In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means

“Translation is inevitable!” a distinguished fiction writer exclaimed during a panel on the subject circa 2006. It’s a thrilling and romantic notion. Literary masterpieces are penned; their worth is recognized; the endless task of translating and retranslating them into all the languages of the world is launched. Such contingencies as the language the masterwork happens to be written in, the place of origin of its author, the motivation and artistic skill of a given translator, and the language and political context into which that translator introduces the work are irrelevant. Literary greatness alone is the guarantor of translation. Or, to paraphrase the idea in other terms, the invisible hand of the cultural marketplace will always ensure that literary value will be perpetuated equitably across language barriers.

While both the romantic and capitalist formulations of this sentiment may strike many who are reading this as suspect, the idea that the translation of literary works of genuine significance is inevitable—and hence that those works not translated must inevitably be of lesser significance—is a commonplace of book review sections and international book fairs, not to say university classrooms. Yet it’s clear that the translation of a given text often depends largely or perhaps wholly on contextual factors that have less to do with the work’s intrinsic value (whatever that might be and however you might measure it) than with encounters between individuals and the shifting cultural and political contexts within which those encounters take place.

In what follows, I briefly describe the work of four translators of Latin American literary prose into English in and around New York City across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first. The translation of Latin American poetry follows a somewhat divergent pattern that begins earlier and has a different set of milestones and cast of characters; for the present I leave that story to others.¹ I’ve chosen New York City for its long-standing and vibrant Latin American community and its equally long-standing position as a center of the U.S. publishing industry. Each of the translators I evoke inhabits a unique moment in the history of cultural contact between the United States and Latin America, and in the evolution of ideas of translation and of the role of the translator in the United States. In this history, little is inevitable.

In 1868 the New York publishing house of Hurd and Houghton brought out Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants; or, Civilization and Barbarism, taken, the title page states, “from the Spanish of Domingo F. Sarmiento, LL.D., Minister Plenipotentiary from the Argentine Republic to the United States,” and including a “biographical sketch of the author” by “Mrs. Horace Mann” (also the person who extracted the work from the Spanish). The absence from this page of the title of the original work—the resoundingly Hispanic surname Facundo, the title by which Latin American readers commonly refer to this inflammatory 1845 biography of the provincial Argentine caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga—and the anxious bolstering of the work’s status via its author’s academic credentials and diplomatic post and the prominent placement, in type as large as that used for the name of the author himself, of the resonant name of the late Horace Mann, renowned education reformer, abolitionist U.S. congressman, college president, and brother-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, can be accounted for by one crucial feature of its context: this is the only book-length work of literary prose by a Latin American author translated from Spanish to English and published in the United States prior to 1890.

Several clarifications are now in order. First: this is not to say that Life in the Argentine Republic was the only literary work by a Latin American author to have been published in New York City or in the United States before 1890. Nothing could be farther from the truth. To take the Cuban community alone, high points on the list of classic texts first published in New York City—in Spanish—include the Lecciones de filosofía (G. F. Bunce, 1832) by exiled activist priest Felix Varela; novelist Cirilo Villaverde’s canonical Cecilia Valdés (El Espejo, 1882), often described as one of the greatest Latin American novels of the nineteenth century; and virtually the entire poetical obra of Cuban poet, journalist, and revolutionary José Martí, most notably the Versos Sencillos (Louis Weiss & Co, 1891), as well as the bulk of his journalistic and political work.²

This is not to say, either, that there were no translations from or into the Spanish language published in New York during the nineteenth century. Washington Irving’s 1829 Tales of the Alhambra crystallized an interest in classic Spanish literature that gave rise to multiple translations of masterworks of the Spanish Golden Age, accounts of Spain’s conquest of Latin America, and the works of Catholic spiritual figures such as Santa Teresa de Avila. Nor was interest confined to texts hallowed by centuries of prestige: contemporary Spanish novelists such as Benito Perez Galdós, Juan Valera, and Emilia Pardo Bazan were translated, as well, particularly during the second half of the century.

Why did it make such a difference whether a work originated in Spain or Latin America? The question is particularly pertinent in light of the fact that throughout the nineteenth century, as now, the Spanish-speaking population of New York City was of predominantly Latin American origin. Census figures for 1870, 1880, and 1890 show that natives of Spain generally made up only 18 to 23 percent of the city’s total Hispanic population, which grew from 3,605 in 1870 to 5,994 in 1890. But for the Anglophone New Yorkers of the time, the distinction between the Spanish speakers who hailed from Europe and those from elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere was crucial. Spain, land of Cervantes and Quevedo, had precisely the literary capital the United States was acutely aware of lacking during its first century of nationhood—and that it viewed the Latin American countries as lacking, too. Pascal Casanova puts it this way: “The classics are the privilege of the oldest literary nations, which, in elevating their foundational texts to the status of timeless works of art, have defined their literary capital as non-national and a-historical—a definition that corresponds exactly to the definition that they have given of literature itself.”³ Spain, from this perspective, possessed a cultural history that belonged to the exalted category of “literature”; works by its writers, past and present, were thus of foundational interest to a newly postcolonial nation wishing to gain a universal literature of its own. Latin America, newly postcolonial itself, or still colonized, could offer no such cultural capital.

