Unamuno, Nativism, and the Politics of the Vernacular; or, on the Authenticity of Translation

Approaches the question of nativism—an investment in the rejuvenation of one’s nation and its putative mother tongues—through a practice that would seem to be at odds with it: translation. Unamuno used translation to reform the Spanish language, and through it, he became instrumental in launching the study of American literature in Spain in the first two decades of the twentieth century. He did so by discovering his “voice” in Spanish, he claimed, through his translations of everyone from Thomas Carlyle to Walt Whitman. This chapter thus deconstructs Unamuno’s nostalgic vision of the Spanish empire and its linguistic unity after 1898 through his own work as a translator of English, and then specifically US writing, set against his own theories of the future shared dominance of global writing by Spanish and English.

Conclusion

U ses Ilan Stavans’s aestheticized Spanglish “translation” of Don Quixote to point toward a future of English/Spanish bilingual experimentation as a means of rethinking modernist aesthetics in contemporary global literatures.

Introduction

Spaniards know that there is no agreement, neither the landscape with the houses, neither the round with the cube, neither the great number with the small number, it was natural that a Spaniard [Picasso] should express this in the painting of the twentieth century, the century where nothing is in agreement, neither the round with the cube, neither the landscape with the houses, neither the large quantity with the small quantity. America and Spain have this thing in common, that is why Spain discovered America and America Spain, in fact it is for this reason that both of them have found their moment in the twentieth century....

Negro and Negro

Examines the reception of black US writing in Spain in order to contextualize and defamiliarize it as literatura negra norte-americana. By studying the translations, anthologies, and bilingual Spanish-English texts in which works by Hughes and Claude McKay appeared alongside works by leading figures of the Afro-Caribbean negrismo movement (Nicolás Guillén and Emilio Ballagas), this chapter reveals the ways in which black diasporic writing was given a unique new genealogy. Moving away from the Francophone négritude movement and reducing Africa to a source of a remote cultural past, figures like Ballagas collaborated with Spanish critics like Guillermo de Torre to reinterpret contemporary black writing as produced distinctly by the crossings of the US and Spanish empires. US black writing thus illuminated and complicated Spain’s racial past. Hughes, in turn, became for Spaniards and Spanish Americans alike the poet of an uncertain vision of blackness and leftist revolution. This vision was adopted by the Spanish Republicans during the civil war, just as they were paradoxically purging any notion of Moorish “blackness” or Africanism from their own political identity—something that Hughes himself engaged when he translated their poems on “Moorish traitors.”

Jiménez, Modernism/o, and the Languages of Comparative Modernist Studies

Uses Rubén Darío’s manipulation of the term modernismo and Jiménez’s relationship to the modernista movement, as elaborated in over four decades of critical writings, to rethink the paradigms of global modernist studies. This chapter demonstrates how Jiménez’s controversial conversion of a “dying” Spain into a vital node in a “universal” modernist network can redress some critical imbalances in the Anglophone-dominated field of modernist studies. It furthermore shows, through a brief philological examination in Hispanophone media, how the presumed death of Spain was central to the renovation of the term “modernismo” itself in Rubén Darío’s work, which Jiménez saw himself as inheriting. Placing translation and literary exchange at the center of his practices and theories, Jiménez reinscribes Spain into a global history of what I call “modernism/o”—a way of denoting his use of the Spanish word modernismo to signal an “epoch” whose history is in danger of being narrowed by the Anglophone conceptions of “modernism”—by permanently suspending both the word and the concept between English and Spanish, effectively capturing the mobile poetics that his work employs.

Restaging the Disaster

Demonstrates how the young leftist Dos Passos hoped, during World War I, that a collapse of the bourgeoning American empire might be a boon for the American literature he scorned, just as Spain’s imperial loss in 1898 had been for its writers. This chapter situates his work against his own father’s celebrations of “Anglo-Saxon” empire and against his fellow socialist, anti-imperialist, and Hispanophile William Dean Howells’s readings of American literature’s rise and of Spanish realist novels. His contribution, then, is to reduce and unravel “American literature” by using Spain’s imperial decline and literary rise as its comparative foil, a tactic that he ends up reversing in Spain in 1937 when he effects his turn to the political right of US nationalism.

“Splintered Staves”

Examines Ezra Pound’s aborted career as a Hispanist and translator of Spanish texts, from the late medieval Poema del Cid to romanceros (ballads), and his attacks on Germanic philology and his promotion of a comparative, poeticized mode of scholarship. His overlapping poetry and scholarship, dramatized the historical decline of Spanish literature, but insisted that imperial and literary flourishing must be separated. Together with Dos Passos, Pound illustrates the investment of modernist aesthetics, especially the signature style of fragmentation, in the new academic formations of the early twentieth century.

“Spanish Is a Language Tu”

Analyzes the infamously strange dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which characters speak English through a modified version of Spanish syntax, false cognates, and peculiar diction (“What passes with thee?”). This chapter argues that Hemingway’s creation of an Anglo-Spanish literary dialect represents not a political statement on the Spanish Civil War, but a comparative reading of the fates of the languages associated with the rising US and declining Spanish empires—a reading that reaches back to their moments of interpenetration in the 1600s. Rogers calls Hemingway’s mode of dialogue in the novel “structural Spanglish,” a form of interlingual writing that suspends the typical transaction of translation permanently and argues For Whom the Bell Tolls makes a critical late modernist novel that looks forward to the depthless anti-epistemology of postmodernist writing. Briefly examination of several texts that belong in this new genealogy, by Malcolm Lowry, Felipe Alfau, and Ben Lerner.