Entry

 

 

SPA Argentina

 

contents
Introduction | Translation at the turn of the century: A national project | Translation on the bookshelves of the people | Sur and its constellation | The sixties and seventies: Translations from the River Plate region and fringe literatures | Dictatorship, exile, and publishing concentration | Research potential

 

  Introduction 

Political map of contemporary Argentina.

Translation in Argentina, as a subject of research, admits of different approaches. The approach we put forth here aspires to a contextualized assessment of the practice of translation in Argentina, setting aside normative perspectives based on comparative analysis of the translations. Thus, we will focus our attention on the periods we consider to be central for the establishment of a history of Argentine translation. To begin, a few clarifications. First and foremost, the term “Argentine translations” refers not to the nationality of the people who completed the translation, nor to where they were translated, but rather to a demonstrable circulation of translations within the Argentine cultural sphere. This decision is the consequence of our functionalist and situated approach, with special attention to the book publishing industry and other supports for translation in general. Secondly, though the proposed periodization stems from historiography (Generation of ’80, Centennial, interwar, Peronism, dictatorship, etc.), that does not mean that we disregard the distinctive traits of the “field of translation,” which was already germinating in the first of the periods addressed. That the subject has been fertile ground for reflection in recent years is evidenced by numerous studies conducted, some of which are cited in the final bibliography.

Translation at the Turn of the Century: A National Project

This exploration begins with translation practices during  the “conservative regime” in Argentina, in accordance with the periodization that the historiography proposes, between the federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 and the first elections with universal male suffrage in 1916. From the point of view of intellectual history, two divisions are included in this period: the so-called Generation of ’80 and the Centennial. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the processes of modernization modified the political, social, economic, and aesthetic landscape, introducing profound changes such as immigration, the railroad, and economic growth. The political elite participated actively in putting these processes in motion, in addition to constituting the dominant pole of a political world divided in “two distant orders”: an elite, or political class, on the one hand, and the mass which complied with and yielded to the decrees of authority, on the other. Between these two extremes, there was a collection of moral and material meanings that generated, from top to bottom, a social belief about the justification of the regime and the government. A manifestation of this ideology is the collection Biblioteca Popular de Buenos Aires, overseen by Miguel Navarro Viola, which was the first presentation of translated works in a publication. The content of the collection, published from 1879 to 1883, was not intended just for readers who were other scholars, but rather for an audience that would broaden with time as a result of public education policies. The aspiration was for that content to incorporate foreign literature into the pedagogical role of reading; in other words, it participated in the moral meanings imparted “from top to bottom,” proposing material that was “wholesome and patriotic”; “for want of books in our language,” “we must select and translate texts from other languages which respond to the civilizing and moralizing objectives of the project” (cit. in Pagni [1878] 2011: 17-18).  In that sense, it competed with the “immoral” newspaper serials, offering readers “highly moral” material. Indeed, at that time, translations of Émile Zola novels were published in serial format in La Nación, almost immediately after their appearance in France. That is the case with some of the novels that make up Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, which were published in unsigned translations. The Biblioteca Popular de Buenos Aires had ample space dedicated to the translation of contemporary works, primarily from French. For example, the collection published Spanish translations of works by French writers such as Eugène Scribe, Jules Sandeau, Alexandre Dumas fils, Paul Féval, Octave Feuillet, Charles Baudelaire, and Théophile Gautier; Italians Edmundo de Amicis and Luigi Archinti; Germans Paul Heyse and Levin Schücking; and Americans Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar A. Poe. The translators were distinguished members of the Buenos Aires elite: Miguel Navarro Viola himself and his sons, Martín García Mérou, Carlos Olivera, Carlos Aldao, José Tomás Guido, Ernesto L. Negri, Bartolomé Mitre, Delfina Vedia de Mitre, and Alejandro Korn, among others.

A book of the series Biblioteca La Nación (1901-1919).

