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Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces:

The Translation of Politics and the

Politics of TranslationGavin ArnallPublished online: 05 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Gavin Arnall (2012) Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces: The Translation of

Politics and the Politics of Translation, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 21:1,

87-102, DOI: 10.1080/13569325.2012.663349

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Gavin Arnall

ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS

LUCES: THE TRANSLATION OF POLITICSAND THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION

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 Frenchto Spanish, English, or Dutch, and conceptually, from one specific culture to another withdifferent 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 the1793 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 therevolutionary politics of translation.

Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces spans geographically from France and Spain to theCaribbean and temporally from 1789 to 1809 in a fictionalized account of the Age of Revolution and the dissemination of the ideals of the Enlightenment. El siglo is highlyspecific to the period yet generalizable as a meditation on how European, particularlyFrench, ideas are transformed and implemented in new and unique contexts (e.g.,Spain, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Suriname).1 Nestor Garcıa Canclini

terms this hybridization; however, Carpentier thematizes the traveling of ideas as aprocess 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.2

The novel complicates the classic issue of the translator’s fidelity to the text in thatthe responsibility to convey a text’s meaning collides with a need to alter it in its newgeographic and historical context. In El siglo, the translator’s fidelity to the originalconfronts the revolutionary’s fidelity to what Alain Badiou would call “the Event” in thepractice of translating texts, such as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man andCitizen and the 1793 French Constitution, as well as the Event of the French

Revolution itself.3 This article will explore the constellation of politics, translation, and

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 March 2012, pp. 87-102

ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2012.663349

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fidelity in El siglo, with special reference to the relationship between politicaltranslation to propagate revolution and the revolutionary politics of translation.

El siglo introduces Carlos and Sofia, siblings who live with their cousin Esteban, theprotagonist of El siglo, in a richly furnished house recently inherited from their father.

During their year of mourning, the adolescents construct a private world within thisbourgeois interior, which is soon penetrated by Victor Hughes, a Frenchman andimportant historical figure. Victor’s interruption allegorizes the incursion of Frenchrevolutionary ideas into Caribbean, specifically Cuban, culture. His friend Oge is anAfro-Caribbean doctor who trained in France and mixes medicine with mysticism.4

Victor and Oge, who is treating Esteban during a severe illness, know each other fromtheir involvement in freemasonry, information revealed during their muddledexposition of the imminence of world revolution. Esteban finds most of the conceptsand issues discussed so exotic that the conversation is unintelligible; neither theFrenchman nor the Afro-Caribbean successfully translate the revolutionary ideals with

enough context to convey their meaning to a bourgeois Cuban criollo.However, Esteban does grasp a few statements, like “[w]e have gone beyond the

age of religion and metaphysics, we are now entering on an age of science”, and someterms like liberty, happiness, and equality.5 Esteban also “thought he could detect thatVictor and Oge, though united by the same words, were not in complete agreementover men, things and methods”.6 Victor and Oge thus embody the discord between theFrench perspective and its (Afro-)Caribbean translation, allegorizing the inevitableconfrontation that ensues when ideas of one culture travel to a new site with its ownunique historical conditions. In an essay entitled “Traveling Theory”, Edward Saidschematizes this process. After developing in a set of contingent circumstances, ideas

circulate beyond their original cultural borders, confronting alternative cultures withtheir own unique geographic and historical context. A transformative process of accommodation and incorporation then alters and shapes the original idea as the ideaalters and shapes its new site.7

Prior to this transformative process of translation, the ideas are literally andconceptually, in Roberto Schwarz’s term, “misplaced”. For Schwarz, revolutionaryideas “are often ideas out of place, and they only stop being so when they arereconstructed on the basis of local contradictions”.8 The conversation between Victorand Oge is an early attempt in the novel at the reconstruction of misplaced ideas. Intheir discussion of the replacement of the age of religion and metaphysics by the age of

science, Victor dismisses the philosopher Martinez de Pasqually’s occultist andspiritualist beliefs; Oge, on the other hand, defends the philosopher’s teachings, statingthat their aim “is to release the transcendental powers dormant in man”.9 While Victorrejects religion in toto, Oge also defends the spiritualism of Catholicism.10

