Response by Carcelén-Estrada to “Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest”

Vicente Rafael and I share a host of common interests regarding empire and translation: the use of translation as a colonial tool for the codification of postcolonial subjects within the grammar of empire; the impossibility of containing local histories and epistemologies within this grammar; and the ambiguous role translation plays in disseminating and resisting such imperial designs. He entered the field through his analysis of early Tagalog-Spanish translation policies during the Renaissance (Rafael 1993) and moved on to scrutinize the use of translation as a recent imperial linguistic weapon (Rafael 2009, 2014). Meanwhile, my research began with contemporary translational tensions between indigenous populations, SIL linguists and the American oil industry (Carcelén-Estrada 2010) and then travelled back in time to study colonial encodings of Nahuatl, Quechua and Aymara (Carcelén-Estrada 2012, forthcoming). Our intellectual timelines moved in opposite directions, but along parallel lines. Because of this symmetry, I wish to supplement Rafael's denunciation of the logocentrism manifested in the ideological and political resonances of translation by clarifying how colonial translation builds linguistic hierarchical difference on the bodies of indigenous women.

A comparison between Spanish colonial and US imperial translation policies reveals a commonality, which Rafael identifies as a “double conversion” that required the appropriation/expropriation of colonized bodies and souls, reduced to signifiers constrained within an imposed foreign grammar, a force which remains in the quotidian encounters of postcolonial subjects. When foreign expropriations of colonized bodies and souls attempt to normalize their desire by means of translation, a sombre and (un)signified noise meaningless to logocentrism points instead to a crisis of meaning which questions colonial authority: threatening colonized languages are neutralized by being presented as supplemental meaning to the colonial grammar. Despite this syntactic attempt to repress culture and memory, a strange cry emerges, untranslatable excess that refuses to signify and insists instead on inscribing memory otherwise. This cry is heard at the borderland between indigenous identity and cultural translation during the rebellions of Cuzco (1870). Mary Louise Pratt (2002) points to an ontological desdoblamiento, an out-of-body experience evidenced in the translation into Spanish of Quechua testimonies taken for the official narration of the events. The subdued Quechua must “explain” itself to Spanish in Spanish. Quechua can be heard only as an explanation (glosa) to Spanish, failing to properly signify: words are often left untranslated; speech is most certainly incoherent; and the possibility of an official signification depends on the entangling of both languages, in contagion – precisely what colonial policies sought to prevent by establishing linguistic hierarchies. Cuzco's tension over the control of meaning exemplifies what I have called a betrayal of translation, or the performance of translation to reject the commodification of meaning, “preventing the alien from subsuming and expropriating the subaltern” (Carcelén-Estrada 2012, 18).

Rafael argues that the mediating language organizes thought, so that in order to signify, one must inscribe oneself in the imperial grammar, in its logocentrism, a syntax where language serves as a supplement to thought, as the body to the soul. The act of translation can shake modernity's logocentrism, the simulacrum of order. Translational stages, borderlands between modernity/coloniality, remain undecided semantic regions claimed anew in each translational act or performance. But Rafael focuses too much on the foreign side of the linguistic tension, at times forgetting the expropriated bodies of colonial erasures. To bring the bodies back, so to speak, the listener must hear the noise at the borderland of modernity/coloniality and attempt to articulate a resisting narrative, absurd, obscure, disorienting.

The subaltern translates hoping to legitimize its existence within a colonial grammar, seemingly accepting the terms of a master–servant social contract. According to this model, Spanish spiritual masculinity naturally inclined to God/truth must conquer the savage – prone to falsity and to violence, dwelling in the material/natural world and in dangerous proximity to the devil. Even before the Valladolid debates over the Indians’ rationality, Las Casas and Sepúlveda had already based their arguments on this very relational ontology. The Just War assumed a Spanish authority that acted on behalf of God, through his virtue, to rectify falsity, liberate the oppressed from tyranny and eliminate evil. The modern/colonial relational ontology is built upon this moral assumption, as Rafael clearly points out. Las Casas contested this assumption, setting up a philosophical basis for the British-led propaganda against Spain (cf. Valdeón 2014). This hierarchical relation, however, is also gendered as von Flotow suggests in her own response to Rafael. A servant must listen to the master as a wife to her husband and a child to a father (cf. León [1584] 1980; Vives [1528] 1943). This gendered relation also predicates linguistic hierarchies: written Spanish, masculine and holy, overrides the barbarians’ mother tongue, oral and heretic. Therefore, the subalterns’ enunciating position determined by their lineage and language constrains their translation performance and, consequently, their possible gains against the law. Here are three examples.