Some of the titles that appeared in La Biblioteca Popular de Buenos Aires were reedited in a collection of books published without interruption from 1901 to 1919,: La Nación’s Biblioteca. The period of publication coincided with the final days of “alluvial Argentina,” to use the term coined by José Luis Romero (1997: 174-184), that is, a period in which Argentina as a country was receiving a vast inflow of immigrants and was concluding a cycle of spectacular economic growth. The complete catalogue of the collection reveals that texts originating from foreign literary traditions were the distinct majority. Of the 872 published volumes, only 111 were originally written in Spanish, by authors from Argentina, other Latin American countries, or Spain. Some of the translations, especially in the first years of the collection, are preceded by prologues. Those paratexts contributed to the comprehensibility of foreign texts, which thus appear framed by strategies of a didactic nature: the edifying reconstruction of the author as a person, the explanation of elements of the plot, or even of the writing process (Willson 2019: 147). A review of the names of the translators for La Nación’s Biblioteca confirms that some of them were important figures in the political and cultural history of Latin America in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, thus superimposing the public figure and that of the translator. The prominence of these translators, be it through prologues they wrote themselves, or through editorial commentary stating their involvement, contrasts with the numerous omissions of the names of other translators, as well as with the extensive list of translators from Spain, responsible for the versions published after 1911. Another quality connected to the aspired-to accessibility is the declared “eclecticism” of the choice of titles: “In selecting them [the works] we have not only taken into account their intrinsic merit and the well-earned renown of their authors, but at the same time, we have also made sure of their variety” (La Nación, November 2, 1901). Though the first planning of titles wasn’t completed, during those years there were publications “for all tastes,” but in varying proportions. The titles published in translation include some distinguished names from the European canon (Shakespeare, Goethe, Madame de Staël, Lamartine, Flaubert), a large majority of which was popular fiction of French origin, such as that of Paul Féval, Octave Feuillet and Maurice Leblanc. Also the plays of Ibsen (The Wild Duck, The Lady from the Sea, Brand, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, The League of Youth) and of Shakespeare (Hamlet), an essay by J. Michelet (The Bird), and translations by Carlos Aldao of works of travel literature and a historical essay. Some of the most notable translators are José Martí, Lucio V. Mansilla, Domingo F. Sarmiento fils, Bartolomé Mitre, and Carlos Aldao. Also bursting onto the scene was a translator less tied to the political elite: Arturo Costa Álvarez, translator of versions of Conan Doyle, university professor, and  author of many of the collection’s prologues. The translations were almost always from French and, to a lesser extent, from English and Italian, and in the case of texts coming from other linguistic traditions, they arrived indirectly. The success with readers was immediate: after two years, La Nación’s Biblioteca had put more than a million books on the market.

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Translation on the bookshelves of the people

During the interwar period, a series of popular publication enterprises burst onto the scene in Buenos Aires. Inexpensive books were one of the manifestations of an urban culture belonging to the working class sector, along with neighborhood recreation centers,  popular libraries, and the expansion of political and union participation (Romero 2007: 52). Of those projects, we will first review Cooperativa Editorial Claridad, founded in 1922 by Antonio Zamora, who launched the collection Los Pensadores. The intent of the project was, first and foremost, educational. Though the publishing house explicitly set out to include works of every “order of human ingenuity,” the catalog of Los Pensadores abounded above all with works of fiction, since these were able to teach through a particular rhetoric: that of realism (Montaldo 1990: 49). The names of the translators never appeared in this collection, except in the case of Juan Ramón Jiménez, translator of Romain Rolland. It was Jiménez himself who noted (of Romain Rolland) “His style is careless because he writes from the heart.” That truth about the content regardless of form is perhaps the best summary of the aesthetic that inspired the project. This observation also applies, though with a slight distinction, to the novels published by Editorial Tor beginning in the 1930s, as is stated on the flap of the novels he edited in his Biblioteca Las Obras Famosas (1935-1961):

A few hours of daily reading. You should dedicate a few hours to reading. Give your spirit the leisure it needs, taking a moment to set aside professional worries, and cares related to your studies or business.

