American history and social reality. What the translators wanted readers to focus on was not the storyline, the narrative technique, or the language style, but the anti-colonial and anti-oppression struggle and the indomitable spirit of resistance of the people as shown in the works. These literary works not only evoked their 212

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sympathy and support for the weakened peoples, but also projected their self-imagination of their own people onto them. Sharing the same ancient civilization, rich land, and industrious people, but also suffering from invasion and plunder, the history and reality of Latin America formed a sort of mirror image with the history and reality of China itself. However, despite the fact that Latin American literature began to be received by the local community at that time, it did not yet constitute a resource for modern Chinese literature. A paradoxically analogous yet distant reference, Chinese reading and reception of that time profoundly impacted the selection and translation of Latin American literature in China from the 1950s to the 1970s. During these three decades of China’s modern literary history, the translation of Latin American literature was generally sporadic, and almost all of it was done through retranslation from foreign languages other than Spanish, yet local magazines began issuing special volumes on Latin American literature, and various compilations and literary histories of Latin American literature were published. It was not until the People’s Republic of China was founded that Latin American literature was on full display to Chinese literary circles. Gradually, Latin American literature was established within the list of classics. According to the general academic view of the development of Chinese contemporary society and contemporary literature, the Chinese translation history of Latin American literature is divided into three phases: from the 1950s to the 1970s, the 1980s, and from the 1990s until now. This periodization is similar to Hong Zicheng’s staging of the history of contemporary Chinese literature (Hong 1999: pp. I–V). In the 1950s, once universities in China established the Spanish language major, more and more students became professional Spanish translators. As a result, Latin American literary works presented in Chinese were directly translated from Spanish more often than before.

Highly Politicized Translation (1950–1970) From the 1950s to the 1970s, about three hundred publications (including writings, reference books, atlases, photographs, etc.) on Latin America were published in Mainland China, including around eighty literary works from sixteen countries and regions: Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti, Argentina, Peru, West Indies, Honduras, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia; the total print run exceeded six hundred thousand copies (Teng 2011: 158–181). Among them, there were two kinds of Latin American literature series, two kinds of literary histories, and five kinds of selected works. The most translated and published works were Cuban literature (15 titles), followed by Chilean publications (10), Brazil (9), Argentina (8), Mexico (6), and other countries’ literatures; the most translated writers were Pablo Neruda (6), José Martí (4), Jorge Amado (3), and Nicolás Guillén (2). The most printed works included Amado’s trilogy Terras do Sem Fim (3 prints, 34,500 copies), São Jorge dos Ilhéus (2 prints, 16,300 copies), and Seara Vermelha (4 prints, 31,500 copies); Neruda’s selected poems (12 prints, 85,770 copies); Argentinian writer Álvaro Yunque’s short-story collection Martin Didn’t Steal Anything (1 print, 55,000 copies); Colombian writer José Eustasio Rivera’s La Vorágine (3 prints, 55,000 copies); and Cuban novelist Raúl González de Cascorro’s Gente de Playa Girón (2 prints, 30,000 copies). More than half of the published translation works were translated directly from the original languages (Spanish and Portuguese), including Neruda’s Canción de gesta and Guillén’s selected poems. In contrast, the rest were retranslated, mainly from Russian, French, or English. At that time, less attention was paid to the classical literature of Latin America, and the works of the nineteenth century were limited to a few authors, such as Martí, Euclides da Cunha, and Antonio de Castro Alves, while the majority of translations were contemporary twentieth-century works. 213

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Because of the Cuban Revolution victory in 1959, that year became the most productive for Latin American literary translations in the 1950s–1970s period. Take the most important and influential foreign literature magazine of the time, World Literature (named Yiwen when set up in 1953, renamed as World Literature in January 1959) as an example: thirteen of the one hundred and fifty issues from 1953 to 1965 were devoted to Latin American literature; about one hundred and fifty translated works of Latin American literature and twenty critical reviews were published. Among them, the most translated and commented upon were Cuban literature or writings related to the Cuban Revolution (59 articles), and the most popular authors were Neruda (13) and Guillén (13), regarded as revolutionary or progressive writers. Whether the genre of the translated works was poetry, fiction, drama, travelogs, fairy tales, or folklore, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial themes predominated, and contemporary, realistic works were mainstream. It is clear that the Chinese translation of Latin American literature during this period was highly politicized: “with the aim of striking back against the blockades of the United States, Chinese leaders used the people-to-people diplomacy toward Sino-Latin American relations in the early days of new China” (Teng 2016: 167–183). Therefore, some left-wing writers and intellectuals of Latin America who expressed sympathy for the Chinese revolution were invited to visit Mainland China, namely, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. In October 1952, with Pablo Neruda’s help, more than 150 representatives from eleven Latin American countries attended the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing. In order to prepare for this conference, Premier Zhou Enlai not only instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to establish a Spanish major at Beijing Foreign Studies University, but also urged the university to rapidly train Spanish translators (Huang 2004: 23). This was the beginning of the Spanish major being set up at several universities in China (Teng 2016: 167–183). From the 1950s to the 1970s, Spanish teaching and Latin American literary translation promoted civil cultural exchange and even civil diplomacy, to a certain extent exhibiting the complex connection and interaction between translation and politics. Especially after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, China’s ties with Latin America suddenly became closer due to its influence, which led the state to increase the number of Spanish language majors and enrollment in these programs, while setting off China’s first Latin American literature translation peak. However, this would not last, because, in 1965, the Sino-Soviet split caused disputes in the international communist movements, and the Latin American Left was split into the pro-Soviet Union side and the pro-China side. China cut ties with the former and no longer allowed the translation of works by the writers from the pro-Soviet Union camp. Soon the Cultural Revolution started in Mainland China, and foreign literary translation entered a period of stasis. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, only one Latin American novel seems to have been translated into Chinese and published. To better illustrate the relationship between translation and politics, one can look to the translation of Neruda’s work. When Neruda visited New China in 1950, the host country showed warmth and extraordinary hospitality. Premier Zhou Enlai told him that he was “the first swallow in the spring of friendship between China and Latin America” (Huang 2004: 55). He also discussed with Neruda the possibility of helping China invite a large group of Latin American intellectuals and artists to Beijing for a meeting. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda was undoubtedly the most popular Latin American poet in China: even ordinary people knew his name, and many students would memorize lines of his poems. However, when the Sino-Soviet split occurred, Neruda fell out of China’s favor because he came to be seen as a negative character who held the viewpoint of Soviet revisionism. By contrast, another Chilean poet, Pablo de Rokha, was regarded as a member of the pro-China community, and 214

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in July 1964, he was invited to visit China. While traveling widely, he wrote more than fifty poems in praise of China, Mao Zedong, and the Great Leap Forward, which were translated and published soon after in China. On the other hand, from 1964 onward, neither Pablo Neruda nor his works appeared in China’s media, despite his previous substantial contributions to “people-to-people” communications between China and Latin America. Even after the September 11 coup that happened in Chile in 1973 and Neruda’s death, the official media did not say a word to condemn Pinochet’s military coup d’état or to mourn Salvador Allende and Neruda. Once the most important Latin American poet, Neruda had disappeared from China’s view. It was not until 1979, by the end of the Cultural Revolution, that his work was welcomed again (Teng 2018: 175–189). During the last phase of the Cultural Revolution, reviews of Latin American novels of the 1960s also began to appear in some works by foreign literary intelligentsia (e.g., Foreign Literature Affairs), laying the groundwork for the Chinese translation and study of Latin American literature in the 1980s.

Depoliticized Translation (1980s) Compared with the previous period, the 1980s saw a vast increase in Latin American literary publications, which amounted to around 130 types of work, some with multiple Chinese versions (see Wei 2011, Appendix). The most printed work was Brazilian author Bernardo Guimaraes’s A Escrava Isaura, of which were published 422,600 copies of two versions within one month, followed by Ciro Alegría’s Los perros hambrientos (2 versions, 309,300 copies in total), José Eustasio Rivera’s La Vorágine (96,000 copies), García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (2 versions, 54,000 and 53,000 copies each) and the collection of his stories (52,000 copies), Martín Luis Guzmán’s La sombra del caudillo (77,000 copies), Blanca B. Mauries’s La vida y yo (72,500 copies), and Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (65,000 copies), and La casa verde (2 versions, 50,000 and 77,400 copies each), among others. The most translated Latin American author in foreign literature journals was García Márquez, followed by Borges and Vargas Llosa. Furthermore, the important foreign literature series of the 1980s all contained Latin American literary works, such as People’s Literature Publishing House’s Foreign Literature Classics Series, Foreign Literature Publishing House’s 20th Century’s Foreign Literature Series, and Shanghai Translation Publishing House’s 20th Century’s Foreign Literature Series, among others. In the 1980s, two Spanish literature series, which included Latin American literature, were published: The North Literature and Art Press’s Spanish and Portuguese Literature Series and Heilongjiang People’s Publishing House’s Spanish and Portuguese Literature Series. In 1987, Yunnan People’s Publishing House started cooperating with China’s Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Literature Studies Association and launched the Latin American Literature Series, the most voluminous book series that was ever published on this subject. By then, almost all the known works of significant authors in Latin American literature had been translated into Chinese, and the most popular genre was the contemporary novel. Nearly all published works by García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Juan Rulfo, as well as most of those by Jorge Amado and José Donoso, were translated into Chinese. At the same time, since the 1980s, Latin American literature studies were getting more and more institutionalized. Founded in 1979, China’s Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Literature Studies Association opened university courses, such as Latin American literature and Latin American literary history, which were included in some Spanish departments as major compulsory courses. Many theses and collections of research papers were written, 215