Finally, this is not to say that the nineteenth-century United States was in no way engaged in any kind of translation that involved Latin American Spanish. On the contrary, New York City in particular was very busy indeed with a thriving industry centered on Latin America that made translations into Spanish, which New York publishing houses sent south in such quantity that by the mid-1860s, the celebrated house of D. Appleton alone was shipping out nearly fifty such translations a year. This was cultural capital of a different order. This thriving industry provided income and employment to quite a number of Latin American exiles who lived in the city, including the Puerto Rican educator and philosopher Eugenio María de 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, published, and distributed across Mexico Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), a hugely popular novel about racial tensions in California following annexation by the United States in 1850. He wanted to alert Mexicans to the dangers of U.S. expansionism, but was also motivated, as his preface states, by admiration of the work’s literary qualities. He believed these, along with its subject matter, gave it a rightful place in Latin American literature. In Ramona, Martí writes by way of introduction to his translation, “Helen Hunt Jackson … has perhaps … written our novel”—“nuestra novela” (emphasis mine).⁴

The imbalance is clear. In his preface to “the first Mexican historical production to be deemed worthy of translation into the English language”—The Other Side; or Notes for the History of the War between Mexico and the United States (New York: Wiley, 1850), a compilation of accounts by various Mexican military and political figures—the book’s editor, Albert C. Ramsey, a colonel with the 11th infantry during the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1846, had noted that, “The [Mexican people] are far better informed on subjects pertaining to the United States than are the American people informed on subjects pertaining to Mexico.”

Nueva York is consubstantial with New York; it walks down the same streets, endures the same blizzards, hunches over tables in the same libraries, stares out of windows at the same rivers, is blinded by the same hard, glittering light. The city’s streets echo with English, Spanish, and many other languages. But even after decades of convivencia, the Latin American writers who inhabited Nueva York and composed and published their books here—and who read the work of their Anglophone counterparts with keen interest, as Martí’s impassioned essays on Whitman, Emerson, and a host of other North American luminaries attest—had no hope of seeing their work gain access to the Anglophone literary sphere. A novel that has reposed on the shelves of the New York Public Library since it was founded, and that graced the shelves of the Astor Library (now New York’s Public Theater) before that, evokes this divide. Titled Los dramas de Nueva York (Mexico City: J. Rivera, Hijo y Comp., 1869), it was ceremoniously presented by its author, José Rivera y Rio, to Colonel Albert S. Evans in 1869. Evans describes their encounter in a handwritten inscription that appears on the book’s flyleaf:

Los dramas de Nueva York was not the only volume on the Astor Library’s shelves to result from Evans’s journey to Mexico. Evans himself produced a lengthy account of his travels,⁵ adding one more title to the ever-expanding library of books about Latin America by visitors from the United States. (In an unpublished work, I documented almost 200 such accounts by U.S. travelers in Latin America produced over the course of the nineteenth century.⁶) These travel accounts attest to the fact that the inhabitants of the United States were not incurious about Latin America. But there is a difference between the work of the travel writer and that of the translator. Certainly, Mary Mann’s recasting of Facundo without the title Facundo can attest that a translation is not necessarily any more pure, transparent, apolitical, or fully accurate in its reflection of what it represents than a travel account. But to have travel accounts without translations—the bookstores and classrooms of the nation’s English-speaking majority continually restocked with descriptions of Latin American by U.S. travelers who generally spent a few weeks or months there, and often barely spoke Spanish, while remaining almost devoid of any work written by a Latin American—was clearly to ignore Latin America in a profound way: to busily produce books about Latin America while granting little or no voice to Latin Americans themselves.

As for the translator of that first Latin American literary book, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann had befriended the young Sarmiento—“dear Mr. Sarmy,” as she liked to call him—when he arrived in the United States in 1847, bearing a letter of introduction to her distinguished husband. Like the Manns, Sarmiento was an educational reformer, and much of his later interaction with Mrs. Mann would be focused on the reforms he sought to achieve in Argentina. During that first visit, Sarmiento spoke no English and communicated with the Manns in French. When he returned to the United States in 1865, as Argentina’s ambassador, he renewed his friendship with Horace Mann’s widow. Only then did he learn that as a result of two years spent as a governess in Cuba during her youth, Mary Peabody Mann spoke Spanish. “The Lord has appointed you my guardian angel and it is your duty to submit with Christian resignation,” he wrote her in tones of delight that would later give rise to groundless rumors of a love affair between them, and she duly embarked on several decades of tireless assistance to his literary, political, and educational projects.⁷ During the earlier visit, the Manns had introduced Sarmiento to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (so taken with the young Argentine that he briefly toyed with the idea of an Evangeline-like romance based on Facundo). It was to Longfellow, whose first published book had been a translation of the fifteenth-century Spanish poet Jorge Manrique’s Coplas por la muerte de su padre, that Mary Mann turned when she encountered difficulties with Sarmiento’s Spanish. The established cultural mode of translation from the classic literature of Spain thus lent a hand to the groundbreaking translation of the new literature of Latin America.