These pieces of advice unequivocally mark the desire to attribute a non-literary value to literature, a utility which, in the opinion of some, is a merely commercial strategy, an opinion confirmed by the titles chosen for publication by the  owner, Juan Torrendell. The most frequent authors were H.G. Wells, Anatole France, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The translators, who were not always mentioned, were the ones who had translated those same authors in the first three decades of the century, in Spain and for Editorial Sopena, Espasa-Calpe, and Maucci, among others. Recent investigations (Abraham 2012) showed the presence of two standing translators at the publishing house: Natal Rufino and Pedro Labrousse (Abraham 2012: 96).

In the 1930s as well, the magazine Leoplán published a collection aimed at the middle and lower classes, which included the great realist novels of the nineteenth century, but also popular mystery, with authors such as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and S.S. Van Dine. This collection, in which the primacy of adventure over formal experimentation is apparent, “could explain the displacement of the figure of the translator, the omission of whose name is particularly significant in a publication that, though it includes many texts by domestic authors, publishes a preponderance of material of foreign origin” (Rocco-Cuzzi 1996: 13). This is in harmony with a realist conception of literature: the presentation, either way, is transparent; what matters is the message.

The daily Crítica, a newspaper that was especially attentive to the demands of a growing readership, translated a vast series of European literary texts between 1924 and 1926; however, the author of the translation was rarely credited. For example, Crítica’s Biblioteca published Anatole France, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, François Mauriac, Iván Turguenief, and Octave Mirbeau (Saítta 1998, Appendices). In this collection, there was also one exception to the systematic omission of the translator: Adolfo Dorfman, one of the paper’s columnists, translated several Russian authors directly from the source language. Perhaps Dorfman’s mention was due to his being one of the paper’s well-known columnists, a hypothesis that is reinforced by the mention of Juan Ramón Jiménez in Los Pensadores: the prior existence of a recognized “profession”—journalist, poet—was a necessary condition for the translator to have an explicit place.  

Though the publishing sector of the 1920s was well developed, the aesthetic debates of the day had a place in magazines. Foremost among them were Martín Fierro and Proa avant-garde magazines of Buenos Aires published during that decade, both important supports for  the practice of translation that were marked by great eclecticism. Among the translations published by these magazines, two stand out, often cited independently from the original context of their publication: the Jorge Luis Borges version of the last page of Ulysses by Joyce (Proa 6, 1924) and the Lysandro Galtier version of the poem “Zone” by Guillaume Apollinaire (Martín Fierro 32, 1926). Other translators who translated mostly European authors into Spanish were Adelina del Carril (translator of Jules Supervielle and Philippe Soupault), Evar Méndez (translator of Alfred Jarry) and Brandán Caraffa (translator of Filippo Tommasso Marinetti).

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Sur and its constellation

In 1931 the magazine Sur arrived on the Argentinian cultural scene and, in 1933, the publishing house of the same name. In all the criticism about Sur, there has been mention of the central importance that translation had for Victoria Ocampo’s cultural project, which underwent a perceptible boom during the first Peronist regime (1945-1955), against which Sur was generally situated as an ideological antipode. Kangaroo, by D. H. Lawrence, and Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley, both in translation by the Cuban poet Lino Novás Calvo, then a collaborator of Revista de Occidente, were the publishing house’s first two titles. These two political novels, in which a dangerous charismatic leader appears, mark, in the plane of translation, a position taken against the rise of Fascism in Europe. The list of additional foreign titles and authors published by Sur is very extensive and is of the highest relevance. Throughout the years, the magazine dedicated some of its issues to French, American, Italian, and Japanese literatures, and in addition published reviews in response to the appearance of translated foreign texts in Argentina. The mention of the translator was an almost absolute rule, as much in the translations published in the magazine as in those of the publishing house. We will now give some titles from the first thirty years of the project headed by Victoria Ocampo, in order of the year of publication of the translation: Orlando and A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf, in versions by Jorge Luis Borges; André Malraux, Man’s Fate in a version by César A. Comet; Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia, in a version by Jorge Luis Borges; Mea culpa, Semmelweis, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, in a version by Ernesto Palacio; The Plague, by Albert Camus, in a version by Rosa Chacel; Malone Meurt, by Samuel Beckett, in a version by José Bianco; Passage to India, by E. M. Forster, in a version by J. R. Wilcock; Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, in a version by Enrique Pezzoni (pseudonym: Enrique Tejedor), which was received in altered form due to censorship. In 1959 the complete works of the poet Salvatore Quasimodo appeared in the publication Sur as translated by Carlos Viola Soto, Alejandra Pizarnik, María Cristina Giambelluca, and Basilio Uribe. Though some translations of classic texts and texts from the nineteenth century were published in the magazine, the publishing house didn’t publish nineteenth century texts, with one exception: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, translated by María Rosa Lida and with a  prologue by Victoria Ocampo.

Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, translated by Jorge Luis Borges (1937).

It was in Sur, in 1951, that Julio Cortázar published one of his first translations, “Récit Secret,” by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. During that decade, before gaining prominence as an author  at the international level, Cortázar forged a body of translation marked by the complete short stories and essays of E. A. Poe, Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe, The Immoralist, by André Gide, and Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, all released by publications with circulation in Argentina.

At the end of the 1930s, the creation of new publishing houses made possible several shifts that formed a sort of network. In 1938 the publishers Losada and Sudamericana were formed; in 1939, Emecé Editores. In the following decade, several members of the Sur group were active at these publishing houses: they oversaw collections, translated, and wrote prologues. At Emecé, Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares directed for ten years El Séptimo Círculo, a legendary crime fiction collection that began to publish volumes in 1944. Critics have pointed to it as the single most pivotal work in establishing the crime fiction genre in Argentina (Lafforgue and Ribera 1996). The first volume of the collection, The Beast Must Die, by Nicholas Blake, was translated by J. R. Wilcock. 

The publishing boom of the years from 1936 to 1955, in which countries like Argentina and Mexico stood in the gap created by the substantial decrease in publishing in the first years of Francoist Spain, was favorable to the establishment of a figure that was until then less common: that of the woman translator. Nydia Lamarque, Leonor Acevedo, Estela Canto, Haydée Lange, María Rosa Oliver, and Aurora Bernárdez were some of the female translators who participated in that particularly effervescent period of literary imports into Argentina.

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 The sixties and seventies - Translations from the River Plate region and fringe literatures

Marked by cultural modernization and gradual political radicalization, the period that began in 1960 and that culminated in the mid-1970s was favorable for Argentine publishing. A notable increase in the volume of book sales combined with greater representation of Latin American authors in the catalogs and the renewal of the canon of national authors. In turn, the adoption of new forms of promotion, distribution, and sale of books, such as magazine stands, would allow access to culture outside of bookstore circuits. Though some contemporaries held that the production of translations during this period was “less than ever,” the publishing catalogs exhibited the vitality of translation activity, the diversity of actors involved in it, and their active role in the creation of local catalogs and volumes of poetry. Among the publishers that produced literary translations during this period, there were the already well-established  Losada, Sudamericana, Emecé, or Rueda, all reputed importers, and a constellation of small and medium-sized publishers of varying duration: Rodolfo Alonso Editor, Brújula, Difusión, Ediciones De La Flor, Centro Editor de América Latina, Ediciones Del Mediodía, Editores Dos, Fabril Editora, Goyanarte, Huemul, Jorge Álvarez, Nueva Visión, Quetzal, Quintaria, Tiempo Contemporáneo, and Troquel, among others (Falcón 2016).

In terms of literary translation, the sixties and seventies were marked by the incorporation of minor genres such as children’s literature and noir fiction, the incorporation of peripheral literary genres, and the turn toward North American literature. There was also a renewal of the ranks of translators, who were often recruited from the new generations of writers and other representatives from the publishing and cultural field. One notable feature is that the characteristic nationalization of the catalogs of the so-called “Argentinian book boom” coincided with the incorporation of a local language variety in some literary translations, a normative sea change that was seen in some of the publishing houses that emerged between 1960 and 1975. The publishers Jorge Álvarez, Ediciones de La Flor, Tiempo Contemporáneo, and the Centro Editor de América Latina were highly representative of these features of the era (Falcón 2016).

