Spanish-speaking World Research Articles

Reception of Translated Classics of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Spanish-speaking World: A Survey of Seven Spanish Versions of Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic)

Previous studies on translations of Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic) have focused on English versions; little attention has been given to non-English translations. The present study is the first investigation of the reception of the seven Spanish versions of Huangdi Neijing in terms of three parameters: collection records in libraries worldwide; book reviews and citation counts in international journals; and customer reviews on Amazon. The results revealed four features of Spanish translations and communication of Huangdi Neijing in terms of reception of academia, reception of general readers, the center of translation and communication, and the role of Chinese scholars. These factors demonstrate the marginal status of Spanish translations of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) classics. The implications are summarized in hopes of promoting the translation and communication of TCM classics in the Spanish-speaking world and to provide insights into the communication of TCM culture in the non-English-speaking world.

In Praise of José Watanabe

In Praise of José Watanabe Marco Katz Montiel (bio) "… home is where our stories are, and that's not just a question of ethnicity or even country …" —Joy Kogawa, Itsuka Alberto Fujimori caught the world's attention in 1990 by becoming the first person of Japanese descent elected to lead Peru—or any nation outside of Japan. His extravagant campaign and unexpected accension caused the world to notice the vast number of nikkei, immigrants from Japan and their descendants, in the country he now governed. According to the Japanese Peruvian Association in Lima, this group numbered over fifty thousand people and included a disproportionate number of artists, musicians, and writers who, along with large populations of nikkei in Brazil and Mexico, employed appealing fusions of Asia and Latin America in their creative activity. Among these was playwright, screenwriter, and poet José Watanabe Varas (1945-2007). By the time of his passing, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars had begun to create interest in Watanabe's works. Volumes of his poetry appeared throughout the Spanish-speaking world and translations began to appear that made his work available to native English speakers and the even larger number of readers who employ English as a second language. When Peruvian cinephiles submitted Watanabe's Alias 'La Gringa' to the Academy Awards, the addition of English subtitles increased the potential audience for that film. Since then, scholarly works on Watanabe's oeuvre have appeared in Peru and as chapters of anthologies dealing generally with Asians in Latin America, in England, and the United States. While all of these provide useful ways of looking at his varied creative production, a comprehensive appreciation of his work remains undone. Reading Watanabe as a Japanese Peruvian author only begins to explain his writing. Although many of his verses do not blatantly announce a paternal heritage, there are moments in which his poetry [End Page 240] shows an immigrant father fusing elements from his home country with those of his adopted land. A subtle example appears in "This Scent, Its Other" from a 1994 collection translated as Natural History in 2022 by Michelle Har Kim (Georgia Review Books). The scene opens with the narrator's older sister chopping parsley with the seemingly "congenital" ability of someone born in Peru, where that condiment predominates. "Parsley would announce that my father, Don Harumi," continues the poem, "awaited his frugal soup. Thanks to this country:a Japanese man who would never forgivethe local secret's absence at the table!I think you folded that secret into another one greaterto compose the beauty of your ordered home that blendedfamily and savvy and knacks of this land. Up to this point suggestive of the ways in which the issei (Japanese immigrant) brings his customs together with practices from his adopted land, the verses turn to what has been lost along the way: Children of your old environs we are lone diners todaydivided as tithesand we eat dinner on Day of the Dead scatteringparsley in our soup. The herbs are but seasoning now, aroma without powerOur houses, Don Harumi, are fallen. Like the father, the son narrating this scene feels othered, but in different ways. This contextualization forestalls any temptation to reify by demonstrating the process through which children from all backgrounds, especially those mindful of how they fit into their surroundings, never stop coming into being. Looking at the way in which the father's identity, Japanese as well as Peruvian, continually comes into being provides insight into the son, who becomes a poet. Unlike many of his compatriots, who fled [End Page 241] their homeland out of economic desperation, Harumi Watanabe abandoned art studies at a university and his parents' stable home in Okayama to escape the traditional arranged marriage they had prepared for him. His emigration took place twenty years after the 1899 arrival of 790 issei men who sailed on the Sakura Maru as replacements for nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants previously engaged in hard labor on the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean. Harumi differed in other ways from the thousands of expectant laborers who followed that first boatload of economic refugees. Many of...

Digesting Tensions and Change

Digesting Tensions and Change

Two Translations of a Cockney Girl in Shaw’s Pygmalion: The Works of Julio Broutá and Floreal Mazía

ABSTRACT Bernard Shaw has been a well-known writer in the Spanish-speaking world since Julio Broutá introduced his works in Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article assesses two of the six translations of his play Pygmalion into Spanish, those of Julio Broutá (1919) and Floreal Mazía (1952), focusing specifically on the rendering of Cockney. Both target authors maintain the dialectal distinction in their works, by translating Cockney as Cheli and Lunfardo, dialects spoken by the lower classes of Madrid and Buenos Aires, respectively.