Among Mary Mann’s other works is a three-volume Life and Works of Horace Mann (1865–68), in which, famously, she alludes to her own presence in Horace Mann’s life in only one sentence. She was also reluctant to be viewed as an active presence and participant in the cultural exchange she was energetically effecting via translation. “I had rather it not seem to come through my agency,” she wrote in an 1868 letter to a fellow reformer, asking for assistance in placing her translation of a letter from Sarmiento in a Washington, D.C. newspaper.⁸ When not ignored, Sarmiento’s translator has sometimes been chastised for cutting portions of the original text, for her neglect of Sarmiento’s use of metaphor, and for being more concerned with his political than his literary ambitions (as, perhaps, was he).⁹ Mann’s translation has rarely been acknowledged as the landmark of U.S.–Latin American cultural exchange that it was—Life in the Argentine Republic would be reprinted for over a century—or seen in the context of her lifelong personal concern with giving voice to those in the Americas who were excluded from U.S. political and cultural discourse.

To give but one additional instance of that concern, Mary Mann would use the political and cultural clout of her husband’s name on behalf of yet another marginalized writer in 1883. While the title page of the novel of her own that she published very late in life bore the name “Mary Mann,”¹⁰ “Mrs. Horace Mann” was again credited as editor of Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), a book by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, a Paiute woman born in 1844 in what is now Nevada who had risen to prominence as a Native American activist and educator. Mann met Winnemucca during the latter’s lecture tour of the Northeast and immediately offered to help rework her lecture materials into a book and secure publication for it. This would appear to be a departure from Mann’s work with Sarmiento, who, in Facundo, had developed the notion that Argentina’s native peoples were resistant to the sort of modern educational reforms he enlisted her help in pursuing, and who believed that Argentina needed to follow the U.S. model by suppressing its natives and promoting immigration from Europe—an ideology he would implement during his six years as Argentina’s president. For Mary Mann, however, the translation of Sarmiento and the editing of Winnemucca were quite consistent. In her “Editor’s Preface” to Winnemucca’s book, she explains that she devoted her energies to it because: “At this moment, when the United States seem waking up to their duty to the original possessors of our immense territory, it is of the first importance to hear what only an Indian and an Indian woman can tell” (my emphasis). In much the same way, her translation of Sarmiento had brought the U.S. reading public, for the first time, one of the stories a Latin American and only a Latin American could tell.

Twenty-two years later, it happened again. In 1890, Harper and Bros. published an English translation of Maria, a novel by the Columbian writer and politician Jorge Isaacs. By then an acknowledged classic of Latin American Romanticism, María, the story of a wealthy family’s decline and its scion’s doomed love for his mortally ill adopted sister, was originally published in Colombia in 1867. Its 1890 publication in New York makes it the first Latin American novel to be published in English translation in the United States.¹¹ That the date of this publication happened to coincide with the First International Conference of American States—or “Pan-American Congress,” as it was known—is no coincidence whatsoever. The Congress, which took place in Washington, D.C. from January to April, was the first official gathering of all the nations of the Western Hemisphere. In addition to creating a new receptivity to all things Latin American, which presumably opened the way for the book’s translation, the Congress was of direct assistance to the work of María’s translator, Rollo Ogden, who, in his introductory note, thanks “Señor Cárlos Martinez Silva, LL.D., delegate from the republic of Colombia to the Pan-American Congress, for valuable aid kindly rendered the translator.”

Son of a Presbyterian minister, Rollo Ogden had at first followed his father into the ministry. In 1881, at the age of twenty-five, he was sent to Mexico City, where he and his wife were missionaries for two years and where he became fluent in Spanish. Four years after his return, he underwent a spiritual crisis and left the ministry to pursue a literary career in which the translation of María was one of the early steps. He also began writing for magazines, including The Nation, to which he contributed a number of editorials that marked him as one of the Anti-Imperialists—a group that included Henry and William James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain. Translation was, for Ogden, a response to U.S. imperialism, which he well understood to be cultural as well as political. In an 1895 editorial for The Nation on the apparent decline of interest in missionary work in the United States, his stance is clearly derived from his experience in the mission fields and his work as a translator: “In the face of [our] better knowledge of many of the people whom we have been wont promiscuously to call heathen, it has been getting more and more impossible to be so sure that they have everything to learn from us, and we nothing from them.”¹²

By then, Ogden was on the staff of the New York Evening Post, of which, in 1903, he would become chief editor—a position previously held, from 1828 to 1878, by William Cullen Bryant, sometime translator of the Cuban poet José María Heredia. Ogden’s continued interest in Latin America is evinced by his 1904 biography of the historian and Hispanist William H. Prescott, eminent chronicler of Spain’s conquest of America.¹³ In 1920, he left the Post to join the staff of The New York Times, becoming its editorin-chief within two years; he remained in that position until his death, twenty-five years later. When Ogden passed away on February 23, 1937, his obituary appeared on the front page of the Times, outlined in a black box.

