Gayle Rogers
Anglophone modernism certainly was one of several hegemonic formations at the time, but how might we reposition it as a temporary stopping point, a transitory route through which many other modernist figures and texts briefly passed on the way to more substantive engagements? How might we treat the familiar and the unfamiliar in modernism in their dialogic development and see Euro-American languages and literary institutions as simultaneously enabling and disabling, major and minor, central and marginal?
In her influential book The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova places Paris and the French language squarely at the center of the literary universe. Writers in other locales and languages only achieve international renown by having prestige conferred upon them by the Parisian literary system, a process for which Casanova takes the emergence of modernism as paradigmatic. While her schema is useful for examining cross-cultural dynamics and inequalities, it is limited for revising a field such as modernist studies—and when it is useful, it is double-edged. It implicitly encourages us to treat texts that originated in nondominant languages, but only insofar as they reached the Parisian bar. In Casanova’s account, literary “revolts” come from the periphery and aim at the center, and translation is a silent, almost invisible mechanism for such action.1 Thus, our studies first reinforce a preselected canon whose terms—from the ideals of literary autonomy and innovation to the elevation of formal experimentation over social realism—were created by select European modernists and their sympathetic critics. Then, as we import more non-Western materials into the metropole, we reinforce their exoticism, their unknowability in their source language, and that language’s distance from our more familiar target languages.
Where Casanova’s sociological-historical approach expands but essentially reifies the canonical map of modernism and the assumptions about originality, influence, and literary value that undergird it, much contemporary work on the topic of translation in world and comparative literary studies has productively unsettled these bearings. Such work prompts us to ask whether we must we begin or end our analyses of non-Anglophone literatures with their manifestations in a dominant tongue like French or with their lives in the Paris–London–New York–Berlin nexus that remains at the core of Anglophone-dominated scholarship on modernism. How do Anglophone scholars move beyond thinking about the English language, or about Anglophone modernists, as the only starting point, endpoint, or center of gravity for studies of translation in global modernisms? Anglophone modernism certainly was one of several hegemonic formations at the time, but how might we reposition it as a temporary stopping point, a transitory route through which many other modernist figures and texts briefly passed on the way to more substantive engagements? How might we treat the familiar and the unfamiliar in modernism in their dialogic development and see Euro-American languages and literary institutions as simultaneously enabling and disabling, major and minor, central and marginal?
This essay proposes thinking of the English language as an unstable medium, a fluctuating currency whose value was relative to specific collaborative transactions within disparate international economies of literature and translation. The cultural valence of translation varies radically, depending on spatiotemporal and geopolitical circumstances, and this variation opens up provocative questions about influence, dependency, canonicity, and the autonomy of minor-language texts. Thus, when framed through translation, the spheres of Anglophone modernism and its components (its authors, media, marketing, and more) appear to have numerous gates that open and close, often capriciously, along their borders. Writers from within and beyond these spheres negotiated those gates in ways that made Anglophone modernism both a field and a conductor between other fields in a network whose operations it did not control. Using translation as an organizing, constitutive concept for global modernist studies compels contemporary critics to resist the impulse simply to add more authors in translation to the existing canon or to emphasize diffusionist accounts of influence and technique. Translation and its mechanisms instead reveal both the connections and the fissures, gaps, ambivalences, and breaks—the inequalities that persist to the present—among the movements and figures that have been named “modernist.”
I will consider here two paths into and through Anglophone modernism, paths that were interwoven yet had very different outcomes: those of Rabindranath Tagore and Juan Ramón Jiménez. They crossed briefly through translation in English, but their more substantive and long-lasting crossings were enabled by their overlap in their complex lives in translation as Tagore’s work traveled from Bengali to Spanish. In a perhaps surprising textual journey, a writer from a colony (India) on the periphery of the Euro-American republic of letters became immensely popular and influential in a European country (Spain) that was on the margins of this same literary sphere. The contexts and results of this “minor-minor,” Global South/European South journey from Kolkata to London to Madrid—a journey that both traced and deviated from familiar colonial routes—comprise but one slice of the intertwined histories of translation and modernism. We find that Tagore’s flickering fame in English and his powerful legacy for over a century in Hispanophone literatures throw into relief some asymmetries that are unapparent until we use translation to hold dominant modernisms in a precarious, uneven balance.
