1 Conceptualizing the Space of Translation
Mapping Language(s) in Latin American Print Culture
Even though translation has historically been studied mostly in relation to print artifacts and products, and the book as such has arguably been the main axis around which translation is perceived, practiced, and studied, the notion of print culture has not been central to knowledge- and sense-making about translation. Nevertheless, exploring the relationship between print culture and translation offers a productive space to bring together aspects of translation that are often studied separately.
The Contours of Print Culture
The assertion that “Any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and also the starting point for another” (Johns 3) is both adequate and limited, as that description extends beyond the book to a range of print products. As a notion and a locus of enquiry, “print culture” has evolved greatly through the years, from an earlier focus on manuscripts to the impact of the printing press and the Gutenberg revolution on the public sphere.1 Today, and following the great shifts that came about throughout the twentieth century in the production of print matter and its impact on society, and owing to transdisciplinary approaches to a wide range of objects of study that fall within “print culture” as a range of practices, the definition has significantly expanded.
This book aligns with definitions of print culture that understand it as looking at both the materiality of print objects and their social existence.2 As Castro-Klarén remarks, looking at books beyond the printed page and focusing on their “entire materiality as physical and social objects” points both to the history of the book and to “print’s transformative power” and illuminates the growth and circulation of cultural objects in modern life “with a new sense of complexity: highlighting the materiality of objects, their place in society, their meaning-making possibilities, as well as their reception and consumption by the reader-viewer” (Castro-Klarén 241). Moreover, in intellectual networks, print practices extend beyond one specific print form or medium. Books, periodicals, and other artifacts of print culture are important in their materiality—which is crucial to understanding them—but they are also intellectual sites and interrelate with one another as such. They constitute stages of—and ways of “staging”—forms of cultural life that inform our understandings of intellectual history.3
Periodicals and other print artifacts are in themselves sites of intellectual engagement, and they relate to books and to other sites of narrative practice. Periodicals intersect with books while having their own social life and following alternative modes of circulation. Explaining why they adopted “print culture” for their study of print production in Britain and the United States between 1880 and 1940, Ardis and Collier note that it allowed them to encompass the “vast publishing scene” of the period and to include “periodicals as entities in their own right, not contexts for primary source materials,” alongside a focus on “the materiality of literature” and a diverse and complex landscape (3). Although there are various terms that relate to this type of perspective, I followed “print culture” for reasons akin to those articulated by Ardis and Collier, who, confronting the notion of “print culture” with those of “print media” and “book history,” opted for “print culture” not out of disinterest in “the visual, technological, and editorial transformations of print media,” but as a more inclusive field that foregrounds—they state, following Williams—the notion of “culture” as encompassing “created material preserved and passed forward in time,” and a historically specific “particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour” (57).4 When it comes to looking at print culture in society, the concept helps to make sense of the relationships between texts and patterns of thinking, modes of production, forms of social life, and narrative practices. While still attending to the specificities of text production, editing, translation, and so on, print culture foregrounds the situatedness of texts and places them in relation to collective bodies—institutions, circles, collectives, scenes5—their sociability,6 and their intellectual, political, and historical contingencies. As a way to understand the social-formation dimension of print, print culture allows an understanding of texts in relation to the public sphere and to imagined communities. In short, it grants centrality to the materiality of cultural products without evacuating them of their social existence.
Finally, inasmuch as it is about the social existence of “all products of the press,” print culture is about narrative technologies and about “the history of human relationships and the relationships between people and objects” (Raven 228). As such, and to the extent that it has to do with circulation, the notion of print culture recognizes that print matter always exceeds the context of its production. While being inscribed by its local specificity, as it circulates it crosses borders and has a transnational existence.
Articulating the Space of Translation
As the mode and expression of border-crossing, transfer and circulation of sense and narratives, translation is constitutive of print culture. In turn, the forms of print culture are in and of themselves sites of translation. When looking at print culture, at the wide and varied range of instances that fall within its spectrum—several of which are the object of this book, such as books, periodicals, and publishing houses—and specifically when looking at the translation praxis within them, what emerges is an image of some of these instances as spaces of translation.7 Although not all sites of print culture are spaces of translation—certainly not to the same extent—throughout the twentieth century, print, its modalities, processes, and products were the spaces par excellence where translation was performed.