Active between 1963 and 1969, Jorge Álvarez became a vector for the dissemination of Argentine literature and a modernizing force for the intellectual and literary field. Of the roughly twenty collections that constituted its catalog, more than half were completely or partially made up of translations, done by some forty identifiable translators and a few dozen other anonymous translators. Some of the most noteworthy were Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Rodolfo Walsh, Mario Trejo, Carlos Moner, Susana Pirí Lugones, José Rodríguez Feo, Floreal Mazía, Daniel Divinsky, Patricio Canto, Cristina Iglesia, Martha Beba Eguía, Carlos Peralta, José Bianco, Lilian Iser, Oscar Steimberg, Alberto Ciria, Carlos Aguirre, Evaristo Ramos, Rubén Masera, Ulises Petit de Murat, and Raúl Sciarreta (Falcón 2016).

Two innovative translation practices perfectly reflect the solid framework of local production and imported literature at Jorge Álvarez.  On the one hand, the production of miscellaneous and thematic books, like the collection Crónicas or Narradores Americanos, materialized that interaction by compiling texts according to Pan-American criteria, such as work by Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Ambrose Bierce, Julio Cortázar, Rodolfo Walsh or Ricardo Piglia. On the other hand, the pioneering and forward-thinking use of the River Plate speech variety in some translations constituted proof that the nationalization of publishing catalogs was also materializing in the fabric of the translations. In this sense, it is worth highlighting the 1967 translation of the story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” by the African American writer James Baldwin, done by Susana Pirí Lugones for the volume Crónicas de Norteamérica de 1967, compiled by Ricardo Piglia. This case constitutes a clear example of the turn toward North American literature and, more specifically, the beginning of the process of importation of African American authors to Argentina, such as James Baldwin or LeRoi Jones, among others.

Cover from the series Crónicas by Editorial Jorge Álvarez (1969).

The presence of collaborators from Jorge Álvarez at the publishing house Tiempo Contemporáneo—created in 1969 and referenced as a publisher of the New Left— highlighted a constellation of importers who shared translation practices. Tiempo Contemporáneo published translations in the social sciences and relevant literary translations: prose and essays by Norman Mailer, among them Why Are We in Vietnam?, Antología mínima (A tiny anthology) of F. Scott Fitzgerald works translated by Floreal Mazía; Cuatro narradores franceses de hoy (Four French narrators of today), a compilation of texts by nouveau-roman authors, like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, J.M. Le Clézio and Jean-Pierre Faye, translated by Octavio Costa, Juan José Saer, Marta Traba, and Alfredo de Robertis. It also published the celebrated collection Serie Negra, directed by Ricardo Piglia and modeled after its French contemporary: Série Noire by Gallimard. This collection carried on with the publishing strategies oriented toward the selection of North American authors, the revindication of popular genres of mass appeal, and the novel approach of translation strategies that greatly adapted texts to the local scene. In 1969 the first issue of Serie Negra was published: the anthology Cuentos policiales de la serie negra (Crime fiction stories from Série noire), translated by Floreal Mazía and Ricardo Ocampo, pseudonym Ricardo Piglia. The prologue by Piglia—signed under his better-known pseudonym: Emilio Renzi–—holds that the noir novel is “social literature of notable quality” whose origin should be thought of not as mystery but as “the  core of a certain typical North American literary tradition,” which has its roots in critical North American fiction, and finds two undeniable precedents in Sanctuary by Faulkner and “The Killers” by Hemingway, a story that Piglia would translate in 1977 for Ediciones Librerías Fausto utilizing the same localization strategy as in his translations of the 1960s.