Tagore, whose reputation in Bengali literature was already cemented by the early 1900s, translated his own works into English in complicated ways. His first major publication in English, Gitanjali (Song Offerings; 1912), was a mélange of previously published poems, excerpts from other texts, and standalone prose poems sewn together, in florid and often ornate language, with the appearance of narrative coherence. Tagore cut specific Indian and Bengali cultural references, toned down his anticolonialism, and amplified the mystical elements of his writing that appealed to the romanticized, exoticized desires of metropolitan audiences. He then fused pieces of poetry and prose to the point that the putative original fades almost completely out of view (see Chaudhuri, “The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore”; Sengupta, “Translation, Colonialism and Poetics”). And though he saw the labor of translation as vital to a humanistic, universalizing reparation of the wounds of colonialism, Tagore was always uncomfortable with it; his formal studies of English were limited, and in his letters, he admitted serious doubts about his skill as a self-translator. He wrote that
my English writing emerges out of my subconscious. . . . Once I mount the peak of conscious will all my wit and wisdom get muddled. That is why I cannot gird up my loins to do a translation. I can only set my boat adrift and not sit at the helm at all. Then, if and when I touch shore, I cannot quite understand myself how it all happened.
(Qtd. in Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore, 59)
While he was aided in his self-translations by Anglophone writers and by his family, he nevertheless felt that he carried out a “gross injustice to my original productions partly owing to my own incompetence, partly to carelessness” (qtd. in Tiwari, “Rabindranath Tagore’s Comparative World Literature,” 46).2 Aarthi Vadde notes, too, that Tagore’s later poetry in Bengali after his translations into English shows evidence of his stylistic revisions based on his contacts with the English language (see Vadde, “Putting Foreignness to the Test”).
Yet Tagore was—and still sometimes is—mistaken for a poet who composed originally in English, though he did so only once, with his later poem “The Child” (1930). Indeed, the Daily Mail declared of his Gardener (1913) that “one cannot tell what [the poems] have lost in the translation” (Briggs, “A Great Man from Bengal,” 6). His works immediately resonated with Western readers, and he was successfully promoted as a new star on the Anglo-European modernist scene. His initial rise in status was remarkable: in 1912, the third issue of the new Chicago-based little magazine Poetry, which published dozens of leading modernist writers alongside extensive translations from a variety of languages, featured the first of its many translations of his prose poems. Tagore’s appearance was accompanied by an essay by Pound, who claimed that this marked “an event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry” (“Tagore’s Poems,” 92). Several months later, when devoting an issue to Tagore, Poetry’s editor Harriet Monroe declared that “the serenely noble laureate of Bengal . . . [is] the ideal poet, the prophet aware of his world and now great-heartedly adopting ours; the Ambassador Extraordinary from East to West, bearing no passports from king to president, but speaking with supreme authority from race to race” (“Comments and Reviews,” 102). (Five months in advance of the award, Monroe points, with her phrase “noble laureate,” to the emergent campaign to make Tagore a “Nobel laureate.”) In an article for the Fortnightly Review, Pound added that Tagore’s poetry has “all the properties of action” that he and his imagist coterie desired at the moment, and he compared him to Dante. “We have found our new Greece,” Pound affirmed, and Tagore steers us away from “the confusion of our Western life, in the racket of our cities, in the jabber of manufactured literature, in the vortex of advertisement” (“Rabindranath Tagore,” 571, 576). Pound confessed to Yeats that Tagore was “greater than any of us,” one of the greatest poets in the English language; Yeats concurred that “I know of no man in my time who has done anything in the English language to equal these lyrics” (qtd. in Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 23, 24). Yeats effused in his introduction to Gitanjali that the book “stirred my blood as nothing has for years. . . . A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image” (xii).3 André Gide translated Tagore into French, and other famed European writers could not stop praising him.
Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913, becoming the first (and until 1945, the only) laureate from outside of Europe or the United States. Between 1913 and 1914, his works were translated into Swedish, Dutch, German, Danish, and Spanish, and he gave a lecture tour in the United States. By 1918, at least fifteen volumes of his poems and a handful of books of essays and autobiographical accounts had been published in English (Gupta, Rabindranath Tagore, 64). Prestige and acclaim flowed in both directions: by “discovering” Tagore, Pound, Yeats, Gide, Jiménez, and others were amplifying their own standing as kingmakers and arbiters of new trends in the literary world. Their often sensationalistic rhetoric regarding Tagore is replete with signs of colonialist appropriation, even while they emphasized that Tagore’s English was his own. Pound called him “THE Scoop” and bragged that Poetry was “the only American magazine to print him, or even to know” of him (Letter to Monroe, 46; see also Saha, “Singing Bengal Into a Nation”). Robert Frost later contended that Tagore’s “poetry overflowed national boundaries to reach us in his own English,” and thus he “belongs little less to us than to his own country” (“Tagore’s Poetry,” 298). In its Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy remarked that Tagore “made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”—that is, his career as the de facto poet laureate of Bengal was pushed fully into the background. The British Empire knighted him in 1915, though he would renounce the honor in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar) massacre.
Tagore courted and accepted such a reception, but his writings speak to these ironic claims of authorial autonomy that greeted his “arrival” among European readers. One prose poem in Crescent Moon (1913) entitled “Authorship” has a boy complaining to his mother about his father, a writer who “plays at making” volumes of incomprehensible books. The boy wonders why his mother defends his father, tolerates his lack of communication and interaction, and takes out her frustrations with him on her children. In a moment that imitates Tagore’s own self-reflexivity, the boy asks, “What’s the fun of always writing and writing? / When I take up father’s pen or pencil and write upon his book just as he does,—a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i,—why do you get cross with me, then, mother? / What do you think of father’s spoiling sheets and sheets of paper with black marks all over on both sides?” (49). The boy in Tagore’s text realizes that the difference between reproducing the alphabet and “spoiling sheets and sheets of paper” with meaningless “black marks” is purely a function of reception—and that reception can be fickle and without logic.
At almost precisely the same moment, Juan Ramón Jiménez, then the leading poet in Spain, began to focus increasingly on his own practices of translation, specifically on translating Anglophone American modernism. He found himself “being reborn . . . and I felt this rebirth of American poetry as if it were my own—much as I did the rebirth of Spanish poetry” (Política, 184). This occurred as he read Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others, and he produced a number of poems that bear the influence of and respond to these writers. Furthermore, Jiménez himself was entering this same English-language world of letters when he traveled to the United States in 1916 to wed the Spanish-born American Zenobia Camprubí: their honeymoon was spent collecting and translating books and visiting the homes and graves of famous U.S. writers. He writes of this in his six-part semiepic Diary of a Newlywed Poet (Diario de un poeta recién casado, 1917), which he composed during his voyage. The book is an extended exercise in translation of every type: there are traditional translations, such as his inclusion of complete poems by Emily Dickinson and by Robert Browning; translations of phrases, pamphlets, street signs, and conversations from his experiences in the United States; and translations of forms such as the sonnet, the modernista poem of anguish, and the aphoristic “one-image” poem of Pound’s ideals. In one prose poem, he takes up directly his own first appearance in English translation, when he criticizes the Hispanist James Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s popular Oxford Book of Spanish Verse (1913) for its poor renditions of six of his poems. (Four titles were liberally reworded, and one was changed without consulting the author.) Fitzmaurice-Kelly, who was Britain’s most important scholar of Spanish letters, “baptized me in chromium blue,” Jiménez writes, by reducing his complex meditations on color and emotion to a ubiquitous, bland “blue” at every turn, missing the nuances in his allusions to Rubén Darío’s Azul . . . (Azure . . . , or Blue . . . , 1888), the text that arguably launched the modernismo movement (Diary of a Newlywed Poet, 290).
