Translating Events, Glossing Experience: European Texts and American Encounters

Abstract

References to the romancero and other literary texts stemming from the medieval tradition in early Spanish American historical documents have been interpreted in two principal ways: one linguistic, the other socio-juridical. On the one hand, they are seen as evidence that the romancero was firmly rooted in popular language and culture, specifically in the colloquial usage of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, that allusions to ballads and other belletristic references in these works, which belong primarily to the textual universe of the relaciones de meritos y servicios (often composed as self-serving justifications for questionable actions), function as a means of self-engrandizement. In this way authors conformed to discursive requirements that compelled them to portray themselves as valiant, when not heroic, subjects of the Crown. The current article proposes a third alternative; namely, that the literary references in sixteenth-century chronicles operate at another deeper epistemological level, and constitute hermeneutical strategies rooted in medieval reading and writing practices. Specifically, that they operate as glosses which process and organize knowledge in a way that allows for the assimilation of new knowledge--especially knowledge of the unknown--into the broader cultural context of the author and the reader. In them, we are able to discover at the level of language and rhetoric one of the basic gestures of colonialism: the urge to appropriate, inhabit the territory of, and dominate the Other through the Other’s transformation into familiar images of the self.