Translation in the River Plate dialect was cultivated in this noir collection by translators like Rodolfo Walsh, Floreal Mazía, Juana Bignozzi, and Roberto Jacoby, but also sustained by Susana Pirí Lugones in her translation of Cartas (Letters) by Dylan Thomas for Ediciones de La Flor in 1971. Ediciones de La Flor, created in 1966 directed for decades by Daniel Divinsky and Kuki Miler, is known for its catalog of Argentine and Latin American authors; with a focus on graphic humor, internationalized Argentine authors operated within its walls, such as Quino or Fontanarrosa. However, the first literary works contracted at the end of 1960 were translations: Aden-Arabie by Paul Nizan; Antología (Anthology) of Georges Brassens, translated by Horacio Salas and Graciela Isnardi de Salas; Nueva Poesía USA. De Ezra Pound a Bob Dylan, (New poetry from the USA: From Ezra Pound to Bob Dylan) with selection, prologue and translation by Marcelo Covián; The Dead Lecturer by LeRoi Jones, translated by Niní Rivero y Martín Micharvegas. These last two illustrate the turn toward contemporary North American literature with an emphasis on beatnik and black poetry, such as Wright, LeRoi Jones, and Bond. La inmaculada concepción by Paul Éluard and André Breton was also published in translation by Alejandra Pizarnik. In harmony with the era’s opening up to genres considered “minor”, in 1972 Kuki Miler and Amelia Hannois created Libros de la Florcita, a collection of children’s literature illustrated by Juan Marchesi combined with translations of Ray Bradbury, Umberto Eco, Eugene Ionesco, Michel Butor and Vinicius de Moraes. Editions of La Flor act as a case study in the history of censorship of translations in Argentina and one of the symbols of cultural repression during the last civil-military dictatorship: the 1977 prohibition of the book The Five Fingers, published by Colectivo Libros para Niños de Berlín, translated by Daniel Bassi in 1975 for the children’s literature collection El Libro en Flor, led to the arrest of the directors of Ediciones de La Flor, who remained in custody at the behest of the executive branch from February to July of 1977 when they went into exile.

In 1977, the military junta banned this book because it  “prime(d) children for subversive action”.

Toward the end of the 1970s, a publishing enterprise emerged that would be crucial in the history of translation in Argentina: Centro Editor de América Latina, founded by Boris Spivacow in the wake of the coup d’état led by General Onganía, after he stepped down from his executive position at the Editorial de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (EUDEBA), a state-owned company that renewed the social sciences and humanities through translation. From its creation in 1966 until its closing in 1995, the Centro Editor de América Latina published almost five thousand titles, in seventy-nine collections of books and fascicles, distributed in bookstores and newspaper and magazine stands. Their policy of inexpensive books under the slogan “Más libros para más” (More books for more people). While the economic crises and ideological persecution were their most constant scenes, the publishing house successfully embodied the ideal of popular education through the expansion of culture, art, science, and literature (Gociol, Bitesnik y Ríos 2007:13). It is often said that CEAL was the last avatar of an enlightened utopia in the twentieth century. Perhaps because of that, their project has remained associated, in the Argentinian cultural memory, with the enterprise of inexpensive books and the translation initiatives of the first half of the twentieth century.

Two literary series consolidated the initiative to put the “worldwide literary patrimony” within reach of the general public through translation: the Biblioteca Básica Universal (1968-1978) and the Biblioteca Total (1976-1978). The collection Biblioteca Básica Universal began to be published in 1968 under the direction of Luis Gregorich, with the collaboration of Josefina Delgado and Juan Esteban Fassio, translator of Jarry in Argentina, with literary consultancy from the critic and translator Jaime Rest; and it was republished with lengthening and editing in 1978 under the external direction of Jorge Lafforgue. Though the books from the first run didn’t have preliminary studies, each copy was marketed along with an introductory fascicle called Capítulo Universal.