Fifteen years after Ogden’s death, Saul Bellow published his landmark novel The Adventures of Augie March. In an early section of the novel, as he contemplates his humble Chicago origins and future prospects, its eponymous picaresque hero comments, “But when there is no shepherd-Sicily … but deep city vexation instead, and you are forced early into deep city aims, not sent in your ephod before Eli to start service in the temple, nor set on a horse by your weeping sisters to go and study Greek in Bogotá, but land in a poolroom—what can that lead to of the highest?”¹⁴ In this string of rapid-fire allusion—“shepherd-Sicily” may refer to the Greek pastoral poet Theocritus (third century B.C.), who hailed from Sicily, while it was certainly the Old Testament prophet Samuel who wore his ephod to serve Eli as a child (1 Samuel 2:18)—the one set on a horse by his sisters to go and study Greek in Bogotá is the narrator of Jorge Isaacs’ María. Ogden’s version of María—then and now the only published translation of the book into English—thus makes a cameo appearance in one of the canonical U.S. novels of the twentieth century; Augie March both claims and rejects it as an antecedent, a model of some literary ideal, unavailable to him, that he calls “the highest.” Few readers of Bellow’s novel can have caught the reference; María remains a rather obscure work among English speakers.¹⁵ But there it is: the prose fiction of Latin America and that of the United States catching each other’s eye in a fictional character’s fleeting dismissal of the models for living proposed by the universe of world literature—a universe that, here at last, includes Latin America.

Though Latin American writers who lived and wrote in Spanish in nineteenth-century New York were beyond the margins of Anglophone literary culture, they were strongly rooted within their own language community; theirs was not a tragedy of neglect. As exiles or immigrants, their lives were divided and they faced prejudice, but they did not feel torn between two languages. Martí had a gigantic literary reputation that extended across the hemisphere, and even a writer like Rivera y Rio returned home to an established, if minor, place in Mexican literature.¹⁶ Whether or not they dreamed of one day influencing U.S. literature in the same way it had influenced them, the possibility of translation was so remote that its unavailability was simply part of the order of things and does not seem to have been particularly destabilizing. It isn’t until the first half of the twentieth century that the language politics of Nueva York produced writers who endured what Pascal Casanova calls the “tragedy of translated men,”¹⁷ writers caught in a double bind between two languages, at home in neither, and deeply suspicious of translation. The fullest exploration to date of these writers and their dilemma is offered by Gustavo Pérez Firmat in a study eloquently titled Tongue Ties.¹⁸

Calvert Casey (1924–1969), for example, was born in Baltimore but raised largely in Havana; he began his writing career in English and then switched to Spanish, but returned to English to write an unfinished novel titled Gianni that he then attempted to destroy. Casey died by his own hand in Rome, at the age of forty-five. Felipe Alfau (1902–1999) was the child of Spanish parents who immigrated to New York when he was fourteen. He made the decision to write his novel, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, in English because, a note on the author explains, “he felt he could not reach a Spanish audience.”¹⁹ The main character of Locos is named Fulano—or “So-and-So”—and is described thus: “It seems that about Fulano’s personality, if we are to grant him a personality, hung a cloud of inattention which withstood his almost heroic assaults to break through it.”

In an interview with Ilan Stavans in 1993, the elderly Alfau, whom Stavans had tracked down in a retirement facility, exhibits supreme indifference to writing, literature, publication, and translation.²⁰ He declares himself a radical outsider to every language he speaks, a writer who claims to write for no one and to care not at all whether anyone reads him. “Better to be all alone,” he tells Stavans. “Alone and silent.” Alfau’s second novel, Chromos, not published until forty years after it was written,²¹ is set in New York among Spanish-speaking immigrants, a fact its first paragraph reflects upon:

Chilean Maria Luisa Bombal, whose childhood was divided between Latin America and Paris, emigrated to the United States in 1940, at the age of 30, leaving behind a growing literary reputation. She would spend the next three decades reworking two of her early tales into English and loading them with so much additional material, in what seems to have been an attempt to make them palatable to a U.S. audience, that she ended up destroying much of their original interest. Her 1935 surrealist novella La última niebla, for example, metastasized over a 12-year period into a 243-page English novel called House of Mist.²² Agreement on the superiority of the earlier work is unanimous, and “The Final Mist” was later published in an English translation by Richard and Lucia Cunningham as part of a collection of short stories.²³

During the same period, the figure of the translator was coming more fully into view. Unless they were canonical writers like Longfellow or Bryant, or were married to famous men, nineteenth-century American translators, of Spanish and other languages, were often anonymous or no more than a cryptic name (sometimes female or of indeterminate gender) about which virtually nothing was known. For Anglophone women, in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, a prevailing view of the translator’s task as one of accurate reproduction devoid of all intentionality meant that translation was a safe way to channel intellectual and creative impulses. “Translation … might be a sign of conformity with traditional values. Its ancillary nature allowed those who so desired to shy away from public recognition.”²⁴ One of the earliest translators of prose to consolidate a presence in the twentieth-century New York publishing scene both fits into and breaks this mold. Like Mary Mann, she was married to an influential man and was diffident about self-promotion. Unlike Mann, she specifically made a name for herself as a translator of Latin American literature and thus helped to establish that possibility for translators of Latin American and other literatures who came after her.