Jiménez found nothing on the order of the success and praise in Anglophone literary cultures that Tagore did. Instead, his journey into U.S. modernism took what might appear to be an unexpected turn to world literature. As he devoured American literary periodicals, especially Poetry, and translated figures ranging from Frost to Yeats to J. M. Synge, one writer captured his attention more than any other as an emblem of English-language modernism’s capacities: Tagore. He and his collaborator Camprubí, who originally pointed him to Tagore’s works, obtained permission from Tagore to become his exclusive, authorized Spanish translators for all Spanish-speaking territories.4 Working from Tagore’s English translations and consulting Gide’s French versions, Jiménez and Camprubí produced an astounding fifteen volumes of Tagore in Spanish in three years and a total of twenty-two volumes between 1914 and 1922. Tagore was hardly known in Spain; indeed, potential readers were skeptical, if anything, because they believed Tagore had been awarded the Nobel unfairly over their countryman Benito Pérez Galdós in 1913. But Jiménez’s 1914 translation of La luna nueva (Crescent Moon, 1913) was a runaway success: there were three printings in the first year alone, with over nine thousand copies sold, better sales than any Spanish-language poet saw at the same time. Jiménez also tried unsuccessfully to bring Tagore to Spain for a celebration of his works.
Jiménez’s captivation was most similar to Yeats’s. But where Yeats bestowed his “blessing” upon Gitanjali in his introduction, Jiménez coupled his name with Tagore’s through translation. The translations themselves, despite the several hands involved, are mostly literal; they reproduce the exotic wonder imbued in Tagore’s English versions and do not evince a great deal of creative license on Jiménez’s part.5 It is, rather, the process of translating and publishing, including the employment of paratexts, that Jiménez engages more robustly. He begins almost every volume of his and Camprubí’s translations with a new poem or prose poem of his own, usually dedicated, like a literary benediction, to the narrative voice or protagonist of Tagore’s text. He opens La luna nueva, for instance, with a note entitled “From the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez to the Indian boy of Luna nueva,” asking the latter figure, “You are there, yes, we feel you with us . . . but where are you? . . . We have known you, yes; but are you aware of us?” He concludes that “it looks like the world, small as you see tangled in that tree, is your ball, and that as you play with that ball, you make what you wish of us” (“El poeta español,” 10, 11). That is to say, the two worlds (East and West, children and adults) that seem separated are bridged not simply by a Western “discovery” of a childlike East but by a convergence initiated when an Eastern writer imagines and creates the West, just as Jiménez’s European peers has posited.
Elsewhere in his Tagore translations, Jiménez opens the Spanish version of Gitanjali with a message to Tagore that fixates on their translational intercourse:
We [the translators] have aimed to give a new body to your great heart, to this book in which gathers your entire heart. Will your heart be moved by the book’s blood and rhythm? Will your heart beat freely in our body? . . . Yes, your poems are going to be heard in our words by your God! . . . Can you speak to him with our Spanish voice—to this God of yours, close, visible, human, who hears beautiful words?
(“Hemos intentado . . .”)
Camprubí concludes the same collection with another note on Gitanjali’s various material sources and with a statement that “no work, much less if it is a translation, can have, while its author is living, anything more than a transitory value. In each new edition, this book has to undergo further stripping [desnudando] . . . until it reaches its permanent expression. Madrid: 1918” (“Nota”). Here, Camprubí invokes the term “desnuda” (“stripped,” or “naked”), which became a keyword in Jiménez’s own minimalist notion of poesía desnuda, or poesiá pura, and the title of one of his poems, as a conceit for the process of translating and revising Tagore that would occupy a middle part of his own career. Indeed, he first elaborated poesía desnuda in 1916, after reading Tagore, in his Eternidades (Eternities, 1918), and the mystical elements he saw in Tagore would surface in his poetry through the 1920s (see Johnson, “Juan Ramón Jiménez”). “Stripping” or “denuding,” for Jiménez, blurs the boundary between the primary production of poetry and the secondary act of translation as both are conventionally conceived. Authentic poetic speech, Jiménez posits, was communal and universal, preexisting and belonging to no single author, and thus “there are things that” by their very form “appear not to have been said first by anyone,” only discovered by the true poet (qtd. in Palau de Nemes, “Tagore and Jiménez,” 191).
