11 Greece and José Martí

This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.

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José Martí. Epic Chronicler of the United States in the Eighties. By Manuel Pedro González, with an introduction by Sturgis E. Leavitt. (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1953. Pp. xii,79. $3.00.)

The Americas A Quarterly Review of Latin American History ◽

10.2307/978121 ◽

1954 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 121-122

Author(s):

Harold E. Davis

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

North Carolina ◽

The United States ◽

Jose Marti ◽

University Of North Carolina ◽

Chapel Hill

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José Martí's “Evening of Emerson” and the United Statesian Literary Tradition

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875809006021 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 43 (1) ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

LAURA LOMAS

Keyword(s):

New England ◽

Latin American ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Jose Marti ◽

Chinese Exclusion ◽

The Pacific ◽

Imperial Expansion ◽

A Minor ◽

War Of The Pacific ◽

Exclusion Act

Revising a century of interpretation that has emphasized the identification of José Martí with Ralph Waldo Emerson, this essay draws on Martí's unpublished and published manuscripts about Emerson to reveal Martí's keen sense of his difference from the New England bard. When we read Martí's 1882 eulogy to Emerson alongside contemporaneous essays about the Chinese Exclusion Act and the War of the Pacific, Martí's epiphany – which he calls the “evening of Emerson” – comes to suggest the evanescence of Emerson's influence. Martí here glimpses his contribution: a creative resignification and translation of Emerson and US culture more broadly in order to arrive at a distinct version of nuestra América. Although Emerson's influence persists, as he provides the phrase “our America,” Martí's interpretation transposes the phrase to a minor key and reveals the perspective of the Latin American migrant who presciently observes the threat of imperial expansion.

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