Transnational South America

Experiences, Ideas, and Identities, 1860s-1900s

Ori Preuss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317435204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

At the crossroad of intellectual, diplomatic, and cultural history, this book examines flows of information, men, and ideas between South American cities—mainly the port-capitals of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro—during the period of their modernization. The book reconstructs this largely overlooked trend toward connectedness both as an objective process and as an assemblage of visions and policies concentrating on diverse transnational practices such as translation, travel, public visits and conferences, the print press, cultural diplomacy, intertextuality, and institutional and personal contacts. Inspired by the entangled history approach and the spatial turn in the humanities, the book highlights the importance of cross-border exchanges within the South American continent. It thus offers a correction to two major traditions in the historiography of ideas and identities in modern Latin America: the predominance of the nation-state as the main unit of analysis, and the concentration on relationships with Europe and the U.S. as the main axis of cultural exchange. Modernization, it is argued, brought segments of South America's capital cities not only close to Paris, London, and New York, as is commonly claimed, but also to each other both physically and mentally, creating and recreating spaces, ways of thinking, and cultural-political projects at the national and regional levels.

1 “Almost the Same Language”

Translation, International Relations, and Identification

La Fiesta Literaria / a Festa Literária

On August 30, 1883, a “Literary celebration on the occasion of the foundation of the Brazilian Association of Men of Letters in the Empire’s capital,” took place at Rio de Janeiro’s Liceu de Artes e Oficios. Present were Emperor Dom Pedro II, his elder daughter and heiress Princess Isabel, as well as dozens of writers, journalists, high- and low-ranking politicians, military men, and two Argentine gentlemen, Vicente G. Quesada and his son Ernesto Quesada. According to the official program the guests received, the celebration was held in honor of the two foreign intellectuals who were included among the speakers. Several days earlier, an invitation from the five members of the organizing committee to “Sr. Dr. Vicente G. Quesada,” circulated in the Rio de Janeiro press. “The services rendered by you and your honorable son Mr. Dr. Ernesto Quesada as writers, in combating the isolation of the peoples of Latin America in the realm of literature, are well known in this capital,” said the text.¹

The Quesadas had been indeed involved as both authors and editors in a transnational enterprise of this sort for the last two decades. In 1861, the father had launched the Revista del Paraná, a journal dedicated to the history, literature, law, and political economy not only of Argentina but of America as well, with the double aim of national self-knowledge and greater awareness of intellectual developments among the other Spanish American republics.² Two years later, another journal followed, La Revista de Buenos Aires (1863–1871), dedicated to “American history, literature, law, and other matters,” and destined for the republics of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. This time the trans–Spanish American agenda was far more pronounced. In the opening statement, the Argentine editors, Vicente Quesada and Miguel Navarro Viola, mentioned Revista del Pacífico (1858–1861) published in Chile, and La Revista de Lima (1859–1863), as models for imitation, saluting these “valuable shrines of American literature in faraway territories united with us by common efforts and inclinations, and that the Pacific ocean and the Andes cannot separate.”³

Finally, in 1881, the two Quesadas started the Nueva Revista de Buenos Aires (1881–1885), which was more oriented toward the present than its two predecessors, which had been “deliberately detached from contemporary issues.” This reorientation responded to the new “necessities of a society that marches constantly ahead, seeking peace as political and civil means to guarantee free and cultured life.” In other words, whereas the journals from the 1860s–1870s reflected the pursuit of disinterested self-knowledge, national and continental, the Nueva Revista signaled a conscious fusion of the intellectual and the political fields, and, more specifically, of international history and diplomacy, maintaining and even strengthening the macro-regional inclinations of its forerunners. The declared ultimate goal of publishing investigations concerning American international relations was, according to the elder Quesada, to promote peace as a basis for liberty and prosperity.⁴