By 1918, thanks to Jiménez’s translations, Tagore’s work attracted commentary from José Ortega y Gasset, the philosopher, publisher, and culture broker who towered over Madrid’s intellectual scene at the time. In a series of three articles in the literary section of the Madrid daily El Sol, Ortega greeted the Tagore translations with similar Orientalist exoticism, seeing in them a blend of Eastern mystical themes and Western individual poetic genius. But he appreciates most that Tagore can draw his poetry from the simplest of materials, from materials so familiar and collective in nature that every reader immediately recognizes them. Thus it is, as Ortega notes in a manner echoing Jiménez’s own comments, that “every great poet . . . plagiarizes us” by appearing to channel our own experiences (“Un poeta indo,” 5). Jiménez’s translations of Tagore—several degrees removed from the “originals,” if we can even call them that—helped canonize the Indian writer in the Hispanophone world and, as in the case of Pound and Yeats, elevated Jiménez’s own standing as a cosmopolitan tastemaker. Tagore came to influence numerous Spanish writers, the future Chilean Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda (who sparked a small scandal by plagiarizing a Tagore poem), his own close friend Victoria Ocampo of Argentina, and many others. Indeed, Spain still awards a Tagore Prize for poetry, and, as Bhavya Tiwari notes, despite the resurgent interest in Tagore across contemporary India, “the number of translations of Gitanjali into Spanish surpasses those into Hindi” (“Rabindranath Tagore’s Comparative World Literature,” 47).
The connections in translation between Jiménez and Tagore were apparent to British reviewers, as was Camprubí’s mediating role. In 1920, the critic and Spanish translator J. B. Trend wrote that
by this time most of the works of [Tagore] have been translated into Spanish. They are rather a puzzle to Spanish readers, however. They have been so exquisitely and so naturally translated that they seem almost like original works of D. Juan Ramón Jiménez; and the fact that the translation has been made by Señora Camprubí de Jiménez seems to explain and perhaps justify the resemblance in style between Tagore in his Spanish dress and the poetry and prose of Sr. Jiménez. We are inclined to think that the resemblance in outlook is real. It is quite easy to imagine Tagore riding on an ass through Andalucía, and perhaps writing a book as good as Platero y yo.
(“Window-Boxes from Madrid,” 672)
This new imagined appropriation naturalizes an image of Tagore in southern Spain, in a province (Andalucía) that was on the margins of a country whose influence on the literary traditions of its former colonies was both fiercely contested and clearly dwindling. The title cited at the end is Jiménez’s own landmark book of prose poems from 1914, which is similar to Crescent Moon in many ways. When Platero, in turn, was translated into Bengali, Jiménez wrote a preface for that edition in which he explained his theory of translation and its effect on his poetry.6 His collaborations with his wife were not as simple and balanced as he often framed them, however; as Trend’s note above alludes, it was Camprubí who rendered prose translations of Tagore’s English into Spanish, then Jiménez who “poeticized” them. This process became a source of friction between them; Camprubí was initially eager to erase herself from the process since her husband was a well-known poet but later regretted her absence when Jiménez took most of the credit for the translations (see Palau de Nemes, “Tagore and Jiménez”). She claimed that she was “robbed” of her role and threatened to “tell the whole world” of Jiménez’s secret, then alternatively wished “in the future, for us to unite with one another in our book. Thus we will live ‘here’ always” (Monumento de amor, 18). There are questions about the gendered dynamics of translation practices in history that cannot be explored here but that bear on lines such as Jiménez’s declaration of the necessity for translation: “sometimes we read something in another language that feels so personal, so intimate to us that we mourn the fact that it was not our own expression. Then we give it—we must give it—its own form in our tongue, so that it might become ours, little by little. In this sense . . . translation is always a theft” (qtd. in Young, The Line in the Margin, xxi). This notion of theft, or what Ortega labeled plagiarism, was one that Eliot elevated in his writings on craft, too: a mode of poeisis in which ventriloquism, impersonation, and multiply layered translation are actually the poet’s most authentic tools.