In his “De lo real maravilloso americano”, Carpentier stages a similar confrontationwhen he contrasts a disenchanted Europe, with its impoverished aesthetic experienceof the fantastic, to a spiritually vibrant Latin America that, because of its faith inmiracles and saints, experiences the fantastic in reality (lo real maravilloso).11 In bothcases, the distinction between the European and the Latin American hinges on the issueof spirituality and faith. According to Antonio Cornejo Polar, the combination of heterogeneous cultures often includes at least “one element that does not coincide withthe filiation of the others and thus necessarily creates a zone of ambiguity andconflict”.12 The secular and materialist ideas of the Jacobins confront an element of

L A T I N A M E R I C A N C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S8 8

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local culture, namely an affinity for mysticism and spiritualism, which produces anantagonism, an ambiguous and conflictual zone that the translator must navigate.Whereas Victor’s perspective is typically Eurocentric, Oge calls for a more complexconfiguration of elements that preserves and radicalizes local ideas and traditions.

Victor and Oge plan to flee Cuba’s political oppression of freemasons and seekasylum in San Domingo; however, in a chaotic turn of events Victor, accompanied byEsteban, escapes on a ship to France, marking the beginning of Esteban’s epic journey.In France, the politically naıve Cuban adolescent goes through a radical transformation,integrating himself into the Jacobin Clubs and the Masonic Lodges. The result of thisradicalization is that he is “more French than any of them [the Jacobins], morerevolutionary than those who were taking part in the Revolution”.13 It is telling thatthis description is followed by an account of Esteban,

[taking] the floor in a Jacobin Club, and [astonishing] those present with the

suggestion that all they had to do to carry the Revolution into the New World wasto inculcate the ideal of Liberty among the Jesuits who had been expelled from theSpanish dominions overseas and were now wandering in Italy and Poland.14

Esteban the Cuban is more French than his French counterparts because he recognizesthe necessity of expanding the French Revolution beyond France, because being trulyFrench means never being merely French. This evokes Eduardo Gruner’s claim that“the Haitian Revolution is more ‘French’ than the French Revolution since it proposes torealize objectively the latter’s universality by postulating the full emancipation of, andby granting full citizenship to, the African-American slaves”.15 Similarly, Esteban’s

French-ness stems from his fidelity to the universalism of the Enlightenment and theFrench Revolution. His is a politics of translation that would spread the ideal of libertyin an effort to realize its universal potential. As George Steiner argues, “[w]here itsurpasses the original, the real translation infers that the source-text possessespotentialities, elemental reserves as yet unrealized by itself”.16

Victor sends Esteban to the Spanish border to work for the famous Girondist Jacques Pierre Brissot who is preparing propaganda in Spanish, translating from FrenchRevolutionary and Enlightenment texts. Once at the border, the Abbe Jose Marchena,the first to translate Le contrat social into Spanish, tells Esteban that one must graduallyinfuse Spanish culture with French ideals, arguing that “the language of regenerated and

republican France could not yet be used in Spain”, and that, accordingly, one mustrespect “certain ultramontane prejudices, which are incompatible with liberty, butwhich are too deeply rooted to be extirpated at a single blow”.17 Marchena’sinstructions are politically contradictory in that a gradualist strategy, which echoes thecolonialist discourse that slaves were not yet ready to be free, is combined with acharge to take local conditions into account and not merely to impose foreign models.

Consenting to Marchena’s advice, Esteban must actively alter the originals bothlinguistically and conceptually; his work will not be a mere transposition of words fromone language to another but their rearticulation based on Spain’s particularcircumstances and contradictions. Esteban thereby politicizes what Jacques Derrida, inhis discussion of Walter Benjamin on translation, describes as characteristic of translation generally: “Translation is writing; that is, it is not translation only in thesense of transcription. It is a productive writing called forth by the original text”.18

A L E J O C A R P E N T I E R ’ S E L S I G L O D E L A S L U C E S 8 9

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Though Benjamin argues that the translator should not consider the receiver whentranslating a text in order to avoid reducing translation to the transmission of information, Marchena’s method shows that such a consideration leads not to the meretransmission of information but to its active reformulation. Mao, like Marchena,

maintains the principal importance of considering the audience when producingrevolutionary culture: “The first problem is: literature and art for whom?”19 El sigloextends this question – translation for whom? By allowing this consideration to guidethe practice of translation, the phenomenon of misplaced ideas can be avoided,enabling Esteban to contribute to what Benjamin calls the afterlife of the original, and,by extension, to the French Revolution itself.20

