Spanish-American Literature: The Colonial Period

Abstract

Roberto A. Valdeon’s wide-ranging Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 284 pp., is a reference text for curious readers and for scholars with a research interest in translation as a tool to evaluate other cultures, convert, conquer, and study colonial rivalries during the conquest and the colonial period in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru and the Caribbean. Chapter i deals with language and empire, speaking in particular of the dissemination of the Black Legend and other narratives, such as the Indian savage, through translation. Chapters ii and iii discuss the role of well-known interpreters like Malinche and Felipillo, but they also supply an overall view of interpreters and translators in the administration of the colonies and the judicial system, such as Gaspar Antonio Chi in Mesoamerica. Chapter iv focuses on the evangelization and the translation policies of the Catholic Church, looking, for instance, at Guaman Poma and Santa Cruz Pachacuti’s roles as interpreters of visitadores extirpating idolatries in the Andes. Chapters iv and v provide readers with an introductory approach to seminal works by writers such as Las Casas, Cieza de Leon, duran, Chimalpahin, and Titu Cusi Yupanqui, and their translation into some of the main European languages throughout the centuries. Angels, Demons and the New World, ed. Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, CUP, 2013, 332 pp., redresses the imbalance between the widely-studied historical field of witchcraft and demonology and the much less so of angels. The three-part collection of essays focuses on the early modern representation of both angels and demons in the Hispanic world, exploring religious and cultural change, interaction, negotiation, and evolution of highbrow and popular mentalities following the European encounter with America. The first part, ‘From the old World to the New’, concentrates on the intellectual European background on angels and demons, such as Andrew Keitt’s chapter (15–39), which analyses superstition, medical humanism, and preternatural philosophy in Martin de Azpilcueta, Martin de Castanega, Pedro Ciruelo, and domingo de Valtanas’s works. The second part, ‘Indigenous Responses’, assesses the role that angels and demons played in the indigenous Christian cultures of New Spain and New Granada. Andrew Redden (146–70), for example, pieces together the multi-ethnic religiosity of the viceroyalty of New Granada, examining the merging of demonic forms with indigenous deities and the angelic and demonic representations after the arrival of the Jesuits in Santa Fe de Bogota. The third part, ‘The World of the Baroque’, sheds light upon angels and demons’ roles in spiritual and artistic forms. Ramon Mujica Pinilla (171–210) links the iconography of angels decorating Andean churches and monasteries with providentialist readings by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and argues for angelology as a rhetorical device at the service of the Spanish Monarchy and for demonology as a discourse of acculturation, as seen in Pedro Cieza de Leon and Agustin de Zarate’s chronicles.