Born in Cuzco from a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess (colla), Sánchez de Figueroa built a modern persona in the documents that accompanied his Traducción del indio de los diálogos de amor de León Hebreo ([1586] 1960, 13). In his letter to the king he signs “vuestro criado, Garcilaso Inca de la Vega”. This servant (criado) claims both a Spanish lineage – conveniently a homonym to Spain's greatest poet – and an Inca lineage tout simple. He explains that he translated this Neoplatonic text in order to be the first Indian to do so, and uses a patriarchal metaphor to describe his writing, primicia and primogenitura (firstborn). Closely following Sepúlveda, Garcilaso accepts the Incas’ position as vasallos natulares. He supports Spain's Just War as follows:

tenemos en más ser ahora vuestros vasallos que lo que entonces fuimos dominando a otros; porque aquella libertad y señorío era sin luz de la doctrina evangélica, y esta servitud y vasallaje es con ella. ([1586] 1960, 7)

[we are better off now as servants than when we were rulers of others, because in our freedom and dominance we lacked the light of evangelical doctrine, while this servitude and serfdom espouses it]

In the name of Peru, Garcilaso accepts the servitude of his people, from which moment he switches to the plural “we”. He proclaims himself to be a man of arms and letters, performing the idealized masculinity of the European Renaissance. His father (coming from a line of conquistadors and crusaders) bequeathed him Christianity, Spanish and writing, while his mother's orality supplemented Spanish meaning.

In his letter to the king's abbot, Garcilaso claims to “interpret faithfully” only what is conducive to understanding without adding anything “superfluous” (Garcilaso [1586] 1960, 12). Hebrew, León Hebreo's mother tongue, is “short” and “corporeal”, evidently producing obscure texts (ibid.). The Italian translation, elegant and artful, sheds light on its meaning, but Garcilaso calls his “poor” translation from Italian into Spanish the most “transparent” of all (ibid.). During his performance of translation, Garcilaso wears the Spanish colonial mask. He had moved to Spain to “improve” himself (para mejorarme; 8). Through his translation, he serves the king and uses the opportunity to announce that two other texts will rescue historical events from eternal oblivion (La Florida del Inca [1605]; Comentarios Reales [1609]). These latter texts reveal a much different and more complicated articulation of his identity where he reorganizes memory to favour his father and mother, previously disfavoured by Spanish historians who “corrupted” the meaning of the past because of their inability to understand his “natural” language, Quechua (Garcilaso [1609] 1976, 8). Garcilaso's mother tongue, civilized and historical, looks up to Spanish, which it supplements (“comento”, “glosa”; 6), but not to other barbarian languages in the Andes, forever subservient to Quechua.

When the paternal lineage, conquered by the Inca (yarovilca), mixes with an Incan mother who does not belong to the royal family, the subaltern does not conform but resists the colonial grammar. Guamán Poma de Ayala wears several conflicting masks to perform translation against the law. He had interpreted for the church during the dance revolts known as Taky Unquy (1564–72). Although his service led to artistic training in Cuzco, he was nonetheless sentenced in 1600 to exile from his hometown of Guamanga and 200 lashes. He claims a noble lineage (indio principal) and signs as a prince (Poma [1615] 1976, 3), but once Viceroy Toledo decided that the yanacona blood was tyrant and illegitimate, Poma lost legal recognition of the ownership of his land (cf. Adorno 1995). With nothing left (no ay remedio), he turned to writing and translation to craft his position as a prince (Apu) through a dance of multiple identities: “his construction of the author unleashes a succession of masks that the chronicler wears to be at the height of the recipient of his message, King Philip III.… It is about authorizing his own voice” (López-Baralt 2005, 159). These masks discursively articulate a speaking subject, discordant to the identity left to us in the legal records.