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and academic seminars on Latin American literature started taking place. Along with China’s reform and opening-up, centered on internal and external economic growth instead of ideological struggles, more and more Latin American countries established diplomatic relations with China and developed bilateral commercial exchange. These facilitated Spanish literature researchers’ travels to Latin America, thus to some extent reducing the delay between Latin American works and Chinese translations. Due to the enormous social effect and market interests, several publishing houses became involved. Shanghai Translation Publishing House, Yunnan People’s Publishing House, and Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House supported the Association’s annual meetings and seminars. Directly stimulated by the popularity of Latin American literature, Yunnan People’s Publishing House (which had resumed foreign literary publication in 1986) sought to establish its fame and position in the business with Latin American literature series. In 1987, the Association signed a five-year publication contract for the Latin American Literature Series with Yunnan People’s Publishing House. Since then, it has become the expert on Latin American literary publication. In the 1980s, less and less Latin American literature was translated into Chinese from a third language. On the one hand, there were more translators of Latin American literature than before because the Spanish language program, which had been in existence for nearly thirty years, had trained many professional translators. On the other hand, in the 1980s, literature became an important force of social criticism and enlightenment and thus occupied a central position in society; writers and translators were considered “social elites” and were highly respected. Except for a small number done by professional researchers, most of the Latin American literary works were translated by university students and faculty of Spanish, as well as translators of Spanish from the Translation Bureau, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Xinhua News Agency, State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, and Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation in their spare time. Among the translators, it was not rare to find diplomatic envoys in Latin American countries and senior officials of the aforementioned institutions. This encouraged many people to engage in amateur literary translation. At that time, the remuneration was not generous, but since the channels of publication were relatively broad, and it was easy to make an impact in society, many people even considered literary translation as their main career. The Spanish faculty in the universities also began to dedicate more time to literary studies than to language teaching. However, translations from Russian and English still occur even today in the case of Neruda, García Márquez, and Borges, because their works are numerous and highly respected by Chinese readers, and there are not enough Spanish translators to complete all the translation tasks. For this reason, some publishers even invite translators from other languages to retranslate these famous authors in order to seize the market. Although, in terms of quantity, the translation of Latin American literature in the 1980s was far from comparable to European literature, it has had a direct and profound impact on contemporary Chinese literature in its entirety. For instance, in 1986, World Literature published a column called “My Favorite Foreign Contemporary Writer,” and the most recurrent topic was Latin American literature. Among its contributors were not only new writers like Mo Yan (1986: No.3, 298–299), who had just gained fame, but also ordinary literature fans (Gan 1986: No.4, 297–300); even readers from a small border town wrote in to comment on Borges (Gao 1986: No.6, 299–303). Several generations of contemporary Chinese writers, such as Wang Zengqi (汪曾祺), Wang Meng (王蒙), Liu Xinwu (刘心武), Li Tuo (李陀), Han Shaogong (韩少功), Mo Yan (莫言), Ma Yuan (马原), Zhaxi Dawa (扎西达娃), Zhang Wei (张炜), Ge Fei (格非), Yu Hua (余华), Su Tong (苏童), and Can Xue (残雪), among others, have also discussed the importance and influence of Latin American literature. 216

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Root-searching literature (寻根文学) and avant-garde literature (先锋文学), representative of China’s 1980s literary achievements to some extent, were inspired by Latin American literature in their exploration of language, narrative, and time–space imagination and themes, as well as in the contemplation of particular topics, such as literature’s nationality and globality, literature and politics, and literature and history. The Latin American Literature Fever of the contemporary literary field started in 1982 when García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature, peaked from 1985 to 1987, and lasted till the early 1990s. Key figure of the boom, master of magical realism, and Nobel Prize laureate García Márquez undoubtedly became the icon of Latin American literature of the 1980s in China. As a scholar on China’s contemporary literature once described: Apart from Márquez, there has never been any Nobel laureate that has caused such a long-term interest in Chinese authors. One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared on almost every writer’s desk, and in literature gatherings, big or small, the participants kept mentioning the name ‘Márquez.’ He indeed shook the Chinese literary circle in the 1980s and became an inspirational figure. (Li 1995: 103) When will Chinese writers be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as was García Márquez? When will Chinese literature be globally accepted, as was the case with Latin American literature? Literary circles in the 1980s posed questions of this sort. As Liu Xinwu put it: Chinese literature should aspire to build a unique charming modern literary system… just like what Latin American literature did, winning international recognition with its system meanwhile making an influence on the development of the world. That is what we call a contribution to humanism. (Liu, cited in Duan: 261) This opinion was typical of literary circles in the 1980s. García Márquez was treated not only as a brilliant writer, but also as an icon of success and an example for Chinese literature to learn from in order to “embrace the world” (Teng 2021). Although the translation and study of Latin American literature in the 1980s were once very dynamic, the local literary circles lacked a thorough and comprehensive understanding of Latin American literature and did not engage in effective exchanges and dialogues with contemporary Latin American critics. Scholars rarely had the opportunity to interact with hispanistas from other countries, thus leaving many misreadings, misunderstandings, and regrets, which deserved serious reflection from later scholars. For example, the “boom” and “magical realism” are two Western labels often used by the critics at that time to replace “Latin American literature of the 1960s.” Chinese critics paid too much attention to the sensational effect of the Nobel Prize in Literature and were overly concerned with the technical, formal, and linguistic innovations contained in the literary texts, forgetting that none of these innovations was motivated solely by the demands of the formal revolution and failing to ask whether Latin American literature could “boom” outside of the revolutionary 1960s in Latin America. This kind of de-revolutionary and depoliticized study of Latin American novels of the 1960s, represented by One Hundred Years of Solitude, makes the reception and understanding of Latin American literature in the 1980s markedly biased and misplaced, and helps the translation of the “revolutionary and comprometida” literature eventually join the movement of “pure literature” (纯文学) in the 1980s (Teng W, 2021). In its rejection of 217

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politization, including revolutionary politics—seen to suppress and control literature (He 2007: 40)—the discursive practice of “pure literature” inadvertently participated in the process of constructing a new ideology of “Farewell revolution,” which eventually became the new cultural hegemony in the 1990s.

Translation Entering the Global Market (1990s) In the 1990s, with the marginalization of literature in society, Latin American literature fell back into the “proper position” for writing in a “minor language” (as opposed to the socalled major languages, important for China’s foreign policy, such as Russian, English, and French). According to the National General Bibliography, between 1990 and 1999, around one hundred Latin American literary translations were published, and two-thirds belonged to the Latin American Literature Series by Yunnan People’s Publishing House from 1987. But many of the Latin American Literature Series were stacked up in the warehouse and failed to attract readers, as in the 1980s. In 1990, the Nobel Prize in Literature once again favored Latin America. Mexican poet Octavio Paz became the fifth laureate from the region. His award-winning work Piedra de Sol was soon translated into Chinese by Zhao Zhenjiang (赵振江), and edition no. 3 of World Literature in 1991 also published a collection of Paz’s poems. Still, Paz’s translations never started another Latin American literature whirlwind like what García Márquez did. But even García Márquez could not continue being a superstar in the 1990s. After China’s adoption of the Universal Copyright Convention in 1992, the country could no longer publish García Márquez without his authorization. It was only in 2010 that a Chinese publisher finally acquired the rights to the Chinese translation of García Márquez, meaning that before 2010, those published Chinese translations and publications of García Márquez were not authorized in fact. Other factors contributed to the decline in the translation of Latin American literature in the 1990s. For instance, the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Literature Studies Association, once actively organizing teaching, translation, and research of Latin American literature, had become increasingly disorganized in this period, which led to a further dispersion of the translation force of Latin American literature. Even worse, many of the leading translators of the 1980s had retired, while few of the younger generation were willing to engage in translation due to its poor pay, resulting in a shortage of human resources. The marketization and globalization that China started in the 1990s initiated a complex and subtle influence on the translation of Latin American literature, one that is still felt today. Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges represents a remarkable exception. Once somewhat out of touch with the 1980s’ Latin American literature fever because of his unique style, the author became one of the “cultural heroes” of the 1990s and was admired as a master of postmodern literature. The Latin American Literary Circle once considered Borges as some sort of “European writer,” but this least Latin American of all Latin American writers stood out in China in the 1990s. For instance, Foreign Literature issued a special edition on Borges in the edition no. 5, 1992. Flower City Publishing House published The Lottery in Babylon in 1992 (tr. Chen Kaixian and Tu Mengchao). In 1993, Yunnan People’s Publishing House offered another version of the same book (tr. Wang Yongnian), and later, in 1995, published Borges on Writing (tr. Ni Huadi). Apart from these, there were also Borges’s biographies and interviews translated into Chinese. Among the Chinese publications about Borges in the 1990s, the most significant were the three-volume Jorge Luis Borges Collected Works (博尔赫斯 文集) in 1996 and the five-volume Complete Works of Jorge Luis Borges (博尔赫斯全集), which was released in 1999 on the occasion of the centenary of Borges’s birth. At that time, people 218

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who read and studied Borges went outside of the literary circle and intellectual community and formed a group of “Borges’s fans.” Borges also made a profound impact on China’s contemporary avant-garde literature. He was the most esteemed Latin American poet by Chinese contemporary avant-garde poets and also a big icon to avant-garde novelists, but his influence on avant-garde novels was only recognized and discussed after postmodern theories became popular in China. In contemporary literary criticism, it was impossible to discuss avant-garde literature without mentioning Borges’s postmodernity.

Conclusion The above brief history of translating Latin American literature into Chinese since the founding of the People’s Republic of China sheds light on some conclusions. First, the translation and acceptance of Latin American literature have always undergone a process of reconstruction. For example, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the Latin American writers whose works were introduced and translated, and who were even invited to visit China, such as Neruda and Asturias, were all considered “fighters against American imperialism.” In the Chinese cultural context at that time, they were better known as left-wing politicians than writers. It was not until the 1980s that Chinese critics and readers realized through the Nobel Prize in Literature that Neruda and Asturias were both also modernists (or “avant-garde” writers in Latin America). The Nobel Prize brought additional attention to Latin American literature, and a considerable amount of contemporary works were subsequently introduced to China. The Chinese literary field deemed Latin American contemporary writers, represented by García Márquez, as magnificent literary artists, modern literature masters recognized by the world, and examples for Chinese literati to follow. During this time, their political stances and commitments were forgotten, obscured, or ignored. In recent years, however, Chinese scholars have criticized the former cultural strategy of purifying and depoliticizing Latin American literature and reasserted the political implications of these writers’ works. Secondly, there are two essential strategies in the reconstruction of translation history: “the exploration of history,” which aims to fill in the gaps of history and uncover once obscure historical facts (and reevaluating them), and the “overturning,” i.e. returning to the original classical sequence to rethink and rename the canon (Dai 1999: 32). Comparing the translation of Latin American literature of the 1980s to that of the 1950s to the 1970s, and the translation of the 1990s to that of the 1980s, it is evident that Latin American literature in China underwent a rewriting process of obscuring, revealing, re-obscuring, and re-­revealing. For example, from the 1950s until the 1970s, political taboos covered other issues. Indeed, Neruda’s erotic love poems were never seen in Chinese during that period. Yet once these hidden pictures were introduced in the 1980s, other issues were covered up. Neruda’s love poems were translated abundantly while his political poems were no longer being discussed. Hence, every obscuring, gap-filling, and rewriting is a discursive practice with ideological appeals. The research on China’s translation history of Latin American literature should seek to find not only the traces obscured in the process of translation, but also the scenes that were restored and complemented in the process of historical reconstruction, so that political and cultural changes in socialist China’s history can be clearly presented. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, China’s relations with Latin America have entered a “leapfrog” phase (Zheng et al. 2009: 6). As a result of the rapid progress in ­Sino-Latin American relations and the institutionalization of Spanish and Portuguese language education, Latin American Studies in China has also entered a phase of upsurge. In March 2020, there were already one hundred universities and colleges offering Spanish 219

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undergraduate majors, which is more than eight times the number from 1999. The Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Literature Studies Association began to take on new vigor in the new century, and other Latin American research institutions have also been established since then. These are responsible for the current flourishing interest in Latin American literary translation in China. The translation of Latin American literature in China has thus not come to an end but is part of an ongoing and unfolding process. Every translator and every translation practice is involved in shaping Latin America in China and China’s own future too.

Note 1 For the purposes of this chapter, all Chinese quotations and publication names have been translated into English by the author, unless otherwise noted.