A scarcity of resources presented a constant challenge for this vast importing enterprise to overcome in order to fulfill their purpose of democratizing culture. Therefore, the catalog of Biblioteca Básica Universal drew freely from the collection of Editorial Aguilar, acquired by the publisher, but it also reused translations by Maucci, Labor, Losada, Fabril Editora, Lautaro, among other publishers from different latitudes and periods of Hispanic American publishing. If republishing translations can be considered a structural constant of the history of Hispanic American translation, their platform of the translation of peripheral literatures and a broadening of the canon of world literature was an original feature of the Biblioteca Básica Universal, which constituted a watershed in the history of collections of classics in Argentina:

Cover of a copy of the Biblioteca Básica Universal of CEAL.

[the series] tells the history of universal literature, but without the first-world classicizing emphasis, and without excluding buried o emerging literature. The literatures of Asia and Africa and the literatures of stateless peoples such as the post-Diaspora Jews circulated in the collection on equal footing with “canonical” literatures, such as Greco-Roman literature. North American literatures won another point against those of Europe, and of course, those from Latin America against those of peninsular Spain (cit. en Gociol, Bitesnik & Ríos 2007).

The inclusion of peripheral literatures in this collection of universal works promoted the study of a translation phenomenon intrinsically linked to the importation of works coming from literary fields dominated in the worldwide literary system: indirect translations, in this case produced from French, English, German, and Italian versions. In certain cases, the indirect translations were disguised, therefore the source language of the versions can’t always be determined, as occurs in Antología de poesía rusa del siglo XX (Anthology of twentieth-century Russian poetry) translated by Nicanor Parra, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Manuel Rojas, Juan Gelman, Roberto Fernández Retamar, among other writers, most of them Hispanic American (López-Arriazu 2017). In other cases, the indirect nature of the versions is stated openly, as occurred in Antología de literatura japonesa, (Anthology of Japanese literature) whose introduction explains that in the texts coming from the “Nara era and the exuberant bourgeois culture of the Takugawa period, we have translated a passage by Kijiki according to the Italian version by R. Petazzoni, and a short story by Ihara Saikaku based on the English version by W. Th. De Bary.” Japanese literature presented, however, an exception: Kazuya Sakai, the translator and visual artist of Japanese heritage, born in Argentina and emigrated to Mexico in the seventies, author of direct translations of Akutagawa and of fragments of The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon published in Capítulo Universal.

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  Dictatorship, exile, and publishing concentration

During the  civil-military dictatorship (1976-1983), an era marked by ferocious politico-cultural repression and an economic crisis, an important chapter in the history of Argentine translation took place in the distinct pockets exile; in particular, between the mid-seventies and the beginning of the eighties, the most prestigious publishing houses of Barcelona published numerous translations by exiled and emigrated Latin Americans, and they republished entire catalogs of translations done in Latin America in previous decades (Falcón 2018a). In addition to this scene of translation in exile, between 1976 and 1983, Argentina continued growing notables importing enterprises, which had to face all sorts of impediments: scarcity of resources, political persecution, book burnings, and the banning and confiscation of publications.

While other publishing houses and magazines had interesting translation endeavors, the Centro Editor de América Latina was able to assert itself once more as a case study: one of its most significant projects in those years was the Biblioteca Total, directed from 1976 to 1978 by Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo with the collaboration of exiled Uruguayan Heber Cardoso (Falcón 2018b). Biblioteca Total was composed of four series: novels, panorama of literature, social sciences and biographies. There were seventy-six editions in total, and nineteen editions per subcollection. Eighty percent of the titles were translations of canonized works, though female authorship was particularly significant in the biography series: María Bashkirtseff, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, George Sand, Germaine de Staël, Jane Austen. Its catalog was established in part with the illicit, but advantageous, reuse of translations coming from the collections of Espasa-Calpe, Emecé, and Losada, among others. Consequently, the use of pseudonyms to sign manipulated translations was common practice. Indeed, new translations were also completed by collaborators at the publisher: Josefina Delgado translated Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert; Antonio Bonanno translated Washington Square by Henry James and Persuasion by Jane Austen; María Teresa Gramuglio translated Ten Years of Exile by Germaine Staël. There were also indirect translations of Russian authors: Memoirs of Anna Dostoyevskaya

by Anna Dostoyevskaya  translated from the Italian by Celina Manzoni, or Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky in a version by Floreal Mazía.

