Abstract
This translation of José Martí's Nuestra América (Our America) and accompanying essay offer English-speaking readers a new version of his seminal text, situating it more firmly within the realm of literary and translation studies, and decentering it from the world of Latin American history or politics, where the extant English translations tend to live in North American libraries. The translator’s meditation focuses on some of the more poetic aspects of Martí's language and the logic he employs to create interconnected evolving metaphors and metonyms, while also explaining some of the lexical and syntactic choices made in key areas that have traditionally caused difficulty with previous translations of this essay.
Highlights
In Martí’s paragraph about those weak arms and inauthentic posers, I originally wanted to use ‘dandy’ for sietemesino due to its similar implication of posing, but that proved inadequate, and didn’t allow for the way Martí employs this imagery in a chain of causality from weakling to traitor to effeminate poser
A few quasisurrealist images sprout up, precursory to the Vanguardia movement, such as the octopus from whose arms the young generation is springing forth in hope, or the assertion that Latin Americans can no longer be ‘a people made of leaves, living in the air, our crown loaded with flowers.’
Emil Volek), an essentialist attitude that points toward the inherent ‘uniqueness’ of Latin America as a stumbling block to its modernization or integration into the modern world, which will pervade Latin American political thought and literary and cultural production, in the latter half of the twentieth century
Summary
In Martí’s paragraph about those weak arms and inauthentic posers, I originally wanted to use ‘dandy’ for sietemesino due to its similar implication of posing, but that proved inadequate, and didn’t allow for the way Martí employs this imagery in a chain of causality from weakling to traitor to effeminate poser.
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