Harriet Wishnieff was the daughter of immigrants from Russia, born on New York’s Lower East Side, and raised on a farm in Illinois. After returning to New York for a bachelor’s degree in English from Barnard College in 1916, she spent what must have been a rather exciting period as secretary to the modern dance legend Isadora Duncan. She then set her sights on Spanish. “After the First World War, the importance of the Hispanic world became clear,” she would later tell the Buenos Aires magazine El Hogar.²⁵ Well before 1933, when FDR announced that the United States would henceforth pursue “the policy of the good neighbor” with regard to the nations of Latin America, awareness was on the rise. In 1918, James Alexander Robinson founded the Hispanic American Historical Review, the first U.S. academic journal devoted entirely to Latin America. By 1920, Harriet Wishnieff was spending her days working for a Spanish book importer and taking night classes in Spanish at Columbia University, where she met Federico de Onís, a Spaniard who emigrated in 1916 when he was invited to found Columbia’s Spanish department. When they wed, she became Harriet de Onís, and under that name published more than forty works of translation from the Spanish and Portuguese over the next several decades. (Here let me take the opportunity to note that the use of a spouse’s famous or culturally resonant name for the benefit of the work one translates is not limited to female translators: in 1942, Doubleday brought out a translation “by Katherine Anne Porter” of the work often cited as the first Mexican novel, José Joaquín Lizardi’s 1816 El Periquillo sarniento. In fact, the translation was done by Porter’s then-husband, Eugene Pressly, and the work has later been reissued as “translated by Eugene Pressly and edited by Katherine Anne Porter.”²⁶)

Harriet de Onís’s translation career began in the late 1920s when her husband encouraged her to translate El águila y la serpiente, by Mexican novelist Martín Luis Guzmán. By coincidence, a few days later a friend who had landed a job at the prestigious publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf happened to call and ask her to translate it, as well. The context that produced such consensus on the need for a translation was strikingly similar to the one that resulted in Mary Mann’s translation of Sarmiento, sixty-two years earlier. After playing a role in the Mexican Revolution, Guzmán had arrived in the United States in 1916 and stayed on until 1920, living primarily in New York City. In 1923, he returned, this time—like Sarmiento before him—as an official envoy of his nation’s government.²⁷ Like Sarmiento, Guzmán had written a sprawling work about the overthrow of a tyrant in Latin America; Guzmán’s novel was likewise published in abridged form in its English translation. De Onís approached the work of translating it very seriously, engaging Guzmán in lengthy correspondence, an approach she would maintain with many of the other writers she translated. Puzzled by the word “Mitigüeson,” which came up several times, she included it in one of her lists of queries. Guzmán replied that this was how the soldiers in the Mexican Revolution spoke of their guns, “Mitigüeson” being a phonetic rendering of the Mexican pronunciation of “Smith and Wesson.”²⁸

The Eagle and the Serpent came out in 1930 and de Onís’s career was launched. She soon became not only a colleague but also a friend to Blanche and Alfred Knopf. Backed by her husband’s prestigious academic position and with access to the ear of one of U.S. publishing’s most influential couples, she took on a curatorial as well as a performative role, acting as a strong advocate for works she felt should be translated. “She exercised a great deal of power over the field for many years,” a recent study by Deborah Cohn suggests. While she’s been accused of sometimes doing inferior work, particularly when translating from the Portuguese, many of her translations were highly praised, by Dame Edith Sitwell and others. Cohn suggests that de Onís staved off recognition of the experimental modernism that would dominate Latin American fiction in the 1950s and 1960s by her personal preference for regional and folkloric works, which shaped the Knopf list.²⁹ This charge is belied by her documented effort, from the late 1940s through 1952, to try to convince her editor at Knopf, Herbert Weinstock, to publish the work of a certain Argentine writer she was entranced with. The effort failed. “I cannot urge the book on Alfred and Blanche in view of the uniformly bad sale of Latin American literature here,” Weinstock—not the last editor to invoke the marketplace in rejecting a work of translation—informed her. Jorge Luis Borges would have to wait until 1962 for his first publication in English.

She did play a part in the first English translation of the prose work of José Martí, The America of José Martí, published by the Noonday Press in 1954, almost sixty years after Martí’s death. It was a family project: the book was edited and introduced by Federico de Onís, and credit for the translation is given to Harriet and Federico’s son, Juan. It was the only translation produced by Juan de Onís, who would go on to a career as a journalist, and the skill with which he rendered Martí’s difficult prose into English has led some to suspect that a maternal hand played a role in his work.

