A Review of Sujetos del deseo. Una exploración sobre la traducción amateur en los años del panamericanismo

 

In Sujetos del deseo, Chilean poet and translator Soledad Marambio posits that literary translators—so often considered an almost spectral presence in their silent rendering of a source text into a target language—can be a force of resistance and cultural mediators between Latin America and the United States. This somewhat niche book is a product of Marambio’s doctoral dissertation at the City University of New York, where she was mentored by Esther Allen and other prominent translator-scholars.

The central questions of the book—Why does a translator translate? How does a translator choose what to translate?—are just as relevant today as they were from the end of the 19th to the mid-20th century, the period she focuses on. Marambio puts into historical and theoretical context the “amateur translator” by comparing the work and career paths of two of the first U.S.-based literary translators of Latin American literature into English, Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950) and Isaac Goldberg (1887–1938), against the backdrop of Pan-Americanism.

Sujetos del deseo is written in Spanish, and I appreciated Marambio’s deliberate decision to integrate and not translate all cited English-language source materials, which reads as an act of resistance in and of itself. By doing so, as a fellow translator, I had the sense that Marambio was addressing a bilingual readership, which clarifies her targeted audience as people intimately familiar with the nuances of language.

Marambio delves into this anachronic debate by analyzing primary sources including correspondence, media articles and conference transcripts, arguing that the translator’s choice of works can be influenced by their political or cultural context, and in turn can be influential vis-à-vis the public’s exposure to those texts and the cultures and values they reflect. Marambio traces the evolution of Pan-Americanism’s impact on the market for Latin American poetry and novels, and how translators could challenge the ideas of the time, offering alternative ways of relating to Latin America through its literature.

Interwoven is the qualification of translator as “amateur,” which, contrary to today’s association with someone who practices something as a hobby or as an aspiring professional, Marambio instead defines by turning to the etymological roots of “amateur” as one who loves or desires, and, citing French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s concept of one who “works for love no less than for wages and his or her making and producing is oriented toward passion and care more than toward possession or consumption,” invoking both self-realization and desire for the other.

From roughly 1889–1945, Pan-Americanism fomented and organized relationships and cooperation between the United States and Latin America several ways—political, economic, cultural, diplomatic—first set forth by Henry Clay and Thomas Jefferson, and later furthered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Pan-American ideals were also fostered through cultural diplomacy, including literature and educational travel, such as the 1889 6,000-mile journey of a group of Latin American delegates traveling in Pennsylvania Railroad luxury cars across the United States (or the similar endeavor of the Cuban Teachers’ Expedition of 1900 to attend Harvard Summer School). The journey was widely covered in the press at the time, including by journalist José Martí; articles by him and others offer an unexpectedly candid take on the trip. Many of the (North) Americans who lined the streets of their towns and cities to welcome the travelers would have their first exposure to Latin Americans through these exchanges. Another window on Latin American culture was offered through the texts translated and/or included in anthologies at the time.

Marambio’s first case, Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of women’s rights activist Lucy Stone, was a highly educated (graduating with honors from Boston University in 1881) suffragist and editor of the leading American women’s rights newspaper at the time, Woman’s Journal, until 1917. Around 1900, Blackwell became interested in the causes of oppressed peoples, translating and publishing several volumes of verse from such groups, notably Armenian Poems (1896 and 1916), Songs of Russia (1906), Songs of Grief and Gladness (1908) and Some Spanish-American Poets (1929). She worked tirelessly to promote Latin American poetry despite not being trained as a Spanish language translator; to make up for linguistic shortcomings, she was known to ask collaborators to provide a literal translation of poems that she selected, which she would then craft into more poetic renderings (what we might today call “collective translations”).

Isaac Goldberg was born in Boston to Jewish parents. He studied at Harvard (BA 1910, Ph.D. 1912) and was a prolific journalist and biographer. He founded, published and edited a monthly news magazine called Panorama. A trained linguist, he was fluent in Yiddish, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese; like Blackwell, besides translating, Goldberg also gathered work in anthologies, including Brazilian literature (1922) and Studies in Spanish-American literature (1920). In 1932, Goldberg received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation to write a history of Spanish and Portuguese literature in America. However, not unlike some translators today, to make ends meet he accepted all sorts of translation work beyond the literary scope; Goldberg himself acknowledged that the volume of work and the speed at which he had to translate may have left something to be desired.

Marambio argues that both translators were marginalized—Blackwell for her status as a woman and for her radical political views, and Goldberg for being Jewish and for failing to shed the label of amateur and effectively live off of his preferred craft. Professional training—such as Goldberg’s—does not result in a better translation per se; it’s arguably possible to have a talent for translation—and indeed for writing itself—without formal training and/or deep linguistic knowledge and without dedicating one’s career to the endeavor (a more common contemporary interpretation of “amateur” translator). But both Blackwell and Goldberg stand out for their contributions as curators of literature, on several occasions deciding what the North American audience would be exposed to, and advocating to publishers on behalf of Latin American authors.

However, in the primary example given comparing translations by Goldberg and Blackwell—a fragment of a José Martí poem from Versos Sencillos—I didn’t find that either translation was particularly good (read: faithful, musically similar, correct), though of course “good” is subjective. It’s true that Goldberg’s rendering could hardly be called poetic, given that he translated verse into what essentially reads as prose, yet his semantic choices seem closer to the original than Blackwell’s and read less stiltedly; the oversimplicity and typographical errors in Blackwell’s version are distracting.

I would have appreciated if Marambio had included several such examples, to have a broader sample by which to compare and evaluate them and to fortify her argument. Blackwell was looked down upon perhaps because of her status as a woman and for her process that was deemed unscholarly and even “dangerous” (according to Goldberg). Nonetheless, Blackwell was the first to admit that her translations were “no doubt full of imperfections.” More convincingly, Marambio demonstrates that Blackwell fell victim to the whims of the market and of the decline of Pan-Americanism, with publishers’ diminished appetites for publishing Latin American poetry in translation.  Instead, they inclined towards the novel—more in line with Goldberg’s work—and finally lost interest in Latin America altogether as attentions turned to World War II. Marambio also pieces together fascinating evidence of the friendship, and perhaps even occasional rivalry between the two translators, who despite their generation gap were contemporaries living in close geographic proximity in the U.S. Northeast.

Sujetos del deseo offers a thought-provoking juxtaposition of broader historical context and the biographical experiences of three individuals—Blackwell, Goldberg, and Marambio herself—luchando to put forth translations and anthologies that could influence the North American public’s perception and knowledge of Latin American literature and culture within a particular national zeitgeist while coming at the profession from different backgrounds.