The space of translation as an operational notion articulated in this book is informed by various concepts that bring together space, language, and social contact and relation. One such concept is that of the “contact zone,” defined as a “social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 7). Another generative concept informing the space of translation is that of the “translation zone,” posited by Apter, which she defines as a “linguistic hot spot” on which “a subset of politics at large, with particular agendas and strategic interests” is superimposed (130). I am interested in incorporating these concepts while widening their spectrum and granting them specificity. While the space of translation in the Americas is crossed by conflict, asymmetric relations, and political contingencies, when looked at with a focus on print culture—as the examples in this book will illustrate—it generates various other angles of observation and varying temporalities. The space of translation as elaborated here, that is, related to print culture, encompasses both the materiality of the practice and various geopolitical dynamics that are inherently plurilingual. Moreover, given contemporary tendencies to look at translation either only notionally or as a metaphor, and while I recognize the conceptual potential of translation to refer to cultural relations at large—amidst which it inherently occurs—I am interested in keeping the attention on translation proper and on transactions among specific languages spoken by particular communities. As such, some instances of print culture are spaces of translation in ways that others are not.
Conceptually, I would situate the space of translation alongside concerns such as those posited in Infante’s After Translation, where he looks at “various historical, economic, and material processes associated with the transnational flow of culture” (4). Drawing on Lee and LiPuma, Infante looks at circulation of cultural production “as a performative and constitutive process that is ‘created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them” ’ (192). Basing his argument on the notion of “cultures of circulation,” Infante approaches translation “as an instrumental constitutive process able to generate various forms of transfers that articulate the circulation of modern transatlantic poetry, and to articulate a space of mediation between different national traditions, languages, and cultures” (8). In this book, the space of translation is viewed as a site where those “cultures of circulation” operate across languages, in and among specific communities. It helps to situate nodes where those cultures of circulation are manifest and where they negotiate language flows simultaneously within and beyond print matter as they transact, as part of economies of imagination, grounds for legitimacy and value.
Translation, Archive, and Genealogy
Bringing together print culture and the space of translation in mid- to late-twentieth-century Latin America responds to a historiographic desire, that of revisiting narratives of cultural history from the perspective of translation. Although print has been at the center of studying Latin American cultural production, this has not been the case for translation. However, as Casanova remarked, “literary investigations should contemplate the ‘entire configuration’ to which texts belong,” that is, “the totality of texts and literary and aesthetic debates” with which a work of literature “enters into relation and resonance.” She posits: “Everything that is written, everything that is translated, published, theorized, commented upon, celebrated—all these things are so many elements of a vast composition,” and claims that the “singularity” of individual works “becomes manifest” against, and as part of, that “immense combination” (3; my emphasis). Even though the goal of encompassing that “immense combination” is neither feasible nor desirable, the landscape Casanova sketches is one where narratives occur, interact, and circulate within larger configurations of the historical archive. The spaces of translation in print culture in Latin America are productive sites to approach Latin American intellectual history as a narrative archive.8
In relation to the Americas specifically, several authors have redefined the notion of the archive as a way of making sense of cultural memory and intellectual history and, in some cases, of addressing questions of cultural circulation and transmission. Roberto González Echevarría, for example, discusses the notion for a genealogy of Latin American narrative. He sees the archive as a way to understand the relationship between fiction, discourse, and memory and, through this lens, investigates the Latin American novel as part of the textual economy, of the discursive totality of its particular historical and geopolitical specificity (8).9 This and other proposals for a Latin American archive frame and contextualize the notion as part of a genealogy of hemispheric cultural production. In an attempt to situate and historicize Latin American cultural production within larger socio-historical discourses, they hint to a Latin American archive in which narratives—textual, visual, embodied—are ingrained in larger discursive and ideological structures.
Spaces of translation in the Americas are traces of practice and engagement central to the Latin American archive and are thus constitutive of an intellectual genealogy. Beyond criticism, looking at translation praxis can serve the goal of a narrative critique toward a transnational genealogy of language and/in social relations. From this perspective, translation praxis does not aim to “analyze processes of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in discourse” but to “study their formation, at once scattered, discontinuous and regular” (Foucault 233) which is what drives a genealogical critique.10
Understood as such, the archive itself becom...
