Transhemispheric Translation: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Poetics

This talk is organized around case studies of "transhemispheric translation," a term employed to describe poetic experiments that fundamentally foreground translation-between Spanish and English, Latin America and the United States-for the purpose of negotiating hemispheric power differentials. Beginning in the context of the inter-American Cold War of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this talk demonstrates that translation operated as a space of Cold War power. This context allow for a re-reading of Cold War poetic performances of inter-American contact: the Argentine poet Juan Gelman's 1969 pseudotranslation of a fake US poet and the Chilean multimedia artist Cecilia Vicuña's 1973 "untranslation" into English. The talk ends by considering a recent example-non-equivalent self-translations by the Puerto Rican poet Urayoán Noel-to consider how transhemispheric translation continues to function in anti-imperialist fashion today.

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Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communications (OWNER), Program in Latin American Studies

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