All translations, according to Benjamin, conjure a pure, universal language beyondparticular languages, for the original and the translation are “fragments of a greaterlanguage, just as fragments are part of a vessel”.21 Similarly, the ideals of the FrenchRevolution, although deriving from a particular national context and tradition, gesture

at a transnational, and indeed universal, political project. As Aime Cesaire writes, theFrench Revolution proved that,

liberty is indivisible, that one cannot grant political and economic liberty to thewhite planters and keep the mulattos under the stick, that one cannot recognizethe civil equality of the men of the free race and at the same time keep the blacksin the ergastulum.22

The French Revolution’s ideal of liberty is necessarily universal; it cannot excludecertain groups without contradicting the principle itself. The nature of the original thus

calls for its translation, for its circulation beyond its original context. Yet Esteban, inhis role as a politically engaged translator, must respect certain prejudices that are“incompatible with liberty”. The tension between the French Revolution’s universalprinciple of liberty and the active, but also unfaithful, translation of its texts contradictsand thereby limits the principle’s scope. When Esteban agrees to follow Marchena’sinstructions, does he embody what Badiou calls the Thermidorean subjectivity, that is,a subjectivity that renders unintelligible the truths produced in a specific revolutionarysequence?23 Although Esteban agrees to modify French texts in a way that contradictstheir ideal of liberty, he does so with the ultimate goal of extending the ideal andcontributing to its universalization. Esteban as a translator seems to be paradoxically

both faithful and unfaithful to the original, both Jacobin and Thermidorean.Mao addresses a similar paradox with his theorization of the principal and non-

principal contradictions of a particular historical context. As Slavoj Zizek explains,

in order to win the fight for the resolution of the principal contradiction [classstruggle], one should treat a particular contradiction as the predominant one, towhich all other struggles should be subordinated. In China under the Japaneseoccupation, patriotic unity against the Japanese was the predominant thing if Communists wanted to win the class struggle – any direct focusing on class struggle inthese conditions went against class struggle itself.24

Similarly, in the initial phase of extending liberty to Spain, the translator must altercertain texts so that they may coexist with cultural prejudices that contradict liberty.


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To fail to do so and to insist on the centrality of liberty at the wrong moment is to beguilty of what Zizek calls “dogmatic opportunism”.25 This political position actuallygoes against the ideals it purports to uphold by dogmatically placing them in the axialposition of any political sequence irrespective of its particular historical conditions,

thereby impeding the struggle for liberty.In the early stages of political propaganda, the unfaithful translation is the most

faithful, insofar as a betrayal of the text’s meaning leaves open the real possibility of itsfuture realization. Recalling that Lenin went directly against Marx by propagatingsocialist revolution in a relatively backward rather than an advanced, industrializedcountry, Zizek asserts that, “it is an inner necessity of the ‘original’ teaching to submitto and survive this ‘betrayal’, to survive this violent act of being torn out of one’soriginal context and thrown into a foreign landscape where it has to reinvent itself – only in this way, universality is born”.26 Jose Arico argued that this Leninist gesture of “betrayal” is an act of translation, that translation is the mother of universality.27

Esteban’s practice of translation, aimed at making concrete the abstract universal of liberty, thus enacts the Leninist gesture of translation avant la lettre.28

Though following Marchena’s advice, Esteban’s translations do little to alterSpain’s political culture, for much of his work remains “piled up in a cellar”.29

According to Esteban’s friend and fellow agitator Martınez de Ballesteros, the Jacobinsare to blame, for they have “[turned] on the best friends the Revolution has got” bypersecuting foreigners during the Reign of Terror.30 De Ballesteros continues:

So much for their ideas of making the Revolution universal anyway; they’re onlythinking about the French Revolution now. And the rest . . . they can rot!

Everything here is coming to mean its opposite. They make us translate aDeclaration of the Rights of Man into Spanish, and out of its seventeen principles theyviolate twelve every day. They took the Bastille, just to set free four forgers, twomadmen, and a sodomite, yet they found a prison in Cayenne which is far worsethan any Bastille.31

De Ballesteros thus points to the degeneration of the French Revolution, moving fromUniversal Enlightenment to Enlightenment in One Country, which ineluctably bringsto mind Joseph Stalin’s