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Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces : The Translation of Politics and the Politics of Translation

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569325.2012.663349

1469-9575

Gavin Arnall,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

Abstract Alejo Carpentier's novel El siglo de las luces is a fictionalized account of how Enlightenment ideals traveled during the Age of Revolution, a meditation on how European, particularly French, ideas were transformed and implemented in new and unique contexts (e.g., Spain, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Suriname). Carpentier thematizes the passage of ideas as a process of translation, both linguistically from French to Spanish, English, or Dutch, and conceptually, from one specific culture to another with different demands of relevance and applicability. The novel complicates the classic issue of the translator's fidelity to the text in that the responsibility to convey a text's original meaning collides with a need to adapt it to the new context. In El siglo, the translator's fidelity to the original confronts the revolutionary's fidelity to the Event in the practice of translating texts, such as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the 1793 French Constitution, as well as the Event of the French Revolution itself. This paper will explore the constellation of politics, translation, and fidelity in El siglo, with special reference to the relationship between political translation to propagate revolution and the revolutionary politics of translation. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Michael Arnall, Nick Nesbitt, and Rachel Price, whose comments on the content and presentation of this article were an immense help in preparing it for publication. Notes 1 There has been much speculation regarding the relationship between El siglo and the Cuban Revolution. This is largely due to Carpentier's claim that the events in Cuba caused him to revise the novel and his later qualification that he only revised the scene in which Victor and Sophia part ways, so as to avoid melodrama. Rather than provide further speculation on this issue, I have chosen to focus on the articulation of politics through the novel's explicit historical referent, the Age of Revolutions. For an overview of the historical circumstances surrounding the novel's delayed publication, see Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 213–225. 2 See Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1995). 3 See Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Baker (New York: Verso, 2006), 124–139. 4 When Carpentier reveals that Ogé's brother is named Vincent, it becomes clear that Ogé, too, is a reference to a historical figure, namely, Vincent Ogé, the man who fought for the rights of mulatto property owners in Paris in 1789. See Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 142. 5 Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral, trans. John Sturrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 70. 6 Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral, trans. John Sturrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 70 7 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226, 227. 8 Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (New York: Verso, 1992), 39. 9 Carpentier, Explosion, 71. 10 Carpentier, Explosion, 71, 72. 11 Alejo Carpentier, “De lo real maravilloso americano”, A. Carpentier: Valoración multiple (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1977), 100–117. 12 Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Indigenismo and Heterogeneous Literatures: Their Double Sociocultural Statute”, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 104. 13 Carpentier, Explosion, 96. 14 Carpentier, Explosion, 96 15 Eduardo Grüner, La oscuridad y las luces: Capitalismo, cultura y revolución (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2010), 34. “la Revolución haitiana es más ‘francesa’ que la francesa, puesto que ella sí se propone objetivamente realizar aquella universalidad al postular la plena emancipación y otorgar igualmente plena ciudadanía a los esclavos afroamericanos [author's translation].” 16 Georges Steiner, “The Hermeneutic Motion”, The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2002), 197. 17 Carpentier, Explosion, 102. 18 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 153. 19 Mao Tse-Tung, “Conclusion”. Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. Available online at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/YFLA42.html. 20 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, The Translation Studies Reader, 77. 21 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, The Translation Studies Reader, 77, 81. 22 Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981), 342. “la liberté est indivisible, que l'on ne pouvait accorder la liberté politique ou économique aux planteurs blancs et maintenir les moulâtes sous la férule; que l'on ne pouvait reconnaître l'égalité civile aux hommes de couleur libres et dans le même temps maintenir les nègres dans l'ergastule [author's translation].” 23 Badiou, 136. 24 Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, Slavoj Žižek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction (New York: Verso, 2007), 6. 