Works Cited Chen, Xiaoming. Boundless Challenge: Postmodernity of China’s Avant-garde Literature. Changchun: Epoch Literature and Art Press, 1993. Dai, Jinhua. Through a Glass Darkly: Interviews with Dai Jinhua. Beijing: Knowledge Press, 1999. https:// bit.ly/3ooZIVa Gan, Tiesheng. “I Like Carpentier and The Kingdom of this World.” World Literature, no. 4, 1986, pp. 297–300. Gao, Shang. “Borges’ World.” World Literature, no. 6, 1986, pp. 297–300. He, Guimei. “The Intellectual Genealogy and Ideology of Pure Literature.” Shandong Social Science, no. 2, 2007, pp. 29–46. https://bit.ly/3PNKkND Hong, Zicheng. A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999. Hua, Lu. “Overviews of Marginalized Nations of the Present World.” Literature, vol. 2, no. 5, 1934, pp. 789–792. ———. “From Yiwen to World Literature – Words to the Readers.” World Literature, no.1, 1959, pp. 1–4. Huang, Zhiliang. Rediscovering the New World—Zhou Enlai and Latin America. Beijing: World Affairs Press, 2004. Li, Jiefei. “Root-Seeking Literature: The Beginning of Renewal (1984-1985).” Contemporary Writers Review, no. 4, 1995, pp. 101–113. Mao, Dun. “A Novel by a Brazilian Writer.” Fiction Monthly (《小说月报》), vol. 12, no. 2, 1921. ———. “El Velo de la Reina Mab.” Fiction Monthly, vol. 12, no. 11, 1921. ———. “Forward to the Special Edition of Violated Peoples.” Fiction Monthly, vol. 12, no. 10, 1921, pp. 2–7. Mo, Yan. “Two Burning Blast Furnaces: García Márquez and Faulkner.” World Literature, no. 3, 1986, pp. 298–299. Teng, Wei. “Is Borges Post Modern?” Journal of School of Chinese Language and Culture of Nanjing Normal University, 2009. https://bit.ly/3cnYXZy ———. Border on the South: Latin American Literature and Contemporary Chinese Literature. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011. ———. “On Depoliticized Politics: Roberto Bolaño’s Reception in China.” Roberto Bolaño as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. “Pablo Neruda in Contemporary China: Translation between National and International Politics (1949–1999).” Remapping World Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. ———. “García Márquez in China.” The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Zheng, B. et al. “60 Years Between China and Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Studies, 2009, p. 6. Zheng, Z. et al., editors. Marginalized Nations, special issue of Literature, 1934.

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Further Readings Bell-Villada, Gene H. and Ignacio López-Calvo, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Gives unprecedented attention to the global reception of García Márquez and his literary and cultural impact across Asia, Africa, and the Arab world. Müller, Gesine, Jorge J. Locane, and Benjamin Loy, editors. Re-mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological crosscurrents, and book market processes within the Global South. Teng, Wei. Border on the South: Latin American Literature and Contemporary Chinese Literature. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011. Monograph expanding on the relationship between Latin American literature in Chinese translation and literature in China. Written in Chinese.

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13 Octavio Paz, Thinker of Translation Versioning Matsuo Bashō and Fernando Pessoa Christian Elguera and Daisy Saravia

Introduction The amount of scholarship devoted to Octavio Paz is vast and grows ever greater with time. Recently, intellectuals like Guillermo Sheridan, Guadalupe Nettel, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, and Maarten van Delden, among others, have written notable works about his poetry and essays. Nonetheless, it seems that readers and academics have neglected Paz’s facet as a prolific translator. To be sure, Tom Boll (2012) has shown translation was an essential fulcrum for relating poetic conceptualizations between Paz and T.S. Eliot. Furthermore, Odile Cisneros (2020) investigated how Haroldo de Campos’s theories on translation resounded in Paz’s acts of translating. Notwithstanding these studies and the almost 700 pages of Versiones and diversiones, a volume that includes all the translated texts by Paz, there seems to be little interest in studying his impressions on translation, his concrete strategies for resolving linguistic difficulties, and his conscious solutions for editing or modifying complete passages. As a translator, Octavio Paz can be understood from two angles. On the one hand, readers can praise his enthusiasm for translating and disseminating global literature in Latin America: mainly American and French poetry. On the other hand, Paz’s thought and praxis of translation turn attention toward the conflicts between source and target languages, manipulations, and even suppressions inherent to each translator and translated text. This chapter will engage with the latter to explore how Octavio Paz transformed the works of Japanese author Matsuo Bashō and Alberto Caeiro (a poetic heteronym created by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa) according to his engagement with or refusal of ideological patterns and aesthetic principles. Paz was cautious about using the word “translation,” preferring to foreground the term “version” in many publications. This decision has its roots in the works of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, two authors celebrated by Paz. In 1948, commenting on Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, Eliot states that, for a classical scholar, this work “does not conform to his notions of what translations should be. It is not a translation, it is a paraphrase” (xxiii). The mistrust in the word “translation” also reveals a resistance against conservative opinions on the act of translating. As modern authors, Pound, Eliot, and Paz published their poems and articles in a literary epoch in which the dominant intelligentsia judged translation as inferior work, dependent on its fidelity to the original. In opposition to this criterion, Paz used the word

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“version” as part of his campaign for vindicating the task of translators in the twentieth century. For Paz, the translator is another writer, and their aesthetic work is not somehow minor in comparison with the primordial creation (Elguera 2020). This explains why the Mexican intellectual avoided bilingual editions of his translations, even when he dedicated specific volumes to one author. Monolingual publications ratified his decision to appropriate originals so that his imagined readers could not recognize the difference between foreign authors and his writing. Paz invites readers to recognize his style in the translations of Japanese and Portuguese poets. For example, for Paz, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro is a homespun writer, an “innocent poet” in a modern world. Consequently, he alters and adorns several of Caeiro’s passages that contradict his modern and universal insights into poetry (Elguera 2021b). Translation is a catchall term. However, it is crucial to pinpoint a translation’s meaning according to an erudite intellectual such as Octavio Paz. First of all, he proposed that translation is a literary activity whose raison d’être is to transform the original into a translated text. Talking with Pessoa’s translator Edwin Honig, Paz pointed out that “translation is the art of producing, with a different text, a poem similar to the original” (“Conversations”1075). In another moment, he declared: “translation implies transmutation or resurrection. A poem by Baudelaire, translated into Spanish, is another poem, and it is the same poem” (“Return” 335, tr. Milos). As a connoisseur of both Western and Eastern civilization, Paz acknowledges that every act of translating reminds readers about cultural diversity. Nonetheless, translation also proves how authors write in a universal language that includes the most distinct of voices. We must understand this idea in connection with Paz’s assumptions regarding modern Western literature. In Children of the Mire, Paz declared: “despite language and cultural differences, the Western world has only one modern poetry” (vi, tr. Phillips). What is striking here is Paz’s advocacy of Western universality regardless of latent linguistic and geographical differences. As a result, he refused nationalism or any local conceptions of literature, as can be seen in this quote: “It would be more sensible to consider Western literature as an integral whole in which the central protagonists are not national traditions” (“Translation” 160, tr. del Corral). In this light, the talent of translators consists of their skills for modifying the originals, connecting a myriad of styles in an “integral whole,” and reducing local differences thanks to their literary creativity. Regarding this last point, Paz was a harsh critic of the practice of a “servile” translation, confronting the notion of fidelity as the only concept by which intellectuals measure the act of translating. For Paz, the translator is also an agent who spreads the word about foreign writers and cultures. He saw translators as figures who employ an array of opportunities (i.e., publications in magazines, book reviews, and contracts with publishing houses) to expand unknown literature to Spanish audiences, and to Mexican readers in particular. Through this promotional crusade, translators make a grand attempt to promote new literary styles into the target culture, adapting originals to follow or resist aesthetic and ideological norms. When Paz confesses, “reading English and French poems, I felt that they should be known in Spanish” (“Conversations” 1073), he reveals his plan for modernizing Latin American literature. Translating poets such as Gerard de Nerval, Pierre Reverdy, or Elizabeth Bishop, Paz was dousing the Mexican literary field with modern and Anglo-European literary trends. As shall be seen, Paz’s translation of Sendas de Oku was the only vehicle for knowing Japanese literature in the Spanish language for many years. Furthermore, it is highly plausible that Fernando Pessoa had a successful reception across Latin America, thanks to Paz’s translations in 1961 and 1962. In the following pages, Paz’s assumptions and concrete practices of translation will be studied through his literary contacts with Matsuo Bashō and Alberto Caeiro, 223

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whose originals he manipulated and transformed in line with his understanding of modern poetry and cultures.

Sendas de Oku Translated by Paz: Diffusing the Haiku in Latin America In 1957, Octavio Paz, in collaboration with Eikichi Hayashiya, translated Sendas de Oku, a diary that describes Matsuo Bashō’s travels. Originally published in 1702 as Oku no Hosomichi (奥の細道) [Narrow Road to/of inside] it was presented as a classic of Japanese literature that, despite its significance, had not even been translated into any Western language until 1957. The English translation appeared some years after, when Nobuyuki Yoasa published The Narrow Road to the Deep North with Penguin Books in 1966. Paz and Hayashiya’s early translations were innovative and represented a milestone in the relationship between Latin American writers and Japanese poetry, more specifically haiku. Previously, the translations by Covarrubias, and the poems of José Juan Tablada and Efrén Rebolledo, had built the long history of haiku in Mexico and Latin America. This history echoed in Octavio Paz’s translation of Matsuo Bashō, one of the most significant authors of the haiku genre. The Mexican author José Juan Tablada introduced haiku in Latin America. The poet visited Japan in 1900, learning about Japanese culture and changing his worldview. As his knowledge of the Japanese language was very limited, his proximity to haiku was due to translations in French or English. One Spanish translation of Matsuo Bashō’s haiku published in 1914 is derived from an English translation included in A History of Japanese Literature (1907), edited by W.G. Aston (Ota 137). The publication of Un día… (1919) was different because he considered the brevity of haiku, a characteristic of his poetic form that emulates the brevity of the seasons. Un día… (1919) was the first book connected with an eastern style, preceding texts such as Li Po and Other Poems (1920) and Jarrón de flores (1922). Octavio Paz in his essay “La tradición del haiku” recognizes the impact of José Juan Tablada in Latin America because of his attempts to make haiku a poetic trend imitated by many Latin American writers. The reference to José Juan Tablada helps us to understand the fascination with Japanese culture between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Paz’s understanding, Japan arrived in Latin America through Parisian exoticism. However, little by little, it became an exquisite style, thanks to José Juan Tablada’s writing. In contrast to modernist authors such as Rubén Darío, Julián del Casal, or Leopoldo Lugones, Juan José Tablada broke with the Hispanic lyrical tradition and produced the first Spanish adaptation of Japanese poetry. Of course, the incursion was not exempt from debates. In 1914, Enrique Goméz Carrillo pointed out: “Los que han intentado traducirla [la poesía japonesa] se han visto obligados a parafrasear o inventar y han hecho cosas curiosas, a veces cosas raras, a veces cosas bonitas, pero cosas fieles, nunca” [Those who have tried to translate it ( Japanese poetry) have been forced to paraphrase or invent and they have done curious things, sometimes strange things, sometimes beautiful things, but faithful things, never] (226). In the first-half of the twentieth century, the haiku inspired the literary production of new Latin American writers. Authors such as Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), Yosa Buson (1716–1784), Kobayashi Issa (1763–1827), and Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) became the most widely read poets, producing a Hispanic fascination with Japanese poetry. As described above, French exoticism evolved and turned haiku into a poetic expression of experimentation. While this also happened in Latin America, what occurred in the rest of the West was different, particularly in the case of Anglophone art. It was not until 1949 that Reginald Horace Blyth published his book Haikus. In 1970, in “La tradición del haiku,” Octavio Paz praised Blyth’s research as a serious work. This publication would also correspond to the second moment 224