Like Garcilaso, Poma signs his letter as a servant to the king (humilde vasallo), but frames his name with the identity of an author (autor; [1615] 1976, 4). He explains that he translated from pre-Colombian khipus (textile notations), relaciones (testimonies) and memorias (recollections; 7). He describes his work as the most truthful narrative (más verdaderas relaciones), carrying across the substance of 14 languages, “reduced” in colonial grammar to “common sense” (se reducían … común opinión; 8). The colonial languages that Garcilaso considered subservient to Quechua inevitably converge in Spanish and, like Quechua, become simply subaltern. The erased meanings still signify otherwise, as incongruent phantoms at the borderland between Poma's words and drawings. In his drawings, he depicts the Archangel Gabriel descending onto Poma to command his writing, emplotting his narrative in an intellectual lineage that includes St Peter and the king himself. Poma omits indigenous hierarchies altogether (inka-yarovilca). Although his translation supplements Spanish, the woven heteroglossia encodes by betraying translation because it includes unrecognized noise in between writing and art.

After Independence, the Republic downgraded indigenous languages to useless languages (yanka shimi), and today they have little leverage against the state. The conquest is complete; indigenous interpellation, even if supplemental, has become unnecessary – Spanish is spoken in most of Latin America. In Buenos Aires, the legal system cannot even offer a sworn Quechua interpreter. Contesting meaning in Spanish is not an option for many indigenous people, and women have a harder time than men accessing Spanish. This was the case for Aymara Reyna Maraz who in 2014 was sentenced to life for the first-degree murder of her husband, Limber Santos.

In 2009, the couple and their two sons migrated from Bolivia to the Argentinian city's outskirts to work making bricks. Maraz endured domestic violence and was repeatedly raped by her neighbour, Tito Vilca, as a form of payment for Santos’ debt. She informed the police of her husband's disappearance, but both she and Vilca were arrested when Santo's body was found cemented in a construction site. Vilca died in prison without being tried, but did mention a fight between Santos and another worker the day of his death. The prosecution used Maraz's elder son's testimony as evidence against her, although psychiatrists had rejected it for ethical and linguistic reasons. When questioned by the police, she nodded, a gesture that in Aymara invites dialogue, but does not assent. Interpreting services were provided during the trial, and it was only then that she understood her life sentence. In detention, Maraz gave birth to a girl whom she refused to teach Quechua because “she won’t be able to defend herself”, unless it is in Spanish (8300Web 2014). Without access to Spanish, to writing, and to her male ventriloquists, Maraz remains silenced.

Centuries later, “colonial domination, founded on the principle of Indigenous inferiority … still determines reality” (Choque-Quishpe 1998, 11). Gender lies at the basis of colonial hierarchies. Son of a Spanish father, Garcilaso translated to suit the semantic norms of empire; Poma betrayed translation in his encoding of dissonant meanings; Maraz's yanka shimi no longer supplements imperial meaning. These three examples reveal how bodies condemned to orality fail to properly signify, while translation performance can betray empire by masking sombre noises, pointing to the excess of meaning.

Note on contributor

Antonia Carcelén-Estrada is a professor of Spanish colonial literature and translation studies at the College of the Holy Cross. Besides working as a translator and interpreter, she also works as an activist for the revitalization of indigenous languages in the Andes and serves as chair of NECLAS (New England Council of Latin American Studies) Best Translation Committee. Among her most recent publications are “Inscrito en mi piel: ley, migración y la colonialidad del género” (2013) and “Rewriting Memory: A Postcolonial Translation of Don Quixote into Kichwa” (2012). Her other research interests include colonial and contemporary Latin America, philosophy, cultural studies, art history and oral literature.

Notes

1. This is the title of an incomplete text where he focuses on the legal fight to recover his land.