Translating Cuba

Literature, Music, Film, Politics

Robert S. Lesman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000410143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Cuban culture has long been available to English speakers via translation. This study examines the complex ways in which English renderings of Cuban texts from various domains—poetry, science fiction, political and military writing, music, film—have represented, reshaped, or amended original texts. Taking in a broad corpus, it becomes clear that the mental image an Anglophone audience has formed of Cuban culture since 1959 depends heavily on the decisions of translators. At times, a clear ideological agenda drives moves like strengthening the denunciatory tone of a song or excising passages from a political text. At other moments, translators' indifference to the importance of certain facets of a work, such as a film's onscreen text or the lyrics sung on a musical performance, impoverishes the English speaker's experience of the rich weave of self-expression in the original Spanish. In addition to the dynamics at work in the choices translators make at the level of the text itself, this study attends to how paratexts like prefaces, footnotes, liner notes, and promotional copy shape the audience's experience of the text.

1 Introduction

Cuban cultural and political texts have been translated and presented to English speakers in a variety of ways since 1959. Examining translations in the domains of poetry, science fiction, political writing, music, and film, we find that Cuban cultural and intellectual production is usually presented with a clearly defined agenda. In many cases, this agenda is political: to celebrate communism or to oppose it, to expand awareness of the experience of exile, to bring women’s writing and women’s issues out of the shadows, or to encourage a multicultural mindset within the domestic context.¹ Jeremy Munday notes how the Cuban Revolution not only led to greater interest in literary and political works from Cuba and Latin America at large, but also “led to an intensification of the ideological context surrounding translation” (54). Though the Cuban Revolution became a subject of intense interest and debate throughout the English-speaking world, for geographical and historical reasons, the U.S. was the epicenter of this activity. Describing the Cold War sense of urgency among intellectuals in the United States’ cultural hub, Rafael Rojas asserts, “it was imperative for New York intellectuals and politicians to take a public stance on Cuban communism at the time, insofar as the very identity of the United States in a bipolar world was at stake” (6). Rojas analyzes how the stance adopted by many of these intellectuals was one that idealized Cuban socialism (7). Similarly, for the British New Left in the early 1960s the Cuban Revolution represented a humanistic, non-bureaucratic form of socialism opposed to both Stalinism and “the limitations of representative democracy” (Artaraz 97), while the end of the decade saw British student activists using Cuban Revolution hero Ernesto “Che” Guevara as a symbol and inspiration (Artaraz 101). Beyond the U.S. and the U.K., we will see translations with clearly pro-Revolutionary intent originating in Jamaica and Australia. Opposition to the Revolution manifests itself most keenly in translations meant to support the U.S. military’s Cold War struggle against communism. Other renderings we will examine are offered to an English-speaking audience with a troubled ambivalence about the direction Cuban communism takes after its seemingly idealistic early years. The intellectuals behind these publications were previously more enthusiastically committed. Nonetheless, we will see that not all translations of Cuban works respond to the Revolution. In some cases, the objective of a given presentation of Cuban culture is to advance the understanding of a certain philosophy or of the artistic possibilities of a particular genre, rather than make a point about Cuban politics. Here the work is taken up for reasons other than its Cubanness, and at times editors and translators work to flout simplistic idealizations or demonizations of Cuban society.

Cuban works are presented in English through two distinct but interrelated textual channels: the translation itself and its editorial packaging. This duality corresponds to that of text and paratext, to use the language formulated by Gérard Genette. Both translations and the texts that surround them, such as prefaces and footnotes, activate an agenda underlying the English-language presentation of a given Cuban work, though they do so in different ways. Translations evidence ideological assumptions implicitly, while their paratexts tend to lay out their agendas explicitly.

Translation as Rewriting

Translation theorist André Lefevere’s three central concepts of patronage, poetics, and ideology are indispensable for separating out the issues at play when a translator enters into the disputed space between the creation and reception of an original work within its own context on the one hand, and the modification of that work for reception by an Anglophone audience on the other. Though Lefevere designs his system with literature in mind, it can be applied to translations operating in the other domains we will consider in this study: political writing, music, and film. For Lefevere, patronage, poetics, and ideology mold both the writing of original texts and their translations. Translations are shaped by the assumptions built into a receiving cultural context that exert pressures on the translator. A crucial insight here is that the cultural and ideological controls the translator operates under when translating to English are those of the Anglophone context imagined to be the target for the marketing and sale of the translation, rather than the context that shaped the creation of the original.

Lefevere explains that patronage is the sphere of “the powers (persons, institutions) that can further or hinder the reading, writing, and rewriting of literature”; in this sphere, the key actor can be an individual or an institution (12). The most immediately visible force of translation patronage is the publisher, including, for the purposes of the present project, record labels and film distributors. Standing behind the publisher is often another force, such as a government, a political organization, or an academic institution. If patronage determines what gets published and even what gets written in the first place, poetics for Lefevere exerts pressure on how texts get written. A poetics consists of both “devices, genres, motifs, prototypical characters and situations, and symbols” and “a concept of what the role of literature is, or should be, in the social system as a whole” (20). While the first aspect of this dual concept of poetics represents the expressive techniques that characterize the text itself, the latter determines how that text inserts itself into a broader culture. Again, though literature is the reference context for these ideas, how translators deal with central devices and motifs in musical lyrics, film subtitles, and political writing will be a fundamental question as well. What Lefevere calls “poetics” will then be expanded to include communicative techniques applied in the translation of political writing, and to how a subtitler manipulates language within the time and space constraints of their medium.

Ideology circulates through the controlling mechanisms of patronage and poetics. Systems of patronage, whether they are closely tied to public political power or not, typically facilitate the propagation of texts that ultimately say the right things about who should have power and what channels they should use to exert it. This fusion of ideology and patronage produces some of the predictable situations we will encounter in this study: communist governments facilitate the translation and publication of pro-communist texts; organizations committed to an ethic of multiculturalism translate and publish texts deemed rich in cultural particularity, or an editor committed to the philosophy of Bakhtin chooses poems that exemplify that way of thinking. Nonetheless, ideology can also influence strategic rewritings of texts that express conflicting views, a fact we will see, for example, in anti-communist presentations of the writings of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. When patrons circulate texts that say the opposite of what they believe to be true, there is always a vigorous application of such material as prefaces and footnotes to make it clear to the reader that the work’s content is to be opposed. In this way, a translation is intended as a weapon that turns against its original bearer.

Ideology motivates the decisions of powerful actors within patronage systems, such as publishers, editors, record labels, or film distribution companies, while also influencing poetics, or how translators work with language itself. For Lefevere, poetics “is closely tied to ideological influences from outside the sphere of poetics as such, and generated by ideological forces in the environment of the literary system” (20). Vivid examples of this influence will be seen in oppositional presentations of Che Guevara’s texts, where his writing style is pared down in such a way that its affective valence is neutral...