The Regime of Translation in Miguel Antonio Caro's Colombia

Abstract

This essay sets out to interpret the relation of translational practices to the exercise of power in late-nineteenth-century Colombia. To this end, it surveys the work of several philologists and translators (particularly that of the grammarian and president Miguel Antonio Caro [1843-1909]) whose literary careers are inextricably bound up with their political life. Along the way, I also explain how the theorists of sovereignty whose ideas enjoyed wide currency in Caro's time--from Augustine to Juan de Mariana and on to Antonio Narifio often resorted to the tropes of translation (notably the translatio imperii and the pactum translationis) to signify the transmission and legitimation of political authority. Although Caro does not mention such concepts by name, he engages them in ways that anticipate Carl Schmitt's powerful critique of parliamentary democracy. The various versions of the translatio that coexisted in the later nineteenth century had historically been attached to very specific models of the state. In fact, it is now a critical commonplace to refer to the proliferation of text-bound images of a modern bureaucratic state and its attending cultural and educational institutions in nineteenthcentury Spanish America as the emergence of a [ciudad letrada]. As used by Angel Rama, the phrase city designates an imagined community of learned elites that obtains from the rise of the men of letters and/or lawyers (letrados means both in Spanish) through the ranks of the state bureaucracy, all the way to the principal political offices, on the basis of their related abilities to write and speak eloquently and to construct rhetorico-political arguments. Because Caro's career as a man of letters, a publicist of political ideas, and a self-taught jurist was enabled by a long-standing tradition that posited all three endeavors as coexisting in a continuous flow, his opinions, aesthetic choices, and acts of legislation must necessarily be compared to those promoted by some of his forerunners and coevals who also assumed a dual identity as forgers of the citizenry's tastes and prejudices. The main features of the lettered city, which Rama has set forth in a book by the same title, are as follows: first, the superimposition (Rama's words are translacicn and transculturaci6n) of a preexisting order of signs on an uncontrollable and unpredictable phenomenal reality that often goes unacknowledged as such; second, the use of a highly cultured language, often disconnected from everyday usage and fully understood mainly by the minority in power; and third, the displacement of the most immediate economic and social problems of the community by ambitious cultural projects in