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.Several clarifications are now in order.First: this is not to say that Lifein the Argentine Republic was the only literary work by a Latin Americanauthor to have been published in New York City or in the United Statesbefore 1890.Nothing could be farther from the truth.To take the CubanThe Will to Translate83 community alone, high points on the list of classic texts first publishedin New York City in Spanish include the Lecciones de filosofía (G.F.Bunce, 1832) by exiled activist priest Felix Varela; novelist Cirilo Vil-laverde s canonical Cecilia Valdés (El Espejo, 1882), often described asone of the greatest Latin American novels of the nineteenth century; andvirtually the entire poetical obra of Cuban poet, journalist, and revolu-tionary José Martí, most notably the Versos Sencillos (Louis Weiss & Co,1891), as well as the bulk of his journalistic and political work.2This is not to say, either, that there were no translations from or intothe Spanish language published in New York during the nineteenth cen-tury.Washington Irving s 1829 Tales of the Alhambra crystallized an in-terest in classic Spanish literature that gave rise to multiple translationsof masterworks of the Spanish Golden Age, accounts of Spain s con-quest of Latin America, and the works of Catholic spiritual figures suchas Santa Teresa de Avila.Nor was interest confined to texts hallowed bycenturies of prestige: contemporary Spanish novelists such as BenitoPerez Galdós, Juan Valera, and Emilia Pardo Bazan were translated, aswell, particularly during the second half of the century.Why did it make such a difference whether a work originated inSpain or Latin America? The question is particularly pertinent in lightof the fact that throughout the nineteenth century, as now, the Spanish-speaking population of New York City was of predominantly LatinAmerican origin.Census figures for 1870, 1880, and 1890 show that na-tives of Spain generally made up only 18 to 23 percent of the city s totalHispanic population, which grew from 3,605 in 1870 to 5,994 in 1890.But for the Anglophone New Yorkers of the time, the distinction be-tween the Spanish speakers who hailed from Europe and those fromelsewhere in the Western Hemisphere was crucial.Spain, land of Cer-vantes and Quevedo, had precisely the literary capital the United Stateswas acutely aware of lacking during its first century of nationhoodand that it viewed the Latin American countries as lacking, too.PascalCasanova puts it this way: The classics are the privilege of the oldestliterary nations, which, in elevating their foundational texts to the statusof timeless works of art, have defined their literary capital as non-na-tional and a-historical a definition that corresponds exactly to the defi-nition that they have given of literature itself. 3 Spain, from this perspec-tive, possessed a cultural history that belonged to the exalted categoryof literature ; works by its writers, past and present, were thus of foun-dational interest to a newly postcolonial nation wishing to gain a univer-Part I: The Translator in the World84 sal literature of its own.Latin America, newly postcolonial itself, or stillcolonized, could offer no such cultural capital.Finally, this is not to say that the nineteenth-century United States wasin no way engaged in any kind of translation that involved Latin AmericanSpanish.On the contrary, New York City in particular was very busy in-deed with a thriving industry centered on Latin America that made trans-lations into Spanish, which New York publishing houses sent south in suchquantity that by the mid-1860s, the celebrated house of D.Appleton alonewas shipping out nearly fifty such translations a year.This was culturalcapital of a different order.This thriving industry provided income andemployment to quite a number of Latin American exiles who lived in thecity, including the Puerto Rican educator and philosopher Eugenio Maríade Hostos, and José Martí, whose several translations for D.Appleton &Co.are included in the various editions of his Obras completas.In 1887, at his own expense, Martí translated into Spanish, pub-lished, and distributed across Mexico Helen Hunt Jackson s Ramona(1884), a hugely popular novel about racial tensions in California fol-lowing annexation by the United States in 1850.He wanted to alertMexicans to the dangers of U.S.expansionism, but was also motivated,as his preface states, by admiration of the work s literary qualities.Hebelieved these, along with its subject matter, gave it a rightful place inLatin American literature.In Ramona, Martí writes by way of introduc-tion to his translation, Helen Hunt Jackson. . .has perhaps. . .writtenour novel nuestra novela (emphasis mine).4The imbalance is clear.In his preface to the first Mexican historicalproduction to be deemed worthy of translation into the English lan-guage The Other Side; or Notes for the History of the War between Mexico andthe United States (New York: Wiley, 1850), a compilation of accounts byvarious Mexican military and political figures the book s editor, Al-bert C.Ramsey, a colonel with the 11th infantry during the U.S.inva-sion of Mexico in 1846, had noted that, The [Mexican people] are farbetter informed on subjects pertaining to the United States than arethe American people informed on subjects pertaining to Mexico. Nueva York is consubstantial with New York; it walks down the samestreets, endures the same blizzards, hunches over tables in the same li-braries, stares out of windows at the same rivers, is blinded by the samehard, glittering light.The city s streets echo with English, Spanish, andmany other languages.But even after decades of convivencia, the LatinAmerican writers who inhabited Nueva York and composed and publishedThe Will to Translate85 their books here and who read the work of their Anglophone counter-parts with keen interest, as Martí s impassioned essays on Whitman,Emerson, and a host of other North American luminaries attest had nohope of seeing their work gain access to the Anglophone literary sphere.A novel that has reposed on the shelves of the New York Public Librarysince it was founded, and that graced the shelves of the Astor Library(now New York s Public Theater) before that, evokes this divide.TitledLos dramas de Nueva York (Mexico City: J.Rivera, Hijo y Comp., 1869),it was ceremoniously presented by its author, José Rivera y Rio, to ColonelAlbert S.Evans in 1869.Evans describes their encounter in a handwritteninscription that appears on the book s flyleaf:Regents of Astor LibraryGentlemenWhile in Mexico with Mr.Seward I made the acquaintance of the au-thor of these volumes who desired me to say to you that he was takenprisoner by the French in Puebla and sent to France from whence heescaped to the United States.Here he remained some time in exile andwhile here, spent many hours in the Astor Library.He demonstrateshis appreciation of the library as a noble public institution by present-ing these volumes and requesting that they be placed on its shelves.With much respect,Colonel Albert S.EvansLiberty House, New York, Feb.2, 1870Rivera y Rio does not envisage that anyone might read the book hebequeaths a novel of manners set among Latin Americans in New YorkCity and certainly not that anyone might translate it; he asks merelythat it be placed on the library s shelves, simply to be present in the physi-cal space of the city it describes, as its author once was [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]