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of dabbling with success in Japanese poetry, no longer promoted from Latin America, but from the United States, especially since the Second World War. During the 1950s, Reginald Horace Blyth’s research would encourage writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Synder, and Allen Ginsberg, to venture into haiku (Casallas 21). However, it is important to note that Latin American authors were more interested in the poetics of haiku. In “La tradición del haiku,” Paz highlights the differences between the two moments of interest in Japanese poetry. Basically, while the former put an interest in aesthetics, the latter added a strong spiritual impulse, imposing the moral over the aesthetic: Aunque todas las artes, desde la poesía hasta la música y desde la pintura hasta la arquitectura, se han beneficiado de esta nueva forma de acercarse a la cultura japonesa, creo que lo que todos buscamos en ellas es otra forma de vida, otra visión del mundo y, también, del más allá [Although all the arts, from poetry to music and painting to architecture, have benefited from this new way of approaching Japanese culture, I think that what we all seek in them is another way of life, another vision of the world and, also, of the afterworld]. (Paz 1970) In other words, Latin America had an advantage in terms of the interest in and practice of haiku. However, the publication of Sendas de Oku, translated by Octavio Paz and Eikichi Hayashiya in 1957 coincides with an important period of Japanese literature reception in the United States. It was an interest that Paz’s translation preserves very well: the spiritual impulse of haiku. It is important to describe the production of haiku in the Japanese historical context of those years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Meiji period (1868–1912), haiku regained the popularity of earlier times, and poets like Masaoka Shiki wrote on the possibility of connecting traditional style and Western assumptions of poetry. In this light, Masaoka Shiki’s vantage point is innovative and runs in the opposite direction to the understanding of haiku in other latitudes. A fundamental point was to introduce the concept of shasei or “sketch of life,” which alluded to a realistic approach, far from the imagination shown by previous poets such as Matsuo Bashō. Capturing the materiality of nature and representing it according to its sensible aspects (Trumbull 2016), Masaoka Shiki reduced the role of spirituality. As a result, this poet renewed Japanese poetry, giving it a necessary vitality. Sendas de Oku (1957) appears in a particular context where the American influence, the Latin American legacy, and even the Japanese renewal tendency converged. It is also important to reflect on Paz’s translating work, since he published numerous translations from English, French, Portuguese, and Catalan as a creative writer. Regarding languages, such as Japanese or Chinese, Paz manifested a philological attitude. His translation coincided with an intellectual purpose of making Latin American literature visible, enriching it with Western and Eastern trends. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Lezama Lima, Alfonso Reyes, and Octavio Paz himself, among others, “contributed to the opening of Latin American culture to the influx of other Western and Eastern cultures, in addition to throwing it into the flow of a universality that is also pluralized and decentered” (Maciel 2002). After reading Teitaro Suzuki’s treatises about Zen Buddhism in 1950, Paz planned to travel to Japan. In 1952, he was a diplomat at the Mexican Embassy in Japan. This position allowed him to get to know the poetry of the country. In 1955, Paz decided to translate Oku no Hosomichi (奥の細道) with his friend Eikichi Hayashiya. The Universidad Nacional 225

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Autónoma de México published the first translation in 1957. The publishing house Seix Barral edited this work in 1970 and 1981. A last and definitive translation appeared in 1992 by the Shinto Tsushin publishing house in Tokyo. It is an exclusive edition that includes calligraphies and the paintings of Yosa Buson (1716–1783). Reflecting on the translation process requires thinking about the theoretical frameworks proposed by Paz. He considered translation as a vehicle for transmitting cultural diversity, promoting an exchange of ideas with other societies. The opportunity to get to know Japanese culture, therefore, was possible thanks to the diffusion of Spanish translation, as Sendas de Oku demonstrates. Paz’s thought articulated culture, tradition, and poetry to make visible the meanings of haikus. In fact, his project was to create a readership for Matsuo Bashō. As  he explained: “Bashō no los necesita [comentarios], sino lectores. Aclaro, es el lector, nosotros –ocupados, ilusionados, descolocados– quienes ganamos con esta lectura” [Bashō doesn’t need them (comments), but rather readers. I clarify, it is the reader, we—busy, excited, dislocated—who win with this reading] (Paz 1970). Furthermore, in his essay “La tradición del Haiku,” Paz also mentions how Sendas de Oku contributes to spiritual learning of Western societies: Oku no Hosomichi es un diario de viaje que también es una lección de desapego. El proverbio europeo es falso; Viajar no es ‘morir un poco’ sino ejercitarse en el arte de despedirse para aprender a recibir a la ligera. Destacamentos: aprendizajes [Oku no Hosomichi is a travel diary that is also a lesson in detachment. The European proverb is false; Traveling is not ‘dying a little’ but exercising in the art of saying goodbye to learn how to receive lightly. Detachments: learnings]. (Ibid.) As shall be seen, Paz’s translation reduces some words to recreate the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions. The influence of Zen Buddhism in haiku is notorious due to his perception of harmony and individual experiences. In this regard, Paz contends that spirituality is a valid argument for preserving the term Oku in the title. He argues: Preferimos el camino del medio, y pensamos que la palabra Oku, por extraña que resulte para el lector de nuestro idioma, quizás pueda reflejar un poco la indeterminación del original. Oku significa fondo o interior; en este caso designa la lejana región del norte, en lo profundo de Japón … El título evoca no sólo una excursión a las fronteras del país, por caminos difíciles y poco transitados, sino también una peregrinación espiritual. (“La tradición del haiku”) [We prefer the middle way, and we think that the word Oku because it is strange to the reader of our language, could perhaps reflect a bit the indeterminacy of the original. Oku means bottom or interior; in this case, it designates the distant northern region, deep in Japan … The title evokes not only an excursion to the borders of the country, along difficult and little frequented roads, but also a spiritual pilgrimage]. Oku no Hosomichi (奥の細道) is Bashō’s masterpiece and depicts the poet’s journey with his disciple Sora in 1689. The journey, toward the northern part of Japan, includes different places and historical sites in Michinoku over the course of about 150 days. Due to its characteristics, Oku no Hosomichi is also a haibun composition. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, haibun is 226

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a literary form developed in Japan that employs a combination of prose and haiku. A haibun may be as brief as a single terse paragraph followed by a single haiku or an extended work involving an alternation of prose and verse. (592) Bashō’s composition expresses peculiar characteristics of the haibun. However, the haibun also has a spiritual meaning that relates to travel as a means of growing as an individual. More than a description of events, his intention is to capture the spirituality achieved through the perception of nature. This process is a fictional composition, using geographic space as a historical reference, but highlighting creative aspects. Masaoka Shiki criticized Matsuo Bashō’s view as her idea of haiku was different from his. The most important thing for Shiki was to capture facts, such as concrete objects, and fix them in the haiku’s specific structure (Trumbull 2016). Octavio Paz also underscored the fictional nature of this book. To be sure, Paz made visible Bashō’s poetic fiction to underline his ideas on translation. For the Mexican author, the poet and translator are connected in a similar creative process. The diffusion of cultural traditions through translated texts, with their own characteristics, languages, and different aesthetics, can also renovate canonical conceptions of poetry. In other words, a classical text from Japan can renew literary writing in Mexico, thanks to the reading of translations. Concerning the power of translations, Paz has affirmed: El poema traducido debe producir el original que, como ya se ha dicho, no es tanto su copia como su transmutación. El ideal de la traducción poética, como lo definió alguna vez el insuperable Paul Valéry, consiste en producir efectos análogos con medios diferentes [The translated poem must reproduce the original which, as has already been said, is not so much its copy as its transmutation. The ideal of poetic translation, as Paul Valéry once defined it, consists in producing analogous effects with different means] (El signo y el garabato 73) Poetic language is, therefore, a continuation of translation. The original and the translated poems are juxtaposed and, thereby, the task of Paz and Hayashiya is an extension of Bashō’s writing, a creative process that produces new haikus rather than imitates the source language. The last edition of Sendas de Oku was published in 1992. In this publication, Octavio Paz and Eikichi Hayashiya included their last modifications. The second haiku, written when Bashō left Senju, Northeast of Edo, will be analyzed. It was the first rest area on the road to Nikko. The original haiku says: 行 く 春 や 鳥啼 き 魚 の 目 は泪 In the 1957 first translation, Paz and Hayashiya propose this translation: Pronto se va la primavera, Lloran los pájaros y hay lágrimas En los ojos de los peces. (1957: 26) [Spring passing birds cry and tears in the eyes of fish]. 227

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The second version from 1992 has the following composition: Se va la primavera, quejas de pájaros, lágrimas en los ojos de los peces. (1992: 69) [Spring is passing by bird complaints, tears in the eyes of fish]

Here the latent differences between the two versions can be perceived. The translators preserve rhythms and sounds throughout synthetic expressions, highlighting Paz’s desire for a close translation of the original. Translating a haibun or travel diary is a challenging task due to the sensory evocation of natural elements and the absence of author subjectivity. The haiku’s proposal is to represent human feelings in connection with nature without mentioning the author’s presence. Paz’s translation conserves this human absence, highlighting natural experiences. The first line of the haiku presents a brilliant word: the kigo (季語), a word that refers to seasons. According to Kenkichi Yamamoto in “The Five Hundred Essential Japanese Season Words,” “kigo is an important key that determines the quality of haiku depending on how you choose it and how you use it” (2019). In Japan, which has four richly distinct seasons, there are many expressions used by poets that convey them. In this haiku, Matsuo Bashō describes a kigo that represents the love of Japanese people for the cyclical time of seasons. Here kigo is spring, or 春 (natsu), a season that refers to a transformation in which things disappear. In the original, the first verse highlights this sensation: 行く春や Se va la primavera, Yukuharuya