Jorge Luis Borges read the page proofs of Harriet de Onís’s 1935 translation of Ricardo Güiraldes’s classic novel of the Pampas, Don Segundo Sombra, and hailed the novel’s new incarnation in English. Borges understood translation as few others have before or since,³⁰ and on rereading the Argentine classic in its new language, he rediscovered it: “As I went through the English version of Don Segundo, I was continually aware of the gravitational pull and accent of the other essential book of our America: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.”³¹ Borges had not grasped that de Onís was the work’s translator (he thought it was Waldo Frank), but he did understand that the translation was furthering inter-American literary connections, and that may have mattered more to de Onís herself, whose forty books very rarely bore her name on their covers.³²

In a recent study of style and ideology in de Onís’s work, Jeremy Munday subjects eight of her translations to computer-assisted analysis.³³ This methodology limits him to a focus on individual word choice, as opposed to the more crucial and elusive quality of voice, which defines the success or failure of a translation but defies computer analysis. Munday’s study attributes variation between original and translation to bias on the part of the translator, which ignores the Anglophone norm wherein books are worked over intensively during the process of publication. As Maureen Freely’s account of her translation of Orhan Pamuk in this volume attests, an individual word choice in any given translation may have been made by the book’s editor, its copyeditor, or some other party, including its author; few writers and fewer translators who publish in English can claim to have full and final control over every word in a text. Indeed, Munday himself reports that Waldo Frank boasted of having rewritten de Onís’s translation of Don Segundo Sombra to repair what Frank viewed as its stylistic deficiencies. Nevertheless, when Munday identifies a supposed Christian religious veneer imposed on Don Segundo Sombra by the translation of “un perdidito” as “a limb of Satan,” this is described an instance of “aggressive … ideological intervention” by de Onís.

The most damning such “intervention” Munday identifies occurs in a sentence from the translation of Cuban ethnomusicologist Fernando Ortíz’s fundamental Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Knopf, 1947):

In order to charge de Onís with the translation crime of “domestication,” Munday fixes on the translation of the word potente (potent or powerful) as “advanced,” which, to him, “reveals an attitude of superiority from the translator.” He does not note that the translation has seriously garbled the grammar of the original sentence, which could accurately be translated, in the idiom of de Onís’s era, as “The Negroes, like the Indians, were transferred out of one culture into another that was more powerful.” In Spanish, the final clause como los indios links the Africans’ experience to the Indians’ earlier one. By erroneously inserting a relative pronoun and possessive preposition not present in the Spanish, the clause “like that of the Indians,” makes the culture of the Indians equivalent to the “more advanced culture” described in the clause that immediately precedes it. This contradicts the original text, but also the attitude of superiority de Onís is accused of. The failure here (and I don’t claim to know whose failure it was) is less one of ideological bias than of syntax and voice. De Onís devoted most of her life to translating works like Ortiz’s which overtly challenged prevailing values to promote greater appreciation of African and indigenous cultures. It should not dismay us overmuch if individual words in texts that bear her name sometimes fail to conform to the standards of politically correct speech in our own time.

The work of de Onís and other translators who introduced Latin American literature to the United States under the aegis of the Good Neighbor policy is widely acknowledged for establishing the context that allowed the extraordinary surge of the 1960s to take place. While the quality of her work may have varied, there is no doubt of her devotion to José Martí’s project of bringing Latin American culture into the United States to counteract the prevailing ignorance. Her role as translator and curator created a foundation on which others would build. “She had a good eye for books that should have been translated.” Gregory Rabassa said of her.³⁵

Much of the next section of this fast-forwarded history remains too well known to require telling, and in any case Rabassa himself has told his story in an award-winning memoir.³⁶ In an extraordinary reversal of the nineteenth-century cultural dynamic against which Mary Mann and Rollo Ogden had worked, the generation of translators that followed Harriet de Onís—whose husband was still chair of Columbia University’s Spanish department when Rabassa earned his Ph.D. there in the late 1940s after he returned from serving as an OSS cryptographer in World War II—went on to achieve a stature previously undreamed of, and achieved it for their translations of Latin American literature. In addition to Rabassa, this group includes Helen Lane, Alistair Reid, Margaret Sayers Peden, Alfred MacAdam, Edith Grossman, Suzanne Jill Levine, and several others. Most of them have, like Rabassa, done the inestimable service of writing about their lives and work as translators, perhaps because the mid-century period of fervent translation of Latin American literature in the United States known as the Boom coincides precisely with a period of increased professionalization for U.S. literary translators, with the formation of organizations such as the PEN Translation Committee (founded in 1959, just prior to the Boom) and the American Literary Translators Association (founded in 1978, as the Boom was winding down).

The work of this group of translators was supported by a new Center for Inter-American Relations; the importance of that work was acknowledged by a National Book Award in Translation, which Rabassa was the first person to win, in 1966, for his brilliant translation of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, the first book-length work he ever translated. Rabassa’s work on Hopscotch was so extraordinary that Cortázar advised Gabriel García Márquez to delay the publication of his book in English until Rabassa could do the translation. Rabassa’s best-selling 1970 translation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is said by U.S. President Bill Clinton to be his favorite book. In 2006, in a ceremony at the White House, President George W. Bush awarded Rabassa the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence.