It was with this transnational background and reputation that the Quesadas arrived in Rio de Janeiro, the elder now in the double capacity of a cultural entrepreneur and a diplomat after being nominated as Argentina’s minister to Brazil. At the festa literária the father and son kept true to their professed credo of cultural and political approximation between the Argentine Republic and the Empire of Brazil as part of a wider macro-regional trend. “The nations of Latin America,” said Ernesto Quesada in his speech,

… both those of Spanish, and those of Portuguese origin, belong, we may say, to the same race and share, with minor differences, the same language, religion, and habits. They have, moreover, a common border, identical problems to be solved, similar instruments at their disposal, and an analogous future. Still, they live in an astounding intellectual and material isolation […]. This state of affairs is a real crime against Americanism. Men of heart from all sections of Latin America should join forces and try by every means in their power to change this situation.⁵

While the writings of the Quesadas did not directly reflect on the role of translation in itself within their project of binational and continental integration, they did use translation as a means to change the reality of Luso-Hispanic mutual ignorance. The third volume of their Nueva Revista de Buenos Aires featured an article by eminent Brazilian literary critic Silvio Romero translated into Spanish from the original Portuguese that had appeared in 1879 in the Revista Brasileira.⁶ Afterwards, the Nueva Revista de Buenos Aires continued to publish other translations from Portuguese, including speeches delivered at the aforementioned festa literária alongside newspaper reports of the event. Interestingly, the Quesadas chose to translate those texts despite the younger Quesada’s designation of Portuguese and Spanish as nearly the same language, and despite the interchanging use of both languages during the literary celebration in seeming contradiction with their linguistic ideology and the practice of bilingual exchanges. What we are facing, then, is a simultaneity, at once practical and conceptual, of translation and non-translation. This chapter focuses on that simultaneity—of which the case of the Quesadas is just one of many examples, not only among elite circles—and its relationship to collective identification and international relations.

The (Unwritten) History of Translation in Latin America

The history of translation between Brazil and Spanish America during the long nineteenth century is an especially neglected area of the still largely uncharted history of translation in Latin America as a whole. In part, this is due to the longstanding gap between historians and translation studies scholars in general. As Peter Burke noted, despite the so-called “historical turn” in translation studies since the 1980s, “workers in this field have less to say about the contrasts between cultures than between individual translators, less about long-term trends than about short-term processes, and less about the history of practice than about the history of theory.” Historians, on their side, although they often rely on translations for primary source materials and some actually translate—either as part of their investigation or as part of communicating their research findings—have paid very little attention to translation as a subject matter in its own right or to translation studies as an auxiliary discipline.⁷

Apart from this general miscommunication between the disciplines, translation in Latin America has also suffered from its peripheral position in the global geopolitics of knowledge. Thus, despite the apparent importance of translation in the region’s colonial and post-colonial history—an importance that some would attribute to its very peripheral position—research about it has lagged behind research about translation in core countries. The last three decades, however, have seen a rising tide of writing on the topic, mainly by literary critics and translation studies scholars, inspired by theoretical principles derived from the descriptive approach, commonly associated with the names of Even-Zohar and Toury.⁸ In accordance with this approach, newer studies have treated translation as an activity situated in a specific time and place, rather than comparing it abstractly to the original text. They have started to ask questions concerning the identity of the translators, the actions and motivations behind the choices of specific texts to be translated, and for which target audience and for what declared and/or hidden objectives the translation has been done. Birgit Scharlau divides the resulting body of scholarship into three groups. The first group of studies dealt with the contact between Amerindian and European cultures. The second group concentrated on translations of literary works from outside Latin America, mainly European and North American, and their role in the formation of the continent’s national literatures. Finally, the third group approached translation in Latin America from a post-colonial perspective emphasizing the role of translation in colonial or neo-colonial power relations.⁹

It is easy to see how the inter-linguistic exchanges between Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking America have been left untouched by these kinds of studies which appear to share a fixation on deep cultural divides and/or extremely unequal power relations, a fixation which often goes hand in hand with a reification of difference.¹⁰ In contrast, textual exchanges between the two linguistic blocks of Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred in a context of relatively equal power relations and linguistic proximity. In terms used in the field of world literature, these were exchanges between peripheral cultures that belonged to the same geo-cultural region, movements within a peripheral sub-system, rather than between center and periphery.¹¹