The verse 行く春 literally means “spring passes.” However, the lyric speaker understands the spring as a transformation rather than a simple transition. In other words, readers must perceive that spring “changes as it passes” because the exact meaning is that spring is fading. To be sure, the connection between Bashō and the kigo is more than a process of leaving, it is also the regret of the time that has passed. The first five-syllable verse shows us this scene and ends with the syllable や: a well-known kireji’s effect that manifests the author’s surprise. Kireji are words that function in terms of grammar and content in haiku and are used by the poet to emphasize an aspect of nature. The objective of the kireji, in this case the kireji や, is not only to pause the first verse, to divide it in order to express surprise, but also to invite the reader to feel that “glow” of what has just been said. It is an invitation to reflect on the spring that is leaving. With the above stated, the first verse is a challenge for translation, and both Hayashiya and Paz were aware of it. The big obstacle is integrating the kireji, which is irretrievably lost when it is transferred to Spanish. The feat, in that sense, is not so much in forcing its presence but in maintaining the meaning despite its absence. To achieve this, a transformation of the original is proposed, an operation of the creative sense and not limited to literal translation. In Traducción: literatura y literalidad (Translation: Literature and Letters), Paz points out the following: The original text never reappears (it would be impossible) in the other language; however, it is always present, because the translation, without saying it, constantly mentions it, or turns it into a verbal object that, although different, reproduces it: metonymy or metaphor (155, tr. del Corral) 228

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The idea of metaphor serves to affirm that connotative meanings can plausibly be translated into the verbal situation. Perhaps there is no correspondence with kireji, but its connotation can be reproduced in translation. Kireji is a difficult term but is not impossible to translate 行く春. The options “Spring is ending” or “Spring is about to die” explicitate the meaning, but they are impossible for a haiku where the principal goal is to not show too much detail. The alternative of a literal translation like “spring passes” does not work either because a reader in Spanish would not identify the suggestive melancholy that a reader in Japanese would understand. Instead, the translation leans toward “Se va la primavera,” a bridge phrase that warns of the passing of spring without marking its end but still indicating that it is about to leave. The chosen words consider the familiar brevity of haiku, a feature of Japanese poetry that the Paz comments as follows: “Un poema japonés dice con muy pocos elementos algo que tiene una gran intensidad. Esto me interesó mucho porque va precisamente en contra de la tradición latina. (…) La poesía japonesa es una lección de economía” [A Japanese poem says with very few elements something that has great intensity. This interested me a lot because it goes precisely against the Latin tradition. (…) Japanese poetry is a lesson in economy] (“Oriente, imagen, eros” 200). If the first verse announces a goodbye to the spring, the second and third lines focus on the environment and the sadness produced by the farewell: quejas de pájaros, lágrimas 鳥啼き魚の Torina ki uono en los ojos de los peces 目 は泪 Me wa namida

The second verse 鳥啼 き 魚 の is a significant challenge for translators. This verse is, grammatically, attached to the third verse 目 は泪. In a linear way, they can literally translate as 鳥啼 き 魚 目 は泪 “birdsong, fisheyes are tears.” It is a profound description because of Matsuo Bashō’s intention in separating these natural elements to reduce the melancholic sensation of the end. The third verse 目 は泪 or “The eyes are tears” reflects the sadness of this haiku. The second verse preserves the image of fish and birds, although it is understood that the melancholy involves both animals. This haiku offers us a revelation, as spring and the natural environment give way to melancholy, a melancholy inherent to the author but faded in the composition of the haiku. The song of the birds and the appearance of the fish seem to be sad, for what is clear is that Bashō was saddened by saying goodbye to his friends near him. In haiku, this appearance is also due to the anthropomorphic technique that compares something that is not a person with a person and that, in the verse, is expressed through the birds and the fish. The mentioned animals could be the representation of Bashō’s followers and his friend Sugiyama Sanpu. Octavio Paz, as he usually does in other translations, changes the grammatical order and writes the word “lágrimas” [tears] in the second line to highlight the sadness around the image of birds and fish. Like Bashō, he wishes to capture an atmosphere of sadness in nature and in the individual. Therefore, in Spanish, tears as a bridge word between the second and third lines would be ideal to express sadness and magnify it. Therefore, we read this version in Spanish: “quejas de pájaros, lágrimas/en los ojos de los peces” [complaints of birds, tears/ in the eyes of the fish]. Without losing the essence of the haiku that conveys Bashō’s sadness at saying goodbye to his friends and leaving this place, Paz bets on a translation equivalent. For this reason, he uses a creative system of signs in which a translator “is dismantling the elements of the text, freeing the signs into circulation, then returning them to language” 229

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(“Translation” 159, tr. del Corral). In this way, translation becomes a creative act, the result of which is a “transmutation:” the new text that emerges from the old original. Haikus expose aspects of nature (animals, plants, landscapes, meteorological phenomena) or of everyday life. Because of this, the expression “bird complaints” is added, a translation chosen for 鳥啼 instead of “song” or “twitching of birds,” which is the literal translation from Japanese. The word has more simplicity than other translations, which used “crying birds.” Even the 1957 version says, “birds cry.” However, for the 1992 version, the authenticity to the original haiku seems to prevail. Paz theorizes translation as a movement of signs, a re-­ creation that seeks fidelity in its game, so he sticks to the original haiku, in which the song of birds indicates sadness, without this being a human expression, but rather a subtle reference to it. “Complaints” instead of “crying” or “squawk” is thus an intermediate between totally human and animal emotion, a harmony in which Paz surely felt comfortable as a poet and translator. The third verse “[lágrimas] en los ojos de los peces” [(tears) in the eyes of the fish] expresses the spiritual meaning of haiku, creating a moment that brings the real world into contact with the abstract world. As commented before, Paz’s translation not only covers the aesthetic but also the spiritual, and, in this case, it uses the sensation of mujo, or the transience of life, to express sadness through nature. In Translation: Literature and Letters, Paz points out that translation is “analogous although not identical to the original poem” (158, tr. del Corral). Here, the translated haikus conserve the spirit of haibun, a travel journal whose poetic writing is very sensitive to the environment. Beyond language, it is important to highlight the musical and fluid expression of these verses. The idea of sound is indissoluble to the senses. As a result, Paz was concerned with the metric, but also considered portraying sounds of the animals, the environment that the haiku describes. The translation does not maintain the Japanese system of 575 syllables, but rather the order of 798. Nonetheless, the Spanish version mirrors the musicality of haikus.

Octavio Paz in a Labyrinth of Ideologies and Norms: Modernizing Alberto Caeiro’s Poetry Like Octavio Paz, Fernando Pessoa was a versatile translator of Western literature. According to the Brazilianist scholar, Mark Lokensgard, “Pessoa translated more frequently from English to Portuguese than the other way around, and in terms of poetry into English, limited himself to translating Almada Negreiros and [António] Botto” (78). Without a doubt, Octavio Paz’s translations of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry published between 1961 and 1962 are one of the most significant and creative achievements in translation in Latin America.1 His brilliance as a translator is evident in the strategies he uses to transform the original rhythm of Alberto Caeiro’s poetry. For example in “If I die young,” this passage in Spanish, “y no encontré nada salvo que la palabra explicación no explica nada,” (Antología 57) modifies the repetitive tone in the Portuguese original text: “nem achei que houvesse mais explicação que a palavra explicação não ter sentido nenhum” (Poemas 137) (“nor did I find that there were more explanations/Than the world explanation having no meaning at all,” Complete Works, tr. Jull Costa and Ferrari). Nonetheless, the reader can also note radical changes between the source and target languages. Translating Caeiro’s uncollected poems, Paz prefers to write “viví como un réprobo” in Spanish (Antología 58), manipulating the Portuguese original “vi como un danado” (Poemas 138). In the English anthology A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (2006), Richard Zenith translated the verse as: “I saw as if damned to see” (61). Jull Costa and Ferrari, on the other hand, offered another version: “I saw like a man condemned to see,” which qualifies the act of seeing as a condemnation (Complete Works). In both cases, 230

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translators preserve the original verb (“ver”) in past tense, first person. In a parallel fashion to Paz, Jonathan Griffin uses the verb “to live” in his Pessoa’s anthology I Have More Souls than One. Here he writes: “I live like mad” (12). Whereas the Portuguese author conjugates the verb “ver” in the simple past tense, the translator into Spanish uses “vivir.” This decision stirs the reader’s curiosity profoundly. Rather than underline the condemned nature of the lyric speaker (“danado”), the translator chose to underscore his immoral temperament (“réprobo”). Was this just a typo or a calculated cogitation? But before continuing to analyze Paz’s translating strategies, it is crucial to consider how Paz came into contact with Pessoa’s oeuvre in Europe. According to Paz’s recollections in 1961 and 1989, he heard of Pessoa for the first time in his life during his 1958 sojourn in Paris. On a night of camaraderie between intellectuals, Nora Mitrani asked for Paz’s opinions on the so-called “case of Pessoa,” a possible diagnosis of mental disorder that could explain the author’s peculiarity and his use of multiple heteronyms (“Fernando” 4; “Intersecciones” 11). The question astonished Paz because of his ignorance of Pessoa. Even one of the most erudite authors in Latin America had taken no notice of the Portuguese poet. After this conversation in 1958, Mitrani sent Paz a copy of Le surréalisme, meme no. 3 (1957), a magazine in which she presented three translations of Pessoa to Francophone audiences: a fragment of the famous letter in which Pessoa explains the origins of his heteronyms, one example of Caeiro’s poetry “A espantosa realidade das coisas” (“The Astonishing Reality of Things”), and Pessoa’s poem “Gomes Leal.” Paz discovered the complexity of Pessoa’s universe through these translations. In addition, he reviewed the contributions of another French translator, Armand Guibert, who translated Pessoa’s work in1944. Moreover, Paz also read Portuguese editions and publications about Pessoa, such as the essays by Adolfo Casais Monteiro. Inspired by his intellectual curiosity, Paz started his translations immediately, during “unos pocos meses de trabajo encarnizado” [a few months of extreme work] (“Intersecciones” 11). It must be said that Paz’s initial translations were from French into Spanish (Langagne 192). The magazine Universidad de México published its first texts about Pessoa in November 1961. Paz shared an excerpt of his preface “Fernando Pessoa: el desconocido de sí mismo” [Fernando Pessoa: the man unknown to himself ] and a selection of poems with his Mexican readership. A footnote announced that the Universidad de Mexico planned to publish an anthology edited and translated by Paz the following year. Indeed, the press Nuevo Mundo S.A. put the book Fernando Pessoa. Antología in circulation on June 20, 1962. The print run was 1000 copies in ten–twelve-point Garamond font. Some years later, Paz included the text “El desconocido de sí mismo” in his book Cuadrivio ( Joaquín Mortiz 1965). Here, he incorporated Pessoa into his system of Western literature along with Rubén Darío, Ramón López Verlarde, and Luis Cernuda. In Cuadrivio’s prologue, the Mexican author comments about these writers: “los define no solo su ruptura con la tradición inmediata sino el constituir una tradición de la ruptura. Es la tradición de nuestra poesía moderna” [what defines these poets is more than a breaking with an immediate tradition; they also constitute a tradition of rupture. It is the tradition of our modern poetry] (7). This contention reveals one of the primary efforts of Paz as a translator: including Pessoa in the canon of Western literature. This proposal reflects an array of conflicts. Doubtless, Pessoa became a canonical author for Spanish-language readers, thanks to Paz’s essays and translations. However, as shall be discussed, Paz manipulated the Portuguese originals to reduce non-modern assumptions present in Pessoa’s ouvre, especially in the writing of heteronym Alberto Caeiro. The previous account portrays essential elements with which to reflect on translation. On the one hand, the relevance of indirect translation in Paz’s work is identified. Doubtless, the 231