This transformation in the cultural status of Latin American literature and its translators may in retrospect seem to have been inevitable. At the time, it was carefully nurtured by well-placed funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which founded the Center for Inter-American Relations, three years after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, in order to “develop the goodwill and respect of leading Latin Americans as the sensitive interpreter in the United States of their desires for understanding and recognition.” Mary Mann’s role as Sarmiento’s “guardian angel” had been taken on by a vast private fortune, closely allied to the U.S. government. Members of the Inter-American Committee, the name under which the CIAR began to function, “drew on their connections to get public officials such as Richard Goodwin, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and Arthur Schlesinger, historian and special assistant to President Kennedy, to attend the IAC’s symposia, and participants also met with President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and numerous other White House and State Department officials.” The Center’s literature department not only provided grants to translators (assisting Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years), but also became “a nexus for networking and support of all aspects of the translation, publication and promotion of Latin American literature.”³⁷ This Cold War–motivated support for translation went hand in hand with a cultural moment during which, as Eliot Weinberger notes in his essay included here, translated literature was also embraced as an alternative by those in active rebellion against the U.S. government and American social norms.

Perhaps because conventional wisdom both disparages them for being mere copyists and mistrusts them for not being mere copyists, translators often evince an odd relationship to their own powers of agency. In his memoir, Rabassa suggests that his career results from no more than a fortuitous series of coincidences and that he translated all his books without reading them through beforehand because he was “just too lazy to read the book twice.”³⁸ Rabassa himself does not go so far as to wonder what might have become of works of Latin American fiction now widely regarded in the United States as iconic had they been entrusted to a less brilliant translator. However, we can compare the fate in English translation of other towering classics of twentieth-century Latin American literature such as Alejo Carpentier’s 1962 Siglo de las luces (translated into English by John Sturrock from a French translation and retitled Explosion in a Cathedral) or João Guimarães Rosa’s 1956 Grande Sertão: Veredas (partially translated by Harriet de Onis while she was in very ill health, completed by James L. Taylor, and published under the title The Devil to Pay in the Backlands)³⁹ and ask the question ourselves. Given the powerful political forces at work during the period, it may well have been quite inevitable that novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Hopscotch would be translated (unlike the vast majority of Latin American novels that preceded them). The fact that their English translations have achieved classic canonical status strikes me as less inevitable.

My interest here is not in the Boom itself or the fascinating dynamic that led powerful entities in the United States to oppose the spread of Communism in Latin America by supporting the translation of works by writers who were often of avowedly Communist inclinations or connections. The fact is that as a result of the Boom, not only was the cultural capital of Latin American literature immeasurably and permanently enhanced worldwide, but generations of writers within the United States were no longer faced with the dilemma that had confronted Casey, Alfau, and Bombal. A Latino literature emerged that explored its direct lineage to Latin American literature, addressed and made use of the interplay between English and Spanish, consolidated literary traditions that stretched back centuries, and gave literary voice to what would become the country’s largest minority. This, in turn, seems to have led to a decline in the publication of translations. When translator Magda Bogin queried publishers about this decline in 1998, she was told, “We’ve discovered we don’t have to go abroad for the kinds of qualities we were seeming to find in Latin American literature.” To which Bogin herself added, “It’s about time that Latino writers in the United States got the apparatus and wherewithal to be heard … but it shouldn’t knock out the rest of the continent.”⁴⁰ U.S. Latino writers themselves have been increasingly aware of this issue, and a number of them—Francisco Goldman, Daniel Alarcón, and Mónica de la Torre, to name but three—have done a great deal to address it, as both translators and advocates for translation.

For, of course, literary translation itself was by no means permanently bolstered by the Boom’s successes. Even at its height, a “Translator’s Manifesto” by Robert Payne, published by the PEN Translation Committee in 1969, opens with this marvelously flowery complaint: “For too long [translators] have been the lost children in the enchanted forest of literature.” The National Book Award in Translation lasted a decade or so and then petered out.⁴¹ The vogue for discovering new Latin American writers passed, and while the writers whose work had been introduced by the Boom continued to be translated, the generations that immediately succeeded them found it increasingly difficult to break into English—as, indeed, did writers everywhere. In the past ten years, the issue of translation into English, the global vehicular language, has been vociferously raised by writers, translators, and publishers around the world, but actual numbers have not risen all that much, and have no doubt fallen as a percentage of all books published. A total of 299 works of prose fiction in translation were published in the United States in 1999, and 341 appeared in 2010—a year when the U.S. publishing industry turned out well over 200,000 books.⁴²

