The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Prospero's Mirror: A Translators' Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction by Ilan Stavans
David William Foster

Ilan Stavans, ed. Prospero’s Mirror: A Translators’ Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction. Curbstone, 1997. 323 pp. Paper: $17.95.

The idea behind this anthology is clever: choose a series of short stories and publish both the original and the English text as rendered by a translator, along with introductions on the translator and reasons for selecting the story, issues involved in its translation, and the career of the translator. The result is a fascinating dossier on problems of literary translation. Spanish, like English, but unlike the majority of other major literary languages, is a language united by its diversity, a diversity that factors out along numerous axes regarding sociohistoric developments intrinsic to each linguistic community in Latin America, substrata of indigenous languages, relative importance of hegemonic languages, influence of immigrant languages, and contacts between one Latin American society and another. While there have been important essays by major Latin American translators on their craft (Margaret Sayers Peden, Gregory Rabassa), Stavans’s anthology is the first attempt to provide a dossier of translation issues for Spanish, and the result is quite engaging.
In his introductory essay Stavans makes important observations about the sociohistorical development of literary Spanish in Latin America; Stavans is particularly skillful in framing issues of Latin American culture for English-language audiences. However, I do not understand a statement like the following: “in order to be members of Western civilization, Latin Americans need to be initiated in, and then are forced to perfect, the language of the invader.” This implies that there is a Latin America before conquest, an identity that precedes Spanish and Portuguese, and that there might have been a language of expression other than that of the invaders. This is a rather dangerous essentialism and a very questionable hypostatization of a continental existence of which Spanish and Portuguese are historical accidents. Spanish and Portuguese created “Latin America” (and perhaps rather fragmentarily) by suppressing, destroying, and assimilating (problematically) pre-Columbian indigenous cultures, but to see these as somehow constituting a prelapsarian Latin America is a rather mighty ideological postulation. [David William Foster]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Prospero's Mirror: A Translators' Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction by Ilan Stavans David William Foster Ilan Stavans, ed. Prospero’s Mirror: A Translators’ Portfolio of Latin American Short Fiction. Curbstone, 1997. 323 pp. Paper: $17.95. The idea behind this anthology is clever: choose a series of short stories and publish both the original and the English text as rendered by a translator, along with introductions on the translator and reasons for selecting the story, issues involved in its translation, and the career of the translator. The result is a fascinating dossier on problems of literary translation. Spanish, like English, but unlike the majority of other major literary languages, is a language united by its diversity, a diversity that factors out along numerous axes regarding sociohistoric developments intrinsic to each linguistic community in Latin America, substrata of indigenous languages, relative importance of hegemonic languages, influence of immigrant languages, and contacts between one Latin American society and another. While there have been important essays by major Latin American translators on their craft (Margaret Sayers Peden, Gregory Rabassa), Stavans’s anthology is the first attempt to provide a dossier of translation issues for Spanish, and the result is quite engaging. In his introductory essay Stavans makes important observations about the sociohistorical development of literary Spanish in Latin America; Stavans is particularly skillful in framing issues of Latin American culture for English-language audiences. However, I do not understand a statement like the following: “in order to be members of Western civilization, Latin Americans need to be initiated in, and then are forced to perfect, the language of the invader.” This implies that there is a Latin America before conquest, an identity that precedes Spanish and Portuguese, and that there might have been a language of expression other than that of the invaders. This is a rather dangerous essentialism and a very questionable hypostatization of a continental existence of which Spanish and Portuguese are historical accidents. Spanish and Portuguese created “Latin America” (and perhaps rather fragmentarily) by suppressing, destroying, and assimilating (problematically) pre-Columbian indigenous cultures, but to see these as somehow constituting a prelapsarian Latin America is a rather mighty ideological postulation. [David William Foster]

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