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French translators Mitrani and Guibert motivated his impulse for translating Caeiro’s poems. On the other hand, Paz compares his act of translating to love. Regarding this last point, Paz confesses: “mis traducciones no son un trabajo de erudición sino el fruto espontáneo, tal vez un poco agrio, del fervor” [My translations are not an erudite work but a spontaneous fruit of love, maybe a little sour now] (“Fernando” 4). This phrase is similar to one of Paz’s declarations in his dialogue with Edwin Honig in 1975: “We start [a translation] with love. You must love the text” (“Conversations” 1801). For Paz, this love also implied actively reading about and researching Pessoa. According to Saenz Delgado (413), Paz also referenced important research done in Spanish about the Lisboan poet, namely Ensayos sobre poesía Portuguesa by Ildefonso-Manuel Gil (1948) and Fernando Pessoa y su creación poética by Joaquín de Entrambasaguas (1955). Finally, Paz decided to publish these translations because, in the heyday of his productivity and fame (the years between 1950 and 1960), Pessoa was an unfamiliar author for Latin American audiences. In fact, in his book review of the Pessoa anthology edited by Paz, author Juan García Ponce affirms that in Mexico this volume displays “una verdadera obra poética que nos era totalmente desconocida” [a genuine poetic work that was completely unknown to us] (28). To understand how and why the translator Octavio Paz edited Alberto Caeiro’s verses, it is crucial to evaluate Paz’s premises about literature and translation. Paz wrote poems and essays squarely within the modern Western tradition during his prolific career, from the erstwhile authors to his contemporaries. Books such as Children of the Mire and Signs in Rotation are widely documented among the capital components of modernity. First of all, Paz claimed that criticism is the distinctive attribute of the Modern Age. Without deities to adore, humans criticized all kinds of institutions, particularly the Church. As a result, Paz suggests, criticism was the leitmotif of sociopolitical transformations in Western history. However, modernity also signified the schism between being and the world. From the eighteenth century onward, man recognized himself as an entity disconnected from divinities, someone who is not more unified with reality. Consequently, the notion of a divided self was the cornerstone of Paz’s thought, as shall be seen in the following pages. To understand Paz’s conjectures on modernity, one must look at his essays and public speeches. In The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), Paz confesses: “the feeling that we are alone has a double significance: on the one hand it is self-awareness, and on the other hand, it is a longing to escape from ourselves” (196, tr. Kemp). Similarly, his testimony Itinerary (1994) offers us the following passage: for more than five hundred years we have lived discordantly between ideas and beliefs, philosophy and tradition, science and faith (…) Our time is one of split consciousness, and of being conscious of the split. We are divided selves in a divided society. (29, tr. Wilson) To deal with these modern conflicts, Paz proposed that poetry, translation, and revolution could be fulcrums for restoring a “paradisiac past” (Labyrinth 196, tr. Kemp). Quintessential to Paz’s work is a desire to alleviate the afflictions of “divided selves.” For Paz, fragmentation and strangeness were norms or typical rules of modernity. In this sense, he read and translated Pessoa through the lens of modern sociocultural constraints. In other words, Paz’s translations reflect the historical role of the translator into one cultural regime rather than a geniality or proficiency in language transfer (Elguera 2021a:21). He follows the norms of one kind of modernity invented for him through poems and essays. To introduce a poet such as Alberto Caeiro into this modern system implies an anachronism. To control Caeiro’s voice, 232

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Paz tried to prove that Pessoa’s literary production mirrored the principles of modernity. The title of Paz’s essay “El desconocido de sí mismo” provides essential details about the project of modernizing Pessoa. As an author embedded in Western cultural traditions, according to the Mexican essayist, Pessoa is an unknown to himself, a fragmented “I” without a fixed identity (“Pessoa or the Imminence” 8, tr. Honig). However, in contrast to this premise, the heteronym Alberto Caeiro ratifies his “I” without hesitation. In addition, Caeiro recognized the world’s materiality beyond signs, analogies, and human subjectivity. Unlike Western authors who created their literature based on the power of analogy and the plurality of signs, following Paz’s arguments, Caeiro is an antagonist of modern poetry who lives in a mythic time. Paz’s act of translating is aligned with modernity’s social and literary norms. Norms are constraints that explain the translator’s preferences for words and styles (Hermans 75; Toury 83). For example, Toury describes how Israel Jacob Schwartz, the first translator of Shakespearian sonnets in Israel, transformed the beloved man conceived by Shakespeare’s originals into a woman. According to Toury, “Schwartz’s behavior in this respect is not difficult to explain, in light of the prevailing [gender] norms of the period” (149). Following norms, the translator also expresses their ideology about literature and political matters. Regarding the refusal of British translators to transmit Aristophanes’s sexual scenes, Andre Lefevere notes: “most of the translators whose ‘Lysistratas’ [an Aristophanic comedy] have been published over the past century and a half felt the need to state their own ideologies” (33). Recognizing norms and ideologies in Paz’s work helps identify his translational ­position-taking. In a severe attack on the so-called literal translation, Paz advocated recognizing translators as active agents (“Translation” 154, tr. del Corral), underlining that translation is a hinge between the same (the original) and the new (the target language). This conceptualization dovetails with his framework of Western literature. In mapping Western poetry, Paz detects a double movement of tradition and rupture over the longue durée of the Modern Age. Engaging with the changes brought about by the modern literary rupture, Paz highlights the creativity and liberty of translators, thus confronting conservative ideologies imposing translations based on fidelity and the undervaluation of translators. Finally, in contrast to local or reductive understandings of literature, Paz trusted in the power of translation to bring together different languages and literary styles. In other words, Paz epitomized a type of translator for whom “everything is translatable” according to a global comprehension of literature (Apter 2006). In his essay, “Translation: Literature and Letters,” Paz depicts a scene in which Laforgue, Verlaine, Pound, and Mallarme, among others, play together in a symphony (160–161). They are musicians in a concert interconnected by rhythms and melodies that travel across Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Translation is a crucial instrument for articulating a diversity of poetics and languages within this transnational symphony, even Portuguese literature. Such articulation is possible because European poetry is an “integral whole,” as Paz argues in a whimsical attempt to connect the most distant authors, such as Dante, Baudelaire, and T.S. Eliot (“Translation” 160, tr. del Corral). In his translations, Octavio Paz materialized all these norms and ideologies in his interpretation of Caeiro, demonstrating that translators’ works “result from the conceptions of language and of translation according to which they operate, and the translation will bear the ideologies that underlie these conceptions” (Guzmán 28). In this regard, this section delves into the translator’s ideologies latent in the book Fernando Pessoa. Antología (1962). Paz’s intellectual deeds expanded the Spanish Baroque, romanticism, and surrealism in Mexican surroundings. He chose to translate canonical and also unknown authors from different geographies, such as John Donne, Paul Éluard, and Charles Tomlinson. These literary movements and poets corroborate Paz’s arguments about modernity: criticism of official 233

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powers, the rupture between the world and signs, suspicion of language, and, above all, the acknowledgment of emptiness and fragmentation in a desolate reality. Contrary to these precepts, Alberto Caeiro wrote axioms based on the physical sensation of things, affirming his difference as a being in connection with rivers, trees, and stones. The fifth poem is a case in point in which Caeiro “alters the very nature of faith by removing it from the abstract and metaphorical, whether in concept or language, and putting it into direct contact with the immediate reality of the thing,” as K. David Jackson proposes (120). For Caeiro, human beings, objects, and nature are tangible presences rather than metaphysical, fragmented, or linguistic signs. The translation of one uncollected poem, “Dizes-me: tu és mais alguma coisa,” brings to the fore palpable contradictions between the Mexican translator and the Portuguese author. According to Daiane Walker Araujo, Paz modified Caeiro’s verses to embellish his style and lexicon, changing rhythms and dispositions to a more traditional structure (617). Following the comparative method used by Araujo, one can see that Paz, in his translations, tried to keep his distance from Caeiro’s credo of materiality and physical sensation. In doing so, Paz wants to prove that “Caeiro is everything that Pessoa is not, and more—everything a modern poet could never be: a man reconciled to nature” (“Pessoa or the Imminence” 9, tr. Honig). Considering Caeiro’s non-modern temperament, the following verses are irreconcilable with the ideas defended by Paz: Digo da pedra, é uma pedra, Digo da planta, é uma planta, Digo de mim, sou eu (Poemas 135) I say of stone, “it’s a stone,” I say of the plant, “it’s a plant,” I say of myself: “I am me.” (Complete Works, tr. Jull Costa and Ferrari)

In the above quotation, Caeiro proclaims his “I” to recognize his materiality in interaction with other existences. This “I” is more than something self-bifurcated or separated from any abstract totality. Consequently, Caeiro does not envisage himself as a piece disunited from totality, but as a body that feels the existence of nature beyond metaphysics or poetic analogies. The “I” proposed by Caeiro affirms a tangible reality as a healthy manifestation of vitality. Translating this verse, Paz omits Caeiro’s affirmation “sou eu” for one specific motive. Taking his cue from the European Enlightenment onward, Paz considered modern subjects to have lost their “I” after a traumatic separation from what he calls “the All,” the “paradisiac past,” or “real reality.” Such a rupture gives rise to a divided creature that is a stranger to itself. Paz’s essay about Pessoa was published in 1961 based on this argument. The Mexican author contends that Pessoa’s tendency toward heteronomy proves his belonging to the modern tradition. Paz states: “Pessoa’s experience, perhaps without his having himself intended it so, fits into the tradition of the great poets of the modern era, from Nerval and the German romantics on, the I is an obstacle, the obstacle” (“Pessoa or the Imminence” 20, tr. Honig). According to these assumptions, it is easy to understand why Paz erased the “I” proclaimed by Caeiro, as can be seen in this quote: (…) digo de la piedra: es una piedra. Digo de la planta es una planta. Y digo De mi: soy (Antología 55) 234

