Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad

Abstract

On 14 october 1492, on the island that he had just named San Salvador, Christopher Columbus Seized Seven TaÍno indians to serve as translators. The abduction was clearly an act of significant forethought, registering Columbus's intention that these interpreters “inquire and inform … about things in these parts” (Columbus, “Tetter” 118)—a first step toward the subjugation of all the inhabitants of San Salvador, who might one day be “taken to Castile or held captive” on the island (Columbus, Diario 75). The taking of these indigenous translators has been no less momentous for contemporary scholarship, perhaps especially in early modern English and American literary studies: in the year of the Columbian quincentenary, Stephen Greenblatt memorably called it “the primal crime in the New World … committed in the interest of language” (24); Eric Cheyfitz concurs that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (104). Yet the concept of translation as a wholly imperial instrument, as commonplace in Columbus's day as in our own, has limited our thinking in important ways (Adorno, “Polemics” 20). As ethnohistorians and literary critics alike have suggested, the interpretive sway of the “linguistic colonialism” model can obscure as much about its Native objects as it reveals about the purported discursive complexity of its European subjects.