Glosas, recortes y andamiajes en la traducción poética: «The Bounty» (Derek Walcott) en español

Un poema es un artefacto precario, sujeto por los automatismos de la lengua en que fue creado. A la luz de un libro de Walcott, traducido al español por Talens y Forés, se distinguen dos opciones para reactivar los mecanismos del texto original en la lengua de destino. Una vía recurre a la poda, el hipérbaton y la libre selección léxica, en aras a evitar que el texto traducido estire sus versos más allá de la métrica original. Otra opción intenta preservar los contenidos y matices del texto fuente, aunque para ello sea preciso incluir sutiles glosas, parafraseando y ampliando enclaves donde la comprensión lectora puede ofuscarse. En la presente traducción, predomina la opción segunda, sin que escaseen rasgos de la primera.

Human Geography and Islands

Work on islands has long played a critical role in the development of many academic disciplines that overlap and are intimately connected with the discipline of geography. Islands were central to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and have subsequently been for the development of ecological, sustainability, and resilience approaches that are prevalent in geography in the 2020s. Islanders were the focal points for Margaret Mead’s and Marylin Strathern’s developments of the discipline of anthropology, concerns for Indigenous geographies, and the counterpositioning of nonmodern reasoning to European or Western frameworks of reasoning. Islands and islanders have also long been a key focus for many who have critiqued the forces of colonialism, such as Édouard Glissant, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, and Derek Walcott, whose work is extremely influential for Critical Black Geographies. More recently, engaging islands and islanders shaped Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s and Epeli Hau‘ofa’s influential reappraisal of how academic research itself can and should do better, reorienting toward more geographically appropriate Indigenous perspectives. What this is already telling us is that any bibliography compiled under the title of “Geography and Islands” needs to work beyond the boundaries of neatly defined academic disciplines. The focus is the geographical form, the island, and associated island cultures, and thus geographers who study islands regularly step outside fixed disciplines. Thus, this article presents a range of references that are categorized by way of key early-21st-century island themes and topics that will be of particular concern to geographers. Here, the decades since the late 20th century have seen the rise of a more distinct or focused field of academic inquiry, which has come to be known as “island studies.” The key characteristics of this field are its diversity, interdisciplinarity, openness, and extremely rapid growth—geographically, intellectually, and in the broad range of topics and subjects being engaged with in the 2020s. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the term “island studies” did not have much purchase. In the 2020s, due to the strong repositioning of islands within broader concerns—such as human-nature relations, current developments in environmental and resilience approaches, the ongoing legacies and effects of colonialism, Indigenous geographies, migration patterns, mobilities and movements of humans and nonhumans, geopolitical tensions and strategies, and the Anthropocene, as just some examples—the figure of the island has moved considerably more to the center of many debates (and particularly those debates that concern geographers). This article therefore also reflects the sense of dynamism, as well as the interdisciplinary nature, of work with islands as an exponentially developing field of research.

Transatlantic Climate and Gulf Stream Aesthetics

Daniel Williams, “Transatlantic Climate and Gulf Stream Aesthetics” (pp. 57–91) The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches to literary study, this essay argues that the nineteenth-century discourse of the Gulf Stream included a significant aesthetic dimension organized by a dialectic between stability and variability. First, the essay traces the Gulf Stream’s presence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific writing and print culture, showing how memorable figures and vivid illustrations accentuated the risk of climate variability even as they charted an apparently stable oceanic system. Next, it considers the work of two poets separated by the ocean, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sidney Lanier. While ostensibly using the Gulf Stream motif to reflect on geographic identity and cultural belonging, Hopkins and Lanier use formal and figurative techniques that register the threat of climate instability, offering a deeper sense of climate disquiet than the scientific materials on which they drew. Finally, the essay looks at the poetry of Derek Walcott, sketching the afterlife of the Gulf Stream discourse, extending its formal and figurative lineage, and renewing the present ecological urgency of thinking with an Earth-system process as a motif of climatic connection and obligation.

Defying Absolutes and Essentialism in Derek Walcott’s Omeros: An Epic of Traces

Using poststructuralist and postmodern theory, this article analyses the postcolonial epic poem Omeros (1990) by the author Derek Walcott. In using such a genre, Derek Walcott opens up a discussion on the literary canon and the role of epics. The authority of canonical genres is established through the use of some of the epic’s formal conventions in order to be subsequently questioned through the subversion of some others relating to register and perspective. In this way, Walcott establishes a poststructuralist approach to identity which is perceived as fluid, heterogeneous, and subject to transformations. The intertextuality and parody at work in the text bring to light postmodern concerns about history and the past, which are presented as non-absolute traces. In the end, the epic recovery of roots becomes in this poem an invocation of anti-essentialism.