Old Gringo y la frontera fílmica de Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico’s most prolific writers and branded under the Latin American Boom, has received much attention throughout the years as a novelist. However, the work introduced to Hollywood in 1989 with the adaptation of his novel Gringo viejo (1985) did not receive the same attention. Rather, it suffered the consequences of adaptation and gained many critics in the United States mainstream, which prevented him from reproducing the status he gained within the boom in the Spanish-speaking world. Carlos Fuentes’s affection for film can be traced to his two nonfiction books, Myself with Others (1988) and Personas (2012). In both, Fuentes reflects on his life as a writer, highlighting the importance of cinematography to his work. This article marks the relation between Aura and Cortázar, along with Fuentes’s friendship with Luis Buñuel. This article brings proof of the inception of his filmic passion and the deception brought by the rapid deceit of success in Hollywood of the late 1980s.

Second Language Development of Dialect Awareness in Spanish

The objective of the current study is to investigate the development of awareness of dialectal differences in Spanish by second language learners in a formal language learning classroom setting in the United States. Sensitivity toward different regional varieties of a language forms part of socio-linguistic—and ultimately, communicative—competence (Bachman, 1990; Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983), a primary objective of language learning. However, the role of dialect awareness in second language learning is largely not understood. 229 American English-speaking learners of Spanish across five proficiency levels of university study completed a questionnaire that elicited knowledge of dialectal phonetic variation in Spanish. Results found that, while a variety of dialectal pronunciation features and regions were identified, learners were most aware of dialectal features of Peninsular (Spain) Spanish. However, as proficiency level increased, learners became more knowledgeable of dialectal differences in pronunciation throughout the Spanish-speaking world and reported explicit knowledge of a greater variety of dialectal structures and regions. Patterns in the development of dialect awareness in a second language are identified, and implications of dialect awareness for language learning and teaching are explored.

Fijación, fijeza y variación en las locuciones nominales: el caso de metedura de pata, tomadura de pelo y comedura de coco

Focusing our attention on the description of nominal locutions, not so abundant in Spanish dictionaries, the current research has the aim to study both the history and the fixing process of the nominal derivatives of meter la pata, tomar el pelo and comer el coco, from the application of the theoretical concept of lexical family and variation. In addition, it is also relevant to describe precisely its geographical distribution in the Spanish-speaking world from the analysis of data based in linguistic corpora. In this way, it will be possible to shed some new light on the institutionalization process of these living phraseological units in the cultural heritage.

Ghosting, Breadcrumbing, Catfishing: A Corpus Analysis of English Borrowings in the Spanish Speaking World

The study aims to contribute to our understanding of the situation of languages in contact and the phenomenon of linguistic borrowings in the modern online world. The current study investigates the use of English terms borrowed to describe romantic relationships in Spanish. We use a list of terms presented in GQ Spain, a men’s culture, fashion and style magazine, as popular terms in 2020 to describe (a lack of) love in romantic relationships. In order to analyze the actual use of these borrowings in Spanish, we collected data from the Corpus del Español NOW (2012–2019), focusing on the number of occurrences of each English borrowing, level of morphological adaptation, co-occurrence of translations or explanations, date of first use and location of use. Overall, 11 of the 20 terms, such as ghosting, gaslighting or benching, appeared in the corpus. We note the presence of quotation marks, parentheses or uppercase letters in some cases, but it was observed that most examples keep their English form. However, many terms appeared with an explanation or translation, reflecting the novelty of the borrowing. Data regarding dates and countries were collected in order to set the year they were integrated with the new meaning (2013–2019). The country with the highest number of cases was Argentina, and there were a substantial number of cases in other Spanish-speaking countries. Overall, these findings show an increase in the incorporation of these borrowings over the years in the Spanish lexicon.

Variation in Spanish /s/: Overview and New Perspectives

The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision, and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors, and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing the sibilants’ geo-linguistic features has received much attention from scholars, resulting in sibilants being one of the most studied variables in Spanish phonetics. In this article, we provide a concise approach that offers the reader an updated sociolinguistic view of the modern cross-dialectal realizations of /s/. It is essential to study sibilant development to describe Spanish dialects, the differences between Transatlantic and Castilian varieties, and the speech features found in Spanish speaking communities in the Americas. Examining sibilance from different approaches with a representative variety of Spanish dialects as examples advances the importance of sociolinguistic phenomena to index language changes.

