Translating Empire

Historians have traditionally used the discourses of free trade and laissez faire to explain the development of political economy during the Enlightenment. But from Sophus Reinert’s perspective, eighteenth-century political economy can be understood only in the context of the often brutal imperial rivalries then unfolding in Europe and its former colonies and the positive consequences of active economic policy. The idea of economic emulation was the prism through which philosophers, ministers, reformers, and even merchants thought about economics, as well as industrial policy and reform, in the early modern period. With the rise of the British Empire, European powers and others sought to selectively emulate the British model. In mapping the general history of economic translations between 1500 and 1849, and particularly tracing the successive translations of the Bristol merchant John Cary’s seminal 1695 Essay on the State of England, Reinert makes a compelling case for the way that England’s aggressively nationalist policies, especially extensive tariffs and other intrusive market interventions, were adopted in France, Italy, Germany, and Scandinavia before providing the blueprint for independence in the New World. Relatively forgotten today, Cary’s work served as the basis for an international move toward using political economy as the prime tool of policymaking and industrial expansion. Reinert’s work challenges previous narratives about the origins of political economy and invites the current generation of economists to reexamine the foundations, and future, of their discipline.

In this volume, C. L. Crouch and Jeremy M. Hutton offer a data-driven approach to translation practice in the Iron Age. The authors build on and reinforce Crouch's conclusions in her former work about Deuteronomy and the Akkadian treaty tradition, employing Hutton's "Optimal Translation" theory to analyze the Akkadian-Aramaic bilingual inscription from Tell Fekheriyeh. The authors argue that the inscription exhibits an isomorphic style of translation and only the occasional use of dynamic replacement sets. They apply these findings to other proposed instances of Iron Age translation from Akkadian into dialects of Northwest Semitic, including the relationship between Deuteronomy and the Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon and the relationship between the treaty of Assur-nerari V with Mati?ilu and the Sefire treaties. The authors then argue that the lexical and syntactic changes in these cases diverge so significantly from the model established by Tell Fekheriyeh as to exclude the possibility that these treaties constitute translational relationships.

In Translating Empire, Laura Lomas uncovers how late nineteenth-century Latino migrant writers developed a prescient critique of U.S. imperialism, one that prefigures many of the concerns about empire, race, and postcolonial subjectivity animating American studies today. During the 1880s and early 1890s, the Cuban journalist, poet, and revolutionary José Martí and other Latino migrants living in New York City translated North American literary and cultural texts into Spanish. Lomas reads the canonical literature and popular culture of the United States in the Gilded Age through the eyes of Martí and his fellow editors, activists, orators, and poets. In doing so, she reveals how, in the process of translating Anglo-American culture into a Latino-American idiom, the Latino migrant writers invented a modernist aesthetics to criticize U.S. expansionism and expose Anglo stereotypes of Latin Americans. Lomas challenges longstanding conceptions about Martí through readings of neglected texts and reinterpretations of his major essays. Against the customary view that emphasizes his strong identification with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, the author demonstrates that over several years, Martí actually distanced himself from Emerson’s ideas and conveyed alarm at Whitman’s expansionist politics. She questions the association of Martí with pan-Americanism, pointing out that in the 1880s, the Cuban journalist warned against foreign geopolitical influence imposed through ostensibly friendly meetings and the promotion of hemispheric peace and “free” trade. Lomas finds Martí undermining racialized and sexualized representations of America in his interpretations of Buffalo Bill and other rituals of westward expansion, in his self-published translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular romance novel Ramona, and in his comments on writing that stereotyped Latino/a Americans as inherently unfit for self-government. With Translating Empire, Lomas recasts the contemporary practice of American studies in light of Martí’s late-nineteenth-century radical decolonizing project.

Arising from cultural anthropology in the late 1980s and early 1990s, postcolonial translation theory is based on the observation that translation has often served as an important channel of empire. Douglas Robinson begins with a general presentation of postcolonial theory, examines current theories of the power differentials that control what gets translated and how, and traces the historical development of postcolonial thought about translation. He also explores the negative and positive impact of translation in the postcolonial context, reviewing various critiques of postcolonial translation theory and providing a glossary of key words. The result is a clear and useful guide to some of the most complex and critical issues in contemporary translation studies.

Translation and Opposition is an edited volume that brings together cultural and sociological perspectives by examining translation through the prism of linguistic/cultural hybridity and inter/intra-social agency. In a collection of diverse case studies, ranging from the translation of political texts to interpreting in concentration camps, the book explores issues of power struggle, ideology, censorship and identity construction. The contributors to the volume show how translators, interpreters and subtitlers as mediators put their specific professional and ethical competences to the test by treading the dividing lines between constellations of ‘in-groups’ and cultural or political ‘others’.

A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and His Afterlife focuses on Martí’s posthumous legacy and his lasting influence on succeeding generations of Cubans on the island and abroad. Over 120 years after his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, Martí studies have long been the contested property of opposing sides in an ongoing ideological battle. Both the Cuban nation-state, which claims Martí as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and diasporic communities in the US who honor Martí as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation-in-exile, insist on the centrality of his words and image for their respective visions of Cuban nationhood. The book also explores more recent scholarship that has reassessed Martí’s literary, cultural, and ideological value, allowing us to read him beyond the Havana-Miami axis toward engagement with a broader historical and geographical tableau. Martí has thus begun to outgrow his mutually-reinforcing cults in Cuba and the diaspora, to assume his true significance as a hemispheric and global writer and thinker.

Two are the starting points of this book. On the one hand, the use of Doña Marina/La Malinche as a symbol of the violation of the Americas by the Spanish conquerors as well as a metaphor of her treason to the Mexican people. On the other, the role of the translations of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in the creation and expansion of the Spanish Black Legend. The author aims to go beyond them by considering the role of translators and interpreters during the early colonial period in Spanish America and by looking at the translations of the Spanish chronicles as instrumental in the promotion of other European empires. The book discusses literary, religious and administrative documents and engages in a dialogue with other disciplines that can provide a more nuanced view of the role of translation, and of the mediators, during the controversial encounter/clash between Europeans and Amerindians.

This volume of collected essays takes a new approach to this problematic subject by rethinking its broad foundations. From a variety of perspectives, its authors situate mercantilism against the backdrop of wider transformations in seventeenth-century Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic, from the scientific revolution to the expansion of empire.--