Against the familiar logic that nation-based literary studies have suggested, Jiménez saw his translations of Tagore as the culmination of his own “rebirth” in English-language American poetry—even more than translating Frost could have offered him. Thus, in his case and in Tagore’s, tracing their lives in English-language modernism will yield an interesting though partial and incomplete story of their circulation and influence globally. For both Tagore and Jiménez, that is, their time in English was a necessary stage in the circuits that connected them, but it was also brief and somewhat strained. Jiménez did not gain international standing by publishing under the aegis of Pound, Yeats, and Monroe, and he remains unknown to most English-language critics despite having been addressed by contemporary scholars of modernism perhaps more than any other Indian writer except Mulk Raj Anand. Indeed, Tagore’s star faded in Europe and England by 1920: the attacks on him had been vigorous for several years. D. H. Lawrence called him a “sheer fraud” and lamented the British “worship” of him in 1916 (Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell). Pound became disaffected by Tagore’s newer works and his celebrity, while Yeats insisted angrily that “Damn Tagore” produced only “sentimental rubbish” after his first few books; Yeats added that “Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English” (qtd. in Chaudhuri, “The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore,” 112). Jiménez, too, regretted his connection to Tagore, wondering, “have I not invented in translation an Andalusian Tagore, a Tagore who looks like me?” (qtd. in Young, “The Invention of an Andalusian Tagore,” 49). The fact that Tagore’s books sold better than those of many native Spanish poets was “galling” for Jiménez, who could not “accept the fact that his book collected dust on the shelves while Tagore’s sold in the thousands,” writes Howard Young (42–43).
The connections between Tagore and Jiménez also range from the generic (their use of the prose poem as a pliable, translatable form) to the lived (they both wrote and translated several of the texts I have discussed while sailing from their home countries to England or the United States). In fact, they crossed paths again through Anglophone modernist circuits, prompted and mediated this time through their readings of Eliot in the early 1930s. In 1931, Jiménez translated Eliot’s “La Figlia Che Piange,” “Marina,” and the “Som de l’escalina” section of Ash-Wednesday (1927) for a Spanish periodical. But his relationship to Eliot’s poetics and conservative politics became increasingly negative, even dismissive. In 1932, Tagore, writing in a Bengali magazine, rejected Eliot’s poetics and stirred a great debate among native writers about the merits of both Eliot and himself. Here again, two literary publications—one Spanish, one Bengali—that otherwise had little to no contact converged around a shared critique of Eliot. Following Jiménez and Tagore thus tells us something not only about a marginal, extracanonical circuit of exchange and influence but also about the global reception of a central modernist poet (Eliot) as his work continued to move well beyond his purview. The circle was nearly completed in 1953 when Poetry—the modernist magazine that introduced Tagore both to many Anglophone readers and to Jiménez in the 1910s—dedicated an issue to Jiménez. In 1956, the Spaniard was awarded the Nobel Prize, which poets and leftists in Spain quietly celebrated during the author’s post–Spanish Civil War exile in the United States and Puerto Rico.
Across much broader swaths of literary historical space-time, translation has, to various degrees, fostered literary revolutions: the invention of blank verse in English, French Symbolism’s emergence from translations of Poe, the Latin American Boom and translations of Faulkner—the list is extensive. Modernism is no exception. Pound wrote that “every allegedly great age” in literary history is “an age of translations,” which seems to apply to the modernist “age,” in which nearly every writer was also a translator (“How to Read,” 35). Pound himself initiated the pronounced break with Victorian notions of fidelity and accuracy in translation practices, and like countless writers around the world in the early twentieth century, he articulated myriad cultural, literary, and party politics through translation (see Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 187–224; Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism). But we must be careful not to read Pound’s claim either as a directive that translation should enrich and renew domestic cultures and native languages alone or that Anglocentric modernist studies should profit from its imports. Indeed, one of the central tenets of the modernist reconceptualization of translation is that even foundational notions such as target and source are complicated by a number of factors, geopolitics among them. In addition to the meanings that exist at either pole of a translational exchange, the expansive and decentered practices that mediate translation itself, such as revision, distortion, politicization, and dissemination, require more scrutiny. If we examine the languages, practices, and objects of translation that have seemed marginal to modernism or to which modernism seemed marginal, we find new stories that, of course, were not always “new” to global critics. One of those stories would be the role of minor languages in casting Europe as paradoxically central and peripheral to literary transactions. Another would trace how dominant languages reconfigured the connections among lesser-known experimental texts and practices (as when the Japanese occupation of Korea inadvertently brought English-language texts into Korea for the first time) and vice versa.