Toda la sangre formando un río:1 Contributions to the histories of metal music studies from the Spanish-speaking world

The field of metal music and culture studies is rapidly growing throughout the world. Efforts to document its history and development have emerged via publications in academic journals and edited books. Although this historical documentation of the emergence of an area of study is valuable, it has been geographically laden towards the Global North, and written by English-speaking scholars there. In this article, we aim to inform and balance that history-telling process through an exploration of contributions made from Spanish-speaking scholarly epicentres in the Global South. In doing so, we propose and implement a strategy that (1) surpasses the limitations of universalist approaches towards history by including contributions from epicentres of research in both the Global North and the Global South, (2) engages in a self-critical examination of the field of metal music studies, and asks scholars to examine why, and understand how, the disconnections between metal scholars in the Global North and the Global South come into existence and (3) recognizes that knowledge is developed through many mechanisms that bypass academic journals, monographs and traditional modes of academic writing. In order to understand how these three tenants are manifested in the Spanish-speaking world we present examples from Spain, Puerto Rico, Argentina, México, Guatemala and Perú. We recommend that future efforts to document the histories (in plural) of this area of study take into consideration scholarly efforts outside the Global North as a way to decolonize metal studies.

Introduction: The Comedia under Siege

This introduction engages with the meaning and socio-cultural impact of a variety of artistic contributions within the realm of Hispanic theater that have been carried out in the Spanish-speaking world in order to keep production of the comedia afloat during the confinement due to COVID-19. It discusses what this implies for an inherently live medium such as the theater and, ultimately, introduces the content of the rest of the volume.

The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures by Beatriz Rivera-Barnes

Reviewed by: The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures by Beatriz Rivera-Barnes William Flores Rivera-Barnes, Beatriz. The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures. Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 235. ISBN 978-1-498-59648-0. The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures is an impressive multidisciplinary collection of eleven insightful chapters that converge on the unifying themes of hate and ecophobia in major literary and cinematic works produced in the Spanish-speaking world. The first part of the book contains three chapters related to the Iberian world, while the second part encompasses eight chapters referring to Latin American film and literature. The introduction provides a rich discussion on ecocritical theory that includes Simon C. Estok’s view on ecophobia and a synthesis of Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology, to help the reader understand the ecocritical approximation of the book. Furthermore, the introduction provides a valuable academic discussion on what hate and the hatred of nature are, while using a historiographical approach that includes an examination of biblical narratives, medieval events and literature, and current ecocatastrophes. For those interested in Spanish Golden Age literature, the first chapter investigates psycho-philosophical elements in Fernando de Roja’s La Celestina. The chapter presents hate as an intrinsic component of the characters’ self, being generated by love in the form of an excessively manifested passion. Concurrently, the second chapter explores the hate that comes from intimacy as portrayed in Lope de Vega’s La creación del Mundo, El robo de Dina, Fuenteovejuna, and El castigo sin venganza. The chapter highlights how these adaptations of the stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Amnon raping Tamar, or the rape of Dinah exemplify the propagation of hate through generations. The third chapter studies Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez, a work based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel. This chapter provides a reading of that book as a representation of the hate that comes from the God of the Old Testament, human hate, and the resulting curse of nature. By examining narrative techniques that include stream of consciousness and introspective mono-dialogues, chapter three highlights that hate results from intimacy and is catalyzed by an envy that consumes, devours, and destroys humans and their natural environment. Utilizing an eclectic approach, the fourth chapter studies a variety of cinematic and literary texts that describe Lope de Aguirre’s search for El Dorado and Cabeza de Vaca’s foundering in the Florida Everglades. The chapter examines films including Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, Carlos Saura’s El Dorado, Roland Joffe’s The Mission, Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca, Icíar Bollaín’s También la Lluvia, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, in addition to literary works such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition, Rivera’s La vorágine, and a selection of jungle tales written by Horacio Quiroga. This chapter successfully examines and portrays these works as “doomed expeditions” that reflect hatred for nature in an existing, created, or re-created form. The fifth chapter explores hate while examining Alonso Carrió’s Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, and Ernesto Guevara’s Diarios de motocicleta and Otra vez. This chapter is a pleasure to read as it presents, in rich narrative style, how these literary works can be juxtaposed while analyzing journeys that explore the Latin American reality of corruption and abuse. Rivera-Barnes connects the corruption and exploitation from colonial times as presented in Carrió’s Lazarillo with the abuses of neocolonialism exposed in Che Guevara’s narratives to provide a canvas of the continuity of colonialism and its foundational hatred of indigenous peoples and their natural environment. Furthermore, in the case of Che Guevara’s accounts, hatred is also examined as a tool to fight oppression. [End Page 149] Using a historical approach, the sixth chapter studies twentieth-century narratives written by Alejo Carpentier, Manuel Zapata Olivella, and Enrique Buenaventura, to explore literary representations of hatred that portray the 1791 rebellion in Haiti and the making of Haiti...