Nor has appreciation of the nature of a translator’s work notably increased in the media. On March 9, 2010, a New York Times article by Miguel Helft headlined “Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool” reported that Google’s translation service has set itself apart from other online translation tools by adopting a statistical approach. Rather than seeking to translate on its own, Google Translate is a search engine that scans “thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations in order to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.” The Times decided to put Google Translate to the test by feeding it and several other digital translation services the first lines of some famous novels and comparing the results in a chart.⁴³ The other digital translators produced odd, awkward phrases, but Google Translate’s version of the first line of García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad differed from that of the “human translator” by only a single word. Which, given that Google Translate is a search engine and the translation of One Hundred Years one of the most famous texts of our time, widely available across the Internet, should not seem any tremendous feat (indeed, that very slight difference might be deemed a carefully planned denial of plagiarism). As David Bellos pointed out later in response, “All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement.”⁴⁴

Gregory Rabassa’s name was absent both from the chart and the article, which cited Franz Ochs, a brilliant linguist and the head of Google’s translation program, to the effect that “This technology can make the language barrier go away.” It’s a familiar scenario. Translation will be not only inevitable but also unnecessary for humans to bother with: the spaceship arrives at the unknown planet and the computer instantly makes full communication with its alien inhabitants possible. Bellos warns of a closely related misconception that the Times’s chart tends to confirm: the idea that there is a single “correct” translation of any given phrase or literary passage, and that if the human just thinks hard enough, or the machine crunches enough data, both will arrive at that unique and identical formulation. I would append a footnote to this warning: if we deem language to be information and nothing more, and translation no more than the transfer of that information, this misconception may become our truth.

1. Two excellent sources for a corresponding history of the translation of Latin American poetry would be Kirsten Silvz Gruesz, “Tasks of the Translator: Imitative Literature, the Catholic South, and the Invasion of Mexico,” in Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Jonathan Cohen’s recent work on William Carlos Williams as translator: By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959 (New York: New Directions, 2011). Eliot Weinberger’s translations of Octavio Paz and others constitute another significant thread in this history; see his essay, “Anonymous Sources,” in the present volume.

7. Cited by Alice Houston Luiggi, “Some Letters of Sarmiento and Mary Mann, 1865–1876, Part I,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 32, no. 2 (May 1952): 188. For more on Sarmiento and Mary Mann, see Deshae E. Lott, “Like One Happy Family: Mary Peabody Mann’s Method for Influencing Reform,” in Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, ed. Monika Maria Elbert, Julie Elizabeth Hall, and Katherine Rodier (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 91–107; and My Dear Sir: Mary Mann’s Letters to Sarmiento (1865–1881), ed. Barry L. Velleman (Buenos Aires: ICANA, 2001).

9. See, for example, Doris Somers’s critique of the way Mary Mann’s translation suppressed Sarmiento’s use of metaphor in Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 344, n. 17. See also Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism: The First Complete English Translation, trans. Kathleen Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). In her introduction, Ross describes Mary Peabody Mann only as the “wife of the famous United States senator Horace Mann” and makes no mention of her other works.

11. My claim about the unique status of these two book-length translations of Latin American literature into English—Mann’s Facundo and Ogden’s María—is based on a number of bibliographical sources compiled during the first half of the twentieth century, clearly in response to the dawning perception of the dearth of Latin American material available in English. These bibliographies include Remigio U. Pane, “Two Hundred Latin American Books in English Translation: A Bibliography,” The Modern Language Journal 27, no. 8 (Dec. 1943): 593–604; William H. Fletcher, A Guide to Spanish and Spanish-American Literature in Translation (Los Angeles Junior College, 1936); Sturgis E. Leavitt, Hispano-American Literature in the United States: A Bibliography of Translations and Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932). I’m very grateful to Fernando Acosta-Rodriguez, the Librarian for Latin American Studies at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, for helping me locate some of these resources.

12. “Embarrassed Foreign Missions” (Editorial), The Nation 60, no. 1559 (May 16, 1995): 376. The Nation’s editorials were published anonymously at the time; the information attributing this piece to Ogden comes from David Anderson Thomas’s rather adversarial M.A. thesis about Ogden, “Rollo Ogden: An Ideologue of Opposition to United States Imperialism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century” (Georgia State University, 1972). The phrase I cite here, particularly in its rejection of the word “heathen,” hearkens back strongly to Roger Williams’s haunting 1643 Key into the Language of America.

16. Rivera y Río belonged to a group of mid-nineteenth-century novelists known for their “social novels” written under the strong influence of French novelist Eugène Sue. See Adriana Sandoval Lara, “‘Las novelas sociales’ del siglo XIX. Un primer acercamiento a José Rivera y Río,” in La república de las letras: asomos a la cultra escrita del México decimonónico, vol. 1, ed. Belem Clark de Lara and Elisa Speckman Guerra (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005).

33. Jeremy Munday, “The Relations of Style and Ideology in Translation: A Case Study of Harriet de Onís,” in Actas del III Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación. La traducción del futuro: mediación lingüística y cultural en el siglo XXI, ed. L. Pegenaute, J. DeCesaris, M. Tricas, and E. Bernal (Barcelona: PPU, 2008), 1:1, 57–68. See also Jeremy Munday, Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English (New York: Routledge, 2008).