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It is tempting to classify this passage as the epitome of Paz’s manipulation and as evidence of how translators repurpose original meanings. Paz removed the “I” because he believed in the Rimbaudian phrase: “Je est un autre” [I is another]. It seems that Caeiro’s affirmation troubled Paz for many years, motivating him to write a rebuttal of Alberto Caeiro in the essay “Interacciones y bifurcaciones.” This refutation could be read as an offshoot of “The man unknown to himself.” In a 1961 essay, Paz tolerated Caeiro’s “excess of reality,” his “absolute affirmation of existence” (“Pessoa” 10). By contrast, in 1989, he appealed to his readers to disbelieve in Caeiro’s affirmation about the “I.” Caeiro qua Paz is an impossibility, a topsy-turvy thinker in the order of modern Western literature. Seen in this way, Caeiro shakes the pillars of the knowledge system Paz spent decades constructing. In one paragraph, the Mexican poet states: “cuando se dice yo soy se está diciendo algo que, desde que el hombre es hombre, no acabamos de decir. El hombre no termina de decir que o quien es porque nunca acaba de ser completamente” [When someone says I am, it refers to something that, from the foundations of humanity, we never finish saying. Man never finishes saying what or who he is because man never finishes being completely] (“Intersecciones” 11). In addition, Paz contends that the “I” is a chimera or abstraction rather than a corporeal entity, confronting Caeiro’s defense of materiality. Paz bases his refutation on various thinkers, such as the Buddhist Nagarjuna and the British philosopher David Hume, to prove Caeiro’s fallacy. Emphatically, he points out: “Para Nagarjuna el yo no es sino un sonido sin significado; no designa a una realidad sino a la vacuidad. Para Hume, el yo es una percepción instantánea y evanescente, una ilusión” [For Nagarjuna the I is no more than an insignificant sound; it designates an emptiness rather than a reality. For Hume, the I is an instantaneous and evanescent perception, just an illusion] (ibid.). Despite Paz’s battles with Caeiro’s principles, other translators have preferred to preserve the original “I” to emphasize the vitality of what is self-contemplated by Caeiro in his pastoral daily life, as we can see here: Of myself I say, I am me (tr. Honig 37–38) I say of myself, “It’s me” (tr. Zenith, Pessoa and Co.78) I say of myself: “I am me” (tr. Jull Costa and Ferrari) De moi je dis: « je suis moi » (tr. Guirard 116)

English and French translators conserve Caeiro’s voice because they do not refute his conception of being. In comparison, Paz conceived of the existence of the modern subject as a constant disintegration. He was quite insistent on this point throughout his copious publications. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1990), Paz confesses: “I felt dislodged from the present” (14). In another stirring passage, he affirms: the feeling of separation is universal (…) It is born at the very moment of our birth: as we are wrenched from the whole, we fall into a foreign land. This never-healing wound is the unfathomable depth of every man. (“Search” 11, tr. Stanton) The Labyrinth of Solitude offers another statement in which the author describes this separation as “a form of orphanhood, an obscure awareness that we have been torn from the All” (20, tr. Kemp). Paz redirects these detrimental effects of modernity to his translation of The Keeper of Sheep’s poem XXXII. In one stanza, Caeiro says: “Todo o mal do mundo vem de nos importarnos uns com os outros” (Poemas 119). Paz decides to change the meaning of “nos importarnos,” preferring another version: “Todo el mal del mundo viene/de torturarnos los unos a los 235

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otros” (Antología 49). It seems safe to assume that Paz consciously altered the original guided by the whims of modernity. The expression “torturarnos” (from the verb “torture”) echoes separation and wounds as symbols of the modern age. In other words, though a calculated strategy, Paz is imposing modern attributes upon Caeiro’s voice. Readers can compare other English and French translations of the verse in question to clarify this point: All the ill in the world comes from people interfering With one another (tr. Merton 993) All the world’s troubles come from our worrying about one another (tr. Honig 33) All of the world’s trouble comes from us fretting over one another (tr. Zenith, Pessoa and Co. 58) All the evils of the world come from us taking an interest in one another (tr. Jull Costa and Ferrari, Complete Works) Tout le mal du monde vient de ce que nous tracassons les uns des autres (tr. Guirard 69)

The statements “interfering” and “taking an interest” in Merton and Jull Costa and Ferrari’s translations, respectively, reflect Caeiro’s intention to criticize one noisy person who is concerned with the lives of others, perhaps with envy or jealousy as in a battle of egos. The other translators agree on the sensation of apprehension between one another. In contrast, Paz outlines feelings of pain and disgust when he uses the word “torturarnos,” a conception equidistant from Caeiro’s vantage point. The uncollected poem “A espantosa realidade das cosas” also reveals the mismatch between Caeiro and Paz. Subsequent to the first strophe, Caeiro contends that all his poems repeat the same idea: “Basta existir para se ser completo” or “To be complete it is enough to exist” (Complete Works, tr. Jull Costa and Ferrari). This material precept challenges any verbose or metaphysical theorization of humanity, highlighting that humans will exist, feeling their bodies and the palpable reality of multiple beings. After this contention, the pastoral poet reveals to us: Cada poema meu diz isto, E todos os meus poemas são diferentes, Porque cada coisa que há é uma maneira de dizer isto. (Poemas 135)

According to Paz, Caeiro pronounces a different statement: Cada poema mío dice lo mismo Cada poema mío es diferente Cada cosa es una manera de decir lo mismo. (Antología 55)

It was not by chance that Paz modified these lines. He transforms the original to affirm his idea of modern literature as an emulsion of the old and the new. This is a conceptualization 236

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Paz learned from T.S. Eliot’s statement about tradition: “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it” (37). Literary ideologies proposed by Eliot—and also his friend Ezra Pound— influenced Paz’s thought on the praxis of translating. “Lo mismo” is an abstract or universal utterance that highlights the sameness of poetry. Such a sameness refers to the past literary tradition that, simultaneously, appears in the most recent poetic works. This literary perspective also echoes the reflections on translation proposed by Paul Valéry, a French writer mentioned by Paz in his commentaries on translating poetry. In one essay, he points out: “the ideal of poetic translation, as Valéry once superbly defined it, consists of producing analogous effects with different implements” (“Translation” 160, tr. del Corral). Meanwhile, dialoguing with Edwin Honig in 1976, he asserts: “Translation is the art of producing, with different means, analogous effects. I think Valéry said something like that” (“Conversations” 1075). Rather than modify the originals according to their own literary ideologies, translators such as Armand Guirard and Richard Zenith recognized Caeiro’s phrase, “Basta existir para se ser completo” (Poemas 135), as the reiterated idea in his work, employing the expression “this” and its equivalents to avoid possible misunderstandings. We can perceive the differences between Paz and other translators in the following quotations from the above poem, “A espantosa realidade das cosas”: And this is what every poem of mine says And all my poems are different Because each thing that exists is a different way of saying this (tr. Zenith, Little Larger 58) Each of my poems says this, And each of my poems is different, Because each thing that exists is a way of saying this (tr. Jull Costa and Ferrari, Complete Works) Cela, chacun de mes poèmes le dit, et tous mes poèmes sont différents, parce que chaque chose au monde est une manière de le proclamer (tr. Guirard 117)

The French expression “cela” (this) used by Guirard highlights the fact that these verses refer to Caeiro’s previous assertion: “All it takes to be complete is to exist,” according to Zenith’s translation (A Little Larger 58). As a promoter of modern literature, Paz rejected this dictum, and, consequently, he manipulated the original to erase or reduce meanings opposed to the Western literary system. In order to understand these contradictions, it is worth mentioning the distances between Caeiro’s materialism and that of Stéphane Mallarmé, another French poet celebrated and also translated by Paz. In Alternating Current, Paz argues how in modern times it is “impossible for the artist to invoke presence” (27, tr. Lane). As a result, the only choice for this artist is to follow Mallarmé’s abstract ideas: “manifesting absence, incarnating emptiness” (27). In the face of this Mallarmean viewpoint cited by Paz, the poet Alberto Caeiro could say that “absence” and “emptiness” are mere expressions of human subjectivity and not the materiality of the world, as he said in the poem “The astonishing reality of things” (Complete Works). 237

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Conclusion This chapter explored Octavio Paz’s reflections on and practices of translation through his poetic relationship with Matsuo Bashō and Alberto Caeiro. Translating Sendas de Oku in 1957, Paz became the most important promoter of the haiku genre in Latin American literary fields after his compatriot Juan José Tablaba. Sendas de Oku as translated by Paz preserves the original’s profundity manifested in Matsuo Bashō’s travel diary from the sixteenth century. For Paz, the translator is a poet and a creator that transmits the original effects to new readers and achieves its continuity in the translated text. Affirming that the act of translating is not impossible and that connotative meanings can be expressed without difficulties, Paz trusted in his abilities to find equivalences between the source and the target cultures. Sendas de Oku also brings to the fore the connections between poetry and Zen spirituality. Therefore, Paz also was engaged in spreading work on Japanese religious viewpoints around Latin America. In this regard, the translator plays a fundamental role as an agent that connects the most distant cultural traditions. Regarding Alberto Caeiro, Octavio Paz manipulated his voice to repurpose non-modern meanings latent in The Keeper of Sheep and Uncollected Poems. This operation sheds light on how a translator’s decision-making relies on ideological and aesthetic factors. Caeiro was a short circuit in the current of modern authors saluted by Paz. Therefore, he chose to edit Caeiro’s expressions and meanings to transform him into another icon of modern Western poetry. Without a doubt, Paz admired Pessoa and tried to publicize his poems in the Mexican-lettered city between 1961 and 1962. However, this admiration also reflects his ideologies and constraints. Paz modified Alberto Caeiro, the Pessoa heteronomy most incompatible with his precepts, to legitimize his insightful theorization about modernity. In sum, the translator Octavio Paz decided to diffuse Caeiro’s oeuvre by editing his anti-modern assumptions about literature and life. The translator defined by Paz is an active author who refuses to translate word by word, who resists copying the original text, and whose primary effort is transforming the source language. In a passage that evokes Ezra Pound’s and Haroldo de Campos’s writings on translation, Paz states: “the idea of the poet as translator or decipherer leads to the disappearance of the author” (Children 72, tr. Phillips).

Note 1 Author Christian Elguera wants to express his gratitude to Arthur Dixon and Mark Lokensgard for their commentaries and feedback about the section dedicated to Pessoa.

Works Cited Akmajian, Hiag. Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf: The Art of Haiku. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1979. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton UP, 2006. Araujo, Daiane Walker. “Octavio Paz, leitor de Fernando Pessoa: crítica, tradução e poesia.” Pessoa Plural, no. 10, 2016, pp. 606–627. Bashō, Matsuo. Sendas de Oku. Translated by Octavio Paz and Eikichi Hayashiya. Atalanta, 2014. Boll, Tom. Octavio Paz and T.S. Eliot: Modern Poetry and The Translation of Influence. Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2012. Casallas, Javier Felipe. La apropiación del haiku en América Latina. 2019. Universidad Nacional de Colombia, PhD Dissertation. Chieu, Nhat. Bashō and Haiku Poetry. Literature Publishing House, 1994. Cisneros, Odile. “Translation and Radical Poetics: The Case of Octavio Paz and the Noigandres.” Transpoetic Exchanges: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and The Other Multiversal Dialogues, edited by Marilia Librandi, et al. Bucknell UP, 2020. 238