El Cid Campeador between Luzán and Lorca: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Pop-Culture Favorite

This article explores the circulation of popular ballads on El Cid in pliegos sueltos of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the ballads of the oral tradition, which were said to preserve medieval epic fragments, the texts under consideration here had their origins in the popular culture of the Baroque. Although we know a great deal about what El Cid meant for the literate elite of the Romantic and post-Romantic era, we know little about the knowledge and opinions of non-elites throughout the Spanish-speaking world regarding Spain’s “national” hero between the Enlightenment and the Spanish Civil War. Discussion of these pliegos sueltos and their distribution (to places as far away as New Mexico and Chile) may help shed light on this “pop-culture” Cid, what he would have meant for audiences of the period, especially in terms of religious and ethnic identity.

RUSSIA’S COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES ABOUT CRIMEA IN SPANISH-LANGUAGE SPUTNIK AND RUSSIA TIMES (2014-2018)

We analyze Russia’s communication strategies in the period leading up to and following the seizure (2014-2018) of the Crimean Peninsula in the Spanish editions of its digital platforms, Sputnik and Russia Times. Drawing from theories of political communication, we show how Russia used storytelling and framing to build an international image and political brand consistent with, and try to justify, its foreign policy actions. Specifically, Russian messages transmit no room for doubt about the legality of any of its strategies in Crimea. We argue that this communication strategy is consistent with the concept of ‘sharp power’ to describe Russian projection in the world. Cultural and emotional appeals designed to generate positive emotions about Russia, i.e., ‘soft power’, were far less common. In recent years, Russian projection of sharp power appears to have increased in the Spanish-speaking world, particularly in South America. In addition to helping explain Russian foreign policy, our findings contribute to broader debates about political branding and truth in a ‘post-truth’, multipolar world.

"¡A ver la comeria nueva / que la negla representa!": Villancicos de negros en la Bogotá virreinal

Abstract: Sung inside and beyond the confines of cathedrals during the principal religious celebrations, the musical-poetic genre of the villancico took on a special vibrancy in the viceregal city of Santafé (today, Bogotá, Colombia) from the later sixteenth century onward. The singers themselves not only played (sung) the roles of angels and shepherds, but also of others, often adapted from stock comic characters, such as the "Negro" or "Negra" (Black man or woman), found in the widely popular short comic dramas of the Spanish-speaking world. This article studies the manuscript evidence of how the villancicos composed, sung, and performed in the Bogotá Cathedral attest to the contribution of the "black voices" that were heard in this viceregal metropolis, to be embodied in these pieces. I provide transcriptions and analysis of the poems, and even theatrical scripts, found in the musical scores of a corpus of "villancicos de nacimiento" preserved in the Archive of Bogotá's Cathedral. In turn, these musical-poetic works open a window through which to better understand devotional and festive practices in a stratified colonial society and, in so doing, can give us also a picture of performance practices developed by largely unheralded and mostly anonymous Black performers of the territory of New Granada (which coincides with present-day Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), which was administered through the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1717.

„In naives Plaudern“ geraten?

Kurt Pahlen’s activities in the Ibero-American region from 1939 to approximately 1970 were based on his musicological studies and musical activities in Vienna until 1938. Certificates of his studies at the university or press reports on his engagements in Vienna’s musical life shed light on Pahlen’s formation before his emigration to Switzerland, Argentina and Uruguay. In exile, he transmitted his knowledge of classical music to the Spanish-speaking world via articles and books on music history or radio and television broadcasts. His writings were commercially successful and, after their first edition in Latin America, they were often translated into German. As a result, Pahlen acted as translator between cultural contexts, audiences and media. An analysis of selected paragraphs of the books demonstrates, however, that he mainly transmitted his particular view of music, which was extremely time-bound and lost its relevance in later reprints. The reason for the divergent opinions of Kurt Pahlen’s work Spanish- and German-speaking scientific communities can be found in his rejection of academic musicology as he had got to know it in Vienna, and the increasingly superficial and subjective prose in his German reeditions. (Vorlage)

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and (Trans)National Canons

El mundo animálico como símbolo de marginación social en Faragual y otros cuentos, de Carlos Changmarín

The narrative of Carlos Changmarín, master of Panamanian literature, has spread throughout the Spanish-speaking world through the reading of Faragual y otros cuentos, a collection of stories where some of them such as “La vaca”, “El diario de la Yegua del alcalde","El tigre","El gato" or "Galápago en su concha", show animals as symbolic characters of social marginalization. The rhetorical method is adequate to show the intimate connection between the thought and the statement of each one of the circumstances to which the extreme poverty of the peasant environment borders. The five stories, of realistic stock, are close to a stark naturalism, where the primary needs of man enter in to the picture without appearing to be fiction.

