Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature by Gayle Rogers

Abstract

Reviewed by: Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature by Gayle Rogers Brian J. Cope Rogers, Gayle. Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature. Columbia UP, 2016. Pp. 296. ISBN 978-0-23117-856-3. Literary history, modernismo, and translation comprise the three critical constellations of Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature. The book presents a series of case studies of authors from Spain and the United States who sustained a marked interest in the literary canon of the opposing empire. The book is predominantly a literary and cultural history sprinkled with close readings and critical commentaries of selected texts that will appeal to scholars wishing to gain a cross-national and comparative perspective on the work of Ezra Pound, Juan Ramón Jiménez, John Dos Passos, Miguel de Unamuno, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ilan Stavans. The common thread connecting these authors is their work as translators, and in most cases (but not all), their idiosyncratic cultivation of a translational mode of poeisis that lends distinction and originality to their creative work and aesthetic outlook. Incomparable Empires is divided into three sections, each comprised of two chapters that offer insightful historical panoramas and original textual analyses. Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos constitute the focus of the first section ("American Modernism's Hispanists"), which explores the authors' profound interest in the history and literature of Spain. Rogers effectively [End Page 653] shows that both authors developed critical visions of Spain's imperial legacy that contrasted with the more celebratory visions of prominent US Hispanists like William Dean Howells and Archer Milton Huntington (founder of the Hispanic Society of America). Rogers argues persuasively that the authors' engagement with Spain and US Hispanism helped shape their critical views on the state of US letters and on the rise of US imperialism. The chapter on Pound examines traces of the Cantar de mío Cid in The Spirit of Romance and in a selection of the Cantos, framing the latter as a poeticized translation of the Cid that historicizes, interprets, and revitalizes the medieval text. In contrast, the chapter on Dos Passos discusses the influence of Machado's Campos de Castilla on A Pushcart at the Curb, which contains several lyrical vignettes of rural life in modern Castile. Juan Ramón Jiménez and Miguel de Unamuno comprise the focus of the book's second section ("Spain's American Translations"), which examines the authors' engagement with and translation of US literature. The first chapter discusses Jiménez as an heir to Rubén Darío; his interest in US literature and work as a translator; his exile in the United States and Puerto Rico, where he held several professorships; and his desire to fuse modernismo with US modernism. The chapter contains a close reading of Diario de un recién casado that argues that the poem exhibits characteristics of both modernismo and US modernism that reinforce Jiménez's integrative and cosmopolitan aesthetic philosophy. In contrast, the chapter on Unamuno profiles his work as a translator; maps the theories of translation to which he subscribed or from which he departed; and fleshes out his vision for translation as an engine of reciprocal literary and linguistic innovation. The chapter offers an insightful discussion of Unamuno's affinity for Anglophone literature and his understanding of the United States as a rare historical contact zone for English and Spanish that made possible a poet like Walt Whitman. Rogers argues that Unamuno aspired to chart a new course for Spanish poetry through his translation of Whitman and his literary disciples. Rogers defends this wholly untenable position by inferring too much from Unamuno's professed enthusiasm for Anglophone literature and by projecting too much onto Unamuno's veneration of Whitman and his successors. Nevertheless, the chapter makes a respectable contribution to the scholarship in its careful excavation of Unamuno's innovative philosophy of translation, which, as Rogers elegantly demonstrates, intersects with Pound's signature vision of translation as a method of poeisis. The two chapters comprising the book's third section ("New Genealogies") are related only in their focus on US...