That is to say, we can disorient and recast Anglo-European modernisms by understanding translation within them, but we can also understand their relative positioning on a global scale by seeing them as stages in the larger history of translation itself. Further scholarship on translation and foreign-language training clearly will be essential to reforming and rethinking the field of global modernist studies.7 And, unlike a focus on certain formal aesthetics or a relationship to certain stages of capitalism or imperialism, translation studies are not and need not be grounded in Anglo-American or European histories. If we wish to disorient and defamiliarize—rather than simply expand—modernist studies in light of global conditions in the modernist era and in our own, the rhizomatic network of connections and aporias suggested by the still-unfolding story of translation is a starting point that is usefully unlocated.
Notes
1. Casanova’s World Republic of Letters appeared in French in 1999 and in English in 2004. More recently, Casanova has acknowledged overlooking translation in World Republic and has attempted to address it; see Casanova, “What Is a Dominant Language?”.
2. One of the writers who helped revise Tagore’s translations into English was T. Sturge Moore, who nominated the Bengali poet for the Nobel Prize. Moore was a close friend of Yeats and the brother of the philosopher G. E. Moore; his wife, Marie Sturge Moore, translated Tagore into French.
3. For a brief overview of Tagore’s translations and translators, see Radice, “Rabindranath Tagore.” See also the many discussions of his translations in Tagore’s letters with the painter William Rothenstein, who helped bring him to London audiences, in Rothenstein, and Tagore, Imperfect Encounter.
4. For a detailed documentation and bibliography of Tagore’s translation and reception in Spain, which actually began a year earlier (1908) than in England, see Ganguly, “Spain and Latin America.”
5. By speaking about the relative creativity or literalism of Jiménez’s translations, I might appear to be making assumptions and judgments about Tagore’s “originals”—a common practice in translation studies that Lawrence Venuti has often critiqued (see Translation Changes Everything). I am using these terms, however, as shorthand for pointing to the alternate reproduction of or deviation from established norms for translating in these specific cultural moments—even norms for translating Tagore specifically.
6. I have not been able to determine whether this translation into Bengali was made directly from the Spanish or through an intermediary English version. Continuing these interconnections, Trend translated Jiménez’s Fifty Spanish Poems (1950), which helped disseminate Jiménez’s work in the Anglophone world and contributed to his being nominated for, and eventually winning, the Nobel Prize.
7. My own limitations are evident in this essay, as I can address Spanish texts but not Bengali ones; a generous colleague has aided me.
Works Cited
Briggs, F. Ashworth. “A Great Man from Bengal.” Daily Mail (October 29, 1913), 6.
Camprubí, Zenobia. “Nota de la traductora.” In Gitanjali (Ofrenda lírica), by Rabindranath Tagore, trans. Zenobia Camprubí with Juan Ramón Jiménez. Madrid: Tip. de Ángel Alcoy, 1918.
Casanova, Pascale. “What Is a Dominant Language? Giacomo Leopardi: Theoretician of Linguistic Inequality.” Trans. Marlon Jones. New Literary History 44, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 379–99.
. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Chaudhuri, Amit. “The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore.” In The History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 103–115. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Frost, Robert. “Tagore’s Poetry Overflowed National Boundaries.” In Rabindranath Tagore, 1861–1941: A Centenary Volume, 298. New Delhi: Sahitya Akadem, 1961.
Ganguly, Shyama Prasad. “Spain and Latin America.” In Rabindranath Tagore: One Hundred Years of Global Reception, ed. Martin Kämpchen and Imre Bangha, 476–498. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2014.
Gupta, Uma Das. Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Infante, Ignacio. After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics Across the Atlantic. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
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