It was a true importation machine that filled the cultural and political function of opening and preserving a space for the circulation of discourses that, like that of the social sciences, were subject to the pressure of censorial discourse and repressive government practices. In this period both the Biblioteca Básica Universal, in its second iteration, and the Biblioteca Total, guaranteed the survival of and broadened the spectrum of a progressive and universalist cultural tradition as an alternative to the heterophobic, nationalist, “Western, and Christian” discourse of the spokespeople of the military dictatorships that had marked their existence.

Cover of the double issue of Sur 338-339 (1976) “Problemas de la traducción” [Problems of translation].

In parallel with these circuits that were connected to a certain extent with representatives of leftist culture, the translation and importation activities of Victoria Ocampo had two streams in the 1970s. On the one hand, Colección Obras Maestras del Fondo Nacional de las Artes, stewarded by Ocampo—director of that organization since its founding in 1958—and copublished by Sudamericana. Published from 1970 to 1972, it was a collection of classics, the catalog of which brought together great works of fiction, poetry, and theater by male authors from the United States or Europe, and translated by narrators and critics from or based in Argentina: Moby Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville, translated by Enrique Pezzoni with a prologue by Jaime Rest; The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal translated by  José Bianco with a prologue by Ángel Battistessa; Faust by Goethe and Himnos tardíos y otros poemas (Late hymns and other poems) by Friedrich Hölderlin, with both the translation and the prologue by Norberto Silvetti Paz; William Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a translation by Guillermo Whitelow with a preface by Jorge Luis Borges; in 1972 the final title was published: a bilingual version in two volumes of the Divina Comedia by Dante Alighieri, translated, annotated, and featuring a prologue by Battistessa, who in 1962, during a stay in  Florence, had been assigned with  retranslating the work of Dante on the occasion of the anniversary of his birth (Fernández 2018). On the other hand, Ocampo published in 1976 a special issue of the magazine Sur: “Problemas de la traducción” (Problems in translation), completed with the support of UNESCO, an organization to which Villa Ocampo had donated with the intention of turning it into a space for writers and translators (Falcón 2020).

The process of bringing together and transnationalizing the publishing houses of Spanish America, which sprouted in the mid- seventies, would come into full form in the nineties, and would become established in the three decades since. In Argentina, this consolidation fostered a polarization in the publishing landscape, and at one of those poles proliferated small publishing houses called “independientes” (independents), that is, publishers guided more by a logic of cultural production rather than a purely commercial logic, favoring work of domestic origin, small print runs relative to the larger publishers, and a focus on guaranteeing bibliodiversity. The cultural diversity that they champion and the independence in relation to profitability considerations generates, paradoxically, the need for assistance and subsidies for publication and translation, generally granted by institutions and state organizations. Although, as Venturini points out (2019: 6), this doesn’t necessarily entail a restriction on what authors or texts are chosen, it has promoted “the inclusion in the catalogues of authors of ‘rare’ o ‘minor’ languages, such as Czech, Korean, or Finnish.” Some of these small independent publishers promote the use of a local language variety in their translations.

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  Research potential

Theoretically and methodologically based on the polysystemic, sociological, and sociocritical perspective on translation studies, the historiography of literary translation in Argentina is based on the contributions of converging disciplines, such as literary studies and the study of books, publishing and reading. Some possible topics of study are the subjects and problems related to the institutional politics of translation, the design of the catalogs of publishing houses and collections of translated literature, the types of mediating agents and the varying role of the translator in the process of importing literature, the role of state, national, and transnational institutions, and in the circulation of literary works, the obstacles to translation—be they political, economic, or cultural—, the function of translation in the accumulation of linguistic-literary capital and in literary recognition, the conflict between language varieties and where something is translated into Spanish in the global system of translation, legal aspects, the formation of associations and forms of socialization between translators, academic training, the development of research in the field, among other aspects relevant to understanding the development of the activities of literary translation in our country.

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