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Elguera, Christian. Iluminaciones de la traducción: Haroldo de Campos y Octavio Paz en Austin. Latin American Literature Today, no. 14, 2020. https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/es/2020/05/ illuminations-translation-haroldo-de-campos-and-octavio-paz-austin-christian-elguera/. ———. “La heroicidad de Manco Inca en la traducción transatlántica de Pedro Cieza de León.” Escritura y Pensamiento, vol. 20, no. 41, 2021a, pp. 13–49. ———. Octavio Paz: sendas hacia lo intraducible. Latin American Literature Today, no. 17, 2021b. https://latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/es/2021/02/octavio-paz-paths-towards-untranslatablechristian-elguera/. Eliot, T.S. Introduction. Ezra Pound: Selected Poems. Faber & Faber, 1948. ———. “Tradition and the Individual Talent Author(s).” Perspecta, vol. 19, 1982, pp. 36–42. García Ponce, Juan. “Fernando Pessoa, Antología.” Revista Universidad de México, August, 1962, p. 28. Gomez Carrillo, Enrique. “El sentimiento poético japonés,” El nuevo mercurio, April, 1907, pp. 444–459. Greene, Roland, et al., editors. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton UP, 2012. Grossman, Edith. Why Translation Matters. Yale UP, 2010. Guzmán, Maria Constanza. Gregory Rabassa’s Latin American Literature: A Translator’s Visible Legacy. Bucknell UP, 2010. Hermans, Theo. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained. Routledge, 2019. Honig, Edwin. “Conversations with Translators, II: Octavio Paz and Richard Wilbur.” MLN, vol. 91, no. 5, 1976, pp. 1073–1083. ——— and Jean Longland. “Two Interviews. Conducted by Carolina Matos.” The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa, edited by George Monteiro. Gavea-Brown Publications, 1981, pp. 153–165. Jackson, K. David. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. Oxford UP, 2010. Kimiko, H. An Old World Made New: The Narrow Road to the Interior. W.W. Norton, 2008. Lambert, José. “Twenty Years of Research on Literary Translation at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.” Functional Approaches to Culture and Translation. John Benjamins, 2006, pp. 49–62. Langagne, Eduardo. “Fernando Pessoa en México.” Pessoa Plural, no. 16, 2019, pp. 189–209. Lefevere, André. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. Routledge, 2017. Maciel, Maria Esther. “Poéticas de la multiplicidad: Octavio Paz y Haroldo Campos.” Corner 5, 2002. http://www.cornermag.net/corner05/page07.htm. Merton, Thomas. “Twelve Poems from The Keeper of the Flocks.” The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1977, pp. 987–996. Nettel, Guadalupe. Octavio Paz: las palabras en libertad. El Colegio de México-Taurus, 2014. Ota, Seiko. “José Juan Tablada: la influencia del haikú japonés en Un día…” Literatura Mexicana, vol. 16, no. 1, 2005, pp. 133–144. Paz, Octavio. “Fernando Pessoa: el desconocido de sí mismo.” Revista Universidad de México, November, 1961, pp. 4–7. ———. Cuadrivio. Joaquín Mortiz, 1965. ———. “La tradición del haiku.” México en la obra de Octavio Paz, II: Generaciones y semblanzas, Fondo de Cultura Económica, [1970] 1987. ———. Alternating Current. 1967. Translated by Helen R. Lane. Viking Press, 1973. ———. El signo y el garabato. Editorial Seix Barral, 1973. ——— and De Campos, Haroldo. Transblanco (em torno a Blanco de Octavio Paz). Editora Guanabara, 1986. ———. “Intersecciones y bifurcaciones: A.O. Barnabooth, Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro.” Vuelta, no.147, 1989, pp. 7–11. ———. In Search of The Present: Nobel Lecture, 1990. Translated by Anthony Stanton. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. ———. Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde. 1974. Translated by Rachel Phillips. Harvard University Press, 1991. ———. The Labyrinth of Solitude. 1950. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips, BelasGrove Press, 1991. ———. “Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude.” The Labyrinth of Solitude. BelasGrove Press, 1991. ———. “Translation: Literature and Letters.” 1971. Translated by Irene del Corral. Theories of Translation from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 152–162. ———. Itinerary. 1994. Translated by Jason Wilson. Menard Press, 1999. 239

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Pessoa, Fernando. Le Gardeur de troupeaux et les autres poèmes d’Alberto Caeiro. Translated by Armand Guirard, Gallimard, 1960. ———. “Fernando Pessoa: obra poética.” Translated by Octavio Paz, Revista Universidad de México, November, 1961, pp. 8–13. ———. Antología. Translated by Octavio Paz. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1962. ———. Selected Poems. Translated by Edwin Honig. The Swallow Press, 1971. ———. Poemas de Alberto Caeiro. Publicações Europa-America, 1995. ———. Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. Translated by Richard Zenith. Grove Press, 1998. ———. A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. Translated by Richard Zenith. Penguin, 2006. ———. I Have More Souls than One. 1974. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. Penguin Random House, 2018. ———. The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New Directions, 2020. Kindle Edition. Pizarro, Jerónimo. Fernando Pessoa: A Critical Introduction. B Sussex Academic Press, 2021. Ruy Sánchez, Alberto. Una introducción a Octavio Paz. FCE, 2014 Sheridan, Guillermo. Poeta con paisaje: ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz 1. Ediciones Era, 2004. ———. Habitación con retratos: ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz 2. Ediciones Era-CONACULTA, 2015. ———. Los idilios salvajes: ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz 3. Ediciones Era-CONACULTA, 2016. Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies – and Beyond. John Benjamins, 2012. Trumbull, C. “Masaoka Shiki and the Origins of Shasei.” JUXTA Two, no. 1, 2016. https://thehaikufoundation.org/juxta/juxta-2-1/masaoka-shiki-and-the-origins-of-shasei/. Van Delden, Maarten. Reality in Movement: Octavio Paz as Essayist and Public Intellectual. Vanderbilt University Press, 2021. Yamamoto, Takeshi. 俳句の季語まとめ。おもしろ季語一挙紹介、春夏秋冬、あの言葉も季語だった！ Warakuweb, 2019. https://intojapanwaraku.com/culture/13839/ Yohannan, John. The Treasury of Asian Literature. John Day Company and The New American Library, 1956. Zenith, Richard. Pessoa: A Biography. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021.

Further Readings Akmajian, Hiag. Snow Falling from a Bamboo Leaf: The Art of Haiku. Capra Press, 1979. This collection presents readers sixty of the most famous classical haiku in the original romanized Japanese. Berman, Antoine. Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. Gallimard, 1995. Here, Berman offers us a model to compare different translations of the same poem. Berman’s ideas are crucial for understanding the act of translating as a historical process linked to a tradition of translators. Chieu, Nhat. Bashō and Haiku Poetry. Literature Publishing House, 1994. This reading offers an insightful analysis about the similarities between Japanese ink painting art and classical haiku poetry. Paz, Octavio and De Campos, Haroldo. Transblanco (em torno a Blanco de Octavio Paz). Editora Guanabara, 1986. This is an essential volume for understanding Paz’s viewpoints about translation. This text includes some letters in which Paz discusses with De Campos how to translate Blanco—a poem written by Paz in 1967— from Spanish to Brazilian Portuguese. Yohannan, John. The Treasury of Asian Literature. John Day Company and The New American Library, 1956. This research is a way to delve into Bashō’s poetry from a global perspective of literary writings in connection with Asian religion.

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14 “Tequio literario” Translating Indigenous Literature as Communal Labor Paul M. Worley and Ellen Jones

Introduction Despite its 500-year history, the translation of Indigenous texts in the Americas into the continent’s dominant European languages remains undertheorized and poorly understood. This situation is hardly surprising given that literary study often centers on national literatures that are assumed to be monolingual, monoscriptural, and reflective of a national culture, whether of the United States, Mexico, or Argentina. While focusing on the literary translation into English of languages spoken in Mesoamerica, throughout the chapter, we make broader reference to the rest of Abiayala, which is the Guna term for the entirety of the landmass in the Western Hemisphere. As described by the K’iche’ scholar Emil Keme (2018), the term can be translated as “land in full maturity,” among other potential translations, and this act of renaming is part of a larger political project in which Indigenous authors and intellectuals retranslate the continent by reasserting one of its original names. In our attempt to understand the translation of these literatures, we draw on Indigenous understandings of communal labor, and on what Cristina Rivera Garza calls “disappropriation” (2020)—the process of wresting writing away from individual authorship and acknowledging its plural nature—to propose that current translation practices in this area comprise a kind of community-based work that this chapter calls “tequio literario.” In literary translation it is common to have a single translator working with a single text; in “tequio literario,” however, a translator collaborates closely with the author, other translators, and community members in a network of mutual support that operates across multiple languages. The reasons behind the emergence of this practice are complex, reflective of translators’ linguistic and cultural limitations as well as Indigenous authors’ own commitments to their communities and to seeing their work in English. This chapter first argues that recognition of these literatures’ own literary codes requires us to move beyond notions of single authorship and monolingualism, topics explored here in depth by analyzing the role of self-translation and translingualism in the work of various Indigenous authors. The latter part of this chapter then examines original interviews with contemporary literary translators working with languages including Isthmus Zapotec, Nahuatl, and Zoque to argue that the communal nature of (re-)writing can be seen particularly clearly in translations of Indigenous texts into English, particularly as a response

DOI: 10.4324/9781003139645-17

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to the ethical and political complexities of translating from an oppressed language into a colonial lingua franca responsible for a large proportion of global language loss. In so doing, we demonstrate that Spanish, the dominant national language across most of Latin America, plays a complex and varied role that goes far beyond that of “bridging” a linear movement from one fixed, discrete language to another. As coauthors of this chapter, we have allowed ideas about communality and disappropriation to inform our approach to writing. This piece is the result of extensive dialogue and co-revision that draws on our own experiences as practicing literary translators as well as our scholarly training. It brings together ideas from different disciplinary perspectives (principally Indigenous studies and literary translation studies) and incorporates other voices into our own by quoting directly and often from our open-ended interviews with translators, conducted via Zoom during the summer of 2021. The insights we put forward here would not have been possible without their kind participation. The result is a chapter that focuses on process rather than product: we gesture toward a broad range of Indigenous writing while examining the various kinds of collaborative work necessary to make that writing available in English.

From Individual Craft to “Tequio Literario” Examining the translation of Indigenous literature into English requires us to dismantle two paradigms in literary study: namely the monolingual paradigm and the primacy of individual authorship. To begin with the first of these: monolingualism emerged as the dominant paradigm in late eighteenth-century Europe with the political linkage of language and state. According to this paradigm “individuals and social formations are imagined to possess one ‘true’ language only, their ‘mother tongue’, and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture and nation” (Yildiz 2011: 2). The assumption of monolingualism remains powerful two centuries later. For example, in present-day Mexico, the state behaves as though the country were monolingual in Spanish although there are sixty-eight languages (and many more varieties of them) spoken daily. While the country legally recognized itself as plurilingual with the 2003 Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas [General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples], this law’s vast potential remains largely unrealized, resulting in the frequent violation of Indigenous Peoples’ linguistic rights, including the right to register one’s child with an Indigenous name and the right to an interpreter when being treated in a hospital or tried in a court of law, as Mixe linguist Yásnaya Elena A. Gil has shown (2020). The assumption of monolingualism has also had long-lasting implications for the practice and industry of translation, which is usually understood to involve the transfer of meaning from one fixed, discrete language to another. In book publishing, rights are sold on the basis of linguistic territories that correspond to national languages, with each translation project described as moving from a single source language into a single target language. Translators themselves often describe their linguistic abilities thus: ‘SP>EN’ (Spanish to English), or perhaps ‘EN>