In the eyes of Brazilian and Argentine literati there did not seem to be a clear hierarchy between new-world Spanish and Portuguese, or between the respective literatures, such as the one that existed between these two “dominated” literary languages and the “dominating” French literary language in terms of “linguistic-literary capital,” to use Pascale Casanova’s terms.¹² This sense of relative equality in relation to each other, and shared inferiority in relation to the European center, may account for two other special characteristics of the linguistic exchanges to be discussed here. First, in terms of form these are relatively short or fragmented translations, rather than integral works: isolated phrases, short passages, and, occasionally, entire articles or essays. And second, in terms of genre, most of the works are “non-literature” about historical, political, economic, and cultural topics.¹³

The one aspect of this corpus of translations highlighted in this chapter is their link to the sphere of international relations, which is also, inherently, a privileged site for the formation of collective identities.¹⁴ This link between translation and international relations acquires various forms, sometimes concomitantly but not always. First, the translations appear at key moments of Argentine-Brazilian relations. Second, the matters discussed in the source texts are often linked to a past, present or future common to both countries. Third, both the authors and the translators are often statesmen or men of letters involved in foreign policy, formally or informally, as practitioners or as commentators.¹⁵

The chapter discusses a few important junctures of translation and South American international relations in chronological order, with special emphasis on the coexistence of translation and non-translation. Shedding light on those largely forgotten “events,” or “scenes of translation,” ¹⁶ I will reflect on what it meant to translate, or not translate, in circumstances of linguistic contiguity, growing movement of people and information across state boundaries, and converging interests and visions of regional progress. Finally, I will argue that the logic inherent in these transnational entanglements reflected and at the same time produced identities both at the level of the nation-state and beyond.

At this point, a short theoretical note is in place. From translation studies we take Anthony Pym’s observation concerning cross-cultural networks, which can be applied more specifically to cross-national exchanges. When it comes to translation, he suggests, it is more appropriate to think “of winds, of forces that sweep across particular cultures […] without any necessary restriction to the inner cohesion or circularity of the territory crossed. Such a network would comprise the general lines of individual voyages made from culture to culture, without mimicking the curves of geopolitical frontiers. The lines or bundles of lines would not go around a center or along a border; they must instead cut through the bonds of belonging, opening up the possibility of translation, creating and re-creating border posts as they go. This kind of network would by definition be transcultural rather than properly systemic.”¹⁷

The precepts of histoire croisée complement Pym’s emphasis on the inter-systemic nature of translation in that they direct attention to what is born out of the cutting through of political units and collective identities. In accordance with those precepts, we do not consider the transnational level—in this case the cross-national transfer of texts, with or without translation—simply as a supplementary level of analysis to be added to the national level, but rather as “a level that exists in interaction with others, producing its own logics with feedback effects upon other space-structuring logics.” We aim to avoid a crude reification of the national units involved by concerning ourselves “with the new original products of the intercrossing as with the way in which it affects each of the ‘intercrossed’ parties which are assumed to remain identifiable, even if in altered form.”¹⁸

Translation in the Age of the Caudillos and the Future of “Our South America”

In 1846 the Rio de Janeiro literary magazine Ostensor Brasileiro featured an article by Argentine writer José Mármol, then exiled in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• A Note on Portuguese and Spanish Spelling
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Connecting Rivers of South America
• 1 “Almost the Same Language”: Translation, International Relations, and Identification
• 2 “No Need to Go to Paris Anymore”: South American Experiences of Distance and Proximity
• 3 “Everything Unites Us”: Diplomacy, International Visits, and the Periodical Press
• 4 Calibanistic Ariels: An Entangled Luso-Hispanic History of “Latin America”
• Conclusion: Connecting-Separating Rivers of South America
• Bibliography
• Index