Honoring Thomas O’Connor

On the afternoon of December 30, 2020, I received an e-mail notifying me of the passing of David Gitlitz, one of the four founding members of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. The announcement of David’s passing followed this summer’s earlier announcement of the passing of Thomas O’Connor, who, among other things, had served as the book review editor for the Bulletin of the Comediantes.As I composed my own announcement of the news of David’s passing for the AHCT listserv, I realized that I had never actually had the chance to get to know David very well. Of course, I was very much aware of his foundational status in AHCT, and I was likewise familiar with his groundbreaking scholarship. But it occurred to me that, while I had developed professional relationships with Donald Dietz, Vern Williamsen, and Matthew Stroud over the years, I had had very little interaction with David. As the current president of AHCT, this realization made me profoundly sad.My interaction with Tom over the past two decades had been more substantial. Some years ago, when I was still relatively new to the profession, Tom asked me to write a book review for BCom. Throughout the process, I came to admire Tom, and I was always happy to see him whenever we crossed paths at one professional gathering or another.Over the past several months, as I have witnessed the great outpouring of love and respect for both Tom and David from friends and colleagues around the world, I have been humbled by the important legacy that they leave behind.Tom, of course, was a true comediante. He was a prolific writer whose work overwhelmingly focused on early modern Spanish theater, with a particular focus on Agustín de Salazar y Torres and Calderón de la Barca. Indeed, Tom’s monographic study Myth and Mythology in the Theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca is indispensable for students of the Spanish comedia, as is his Love in the ‘Corral’: Conjugal Spirituality and Anti-Theatrical Polemic in Early Modern Spain.Meanwhile, David’s research—like that of so many Hispanists—often crossed a number of disciplinary boundaries. Yes, he published on the Spanish comedia, with a particular focus on Lope de Vega (and, again, David’s La estructura lírica de la comedia de Lope de Vega is required reading), but he also published numerous books and articles in the field of Converso and Crypto-Judaic studies, on the Camino de Santiago, and even on Cervantes. (And this is in addition to his article on the auto sacramental and Disney’s Pinocchio, which, of course, is right up my alley.)Moreover, for members of AHCT, David’s pioneering legacy cannot be overstated. Along with Don Dietz, Vern Williamsen, and Matt Stroud, David’s visionary contribution to the study and teaching of early modern Spanish theater in performance was truly revolutionary at a time (the early 1980s) when scholars still approached Spanish comedias almost exclusively as literary texts rather than as blueprints for a live and vibrant theater tradition. Without David, the wonderful synergy between praxis and theory that became the decades-long nexus between the Chamizal Siglo de Oro Drama festival and the annual AHCT conference in El Paso, Texas, would never have happened. Nor would the AHCT video archive—which documents so much of the past 40 years’ performance history of the Spanish comedia from around the Spanish-speaking world and beyond—have ever existed.Thus, on behalf of all the members of AHCT (both past and present), I want to express our profound gratitude to both Tom and David for all that their work has meant to us over the years. I also want to extend our deepest sympathies to these dear colleagues’ families and friends. If I may be allowed to borrow and reframe a couple of comments that David and Tom themselves made at the time of the passing of Vern Williamsen, but which are equally true of them as well: “the world of the comedia is a poorer place without them” (David); and “we celebrate their lives well lived” (Tom).Bruce R. Burningham, President

Chronicles of Spanish 2020: new challenges

This work is dedicated to such a significant cultural event for the Spanishspeaking world as the launch of the annual publication of the Chronicle of the Spanish,where the work of the Academy in the “era of coronavirus” is described, and the resultof which was the first volume of the chronicle published by ESPASA in November,2020. This chronicle describes the development of the Spanish language and showsThe Royal Spanish Academy activities mainly over the past year. It also includes themost actual and fundamental issues of Spanish studies at the present time, predictsvocabulary and grammar changes of different national Spanish variants, describesvarious initiatives and projects of the Academy.The new strategy for the Academy, which wants to demonstrate greatertransparency in its actions will be analyzed and the most interesting topics from thefirst edition of the chronicle will be observed.