25 Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, Slavoj Žižek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction (New York: Verso, 2007), 6 26 Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, Slavoj Žižek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction (New York: Verso, 2007), 6, 2. 27 José Aricó, “Introducción”, Mariátegui y los orígenes del marxismo latinoamericano (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978), xlviii. 28 We should note that Aricó's sense of translation is not the kind of translation Žižek critiques in his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. For Žižek, there is a fundamental difference between the impossible universality of the “never-won neutral space of translation” and the concrete universality of the ethico-political act. Through Aricó, however, it is possible to read translation and concrete universality together. For Žižek's on the impossible universality of translation, see Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 66. 29 Carpentier, Explosion, 114. 30 Carpentier, Explosion, 114, 111. 31 Carpentier, Explosion, 114 32 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume Two, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 2006), 100. 33 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume Two, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 2006), 100, 101. 34 See Léon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Dover Publications, 2004). 35 Carpentier, Explosion, 117. 36 Badiou, 129, 135, 136. 37 Carpentier, Explosion, 118. 38 Carpentier, Explosion, 118, 122. 39 Carpentier, Explosion, 124. 40 Carpentier, Explosion, 124, 142. 41 Noé Jitrik as cited in Polar, 105. 42 Polar, 114. 43 Mao, “Introduction”. 44 Carpentier, Explosion, 146. 45 Carpentier, Explosion, 146 46 Carpentier, Explosion, 145. 47 Carpentier, Explosion, 145, 152, 153. 48 Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 116. According to Sibylle Fischer, this contradiction plagued the French Caribbean because its nations were founded on the notion of liberty while its economic and social institutions were inherited from colonialism and required a consistently high level of labor power. See Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 269. 49 For Césaire's representation of the tragedy of King Christophe, see Aimé Césaire, La tragedie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970). 50 Carpentier, Explosion, 152. 51 For the Jacobin's and particularly Maximilien Robespierre's betrayal of the French Revolution's principles in favor of property and economic interest, see C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 62–84. 52 Carpentier, Explosion, 351. 53 Carpentier, Explosion, 351, 156. 54 Alejo Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso”, Obras Completas: Ensayos (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1984), 190. “[M]ientras el Emilio de Rousseau no propicia nunca la fundación de una escuela en Europa, Simón Rodríguez fundó en Chuquisaca una escuela basada en los principios del libro famoso, es decir, realizó en América lo que no realizaron los europeos admiradores de Rousseau [author's translation].” 55 Carpentier, Explosion, 158. 56 For more on the politics of the obsessional neurotic, see Slavoj Žižek, “Afterward to the Second Edition: What is Divine about Divine Violence?”, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2009), 475, 476. 57 Carpentier, Explosion, 157. 58 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation”, The Translation Studies Reader, 371. 59 See Spivak's brief discussion of Farida Akhter's claim that the US term “gendering” cannot be translated into Bengali, which follows her statement that the translator “must be able to confront the idea that what seems resistant in the space of English may be reactionary in the space of the original”., 376. 60 Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Mestizaje, Transculturation, Heterogeneity”, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, 117. 61 Carpentier, Explosion, 239. 62 Carpentier, Explosion, 239, 241. 63 Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, 5, 6. 64 Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, 5, 6, 164. 65 Nesbitt, 77, 78. 66 Carpentier, Explosion, 231. 67 Carpentier, Explosion, 231, 232. 68 See Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). See also Michael-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 69 Nesbitt, 43. Grüner, 301. 70 Nesbitt, 36. 71 Carpentier, Explosion, 82. 72 Carpentier, Explosion, 82 73 Carpentier, Explosion, 82, 232. 74 See Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America”, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 3–45. 75 Derrida, 122. 76 Carpentier, Explosion, 263. 77 Neil Larsen reads Esteban's dismay at the presence of the ideals of the French Revolution in his native Cuba alongside Schwarz's notion of an “ideology to the second degree”, an imported idea or belief that represents an alien (European) reality. While Larsen identifies the central problem of the novel, the traveling of ideas, his analysis makes no mention of translation, the novel's key to refashioning misplaced ideas in new, geographically and historically distinct, contexts. See Neil Larsen, “Alejo Carpentier: Modernism as Epic”, Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative, and Nation in the Americas (New York: Verso, 2001), 115–126. For Schwarz on ideology to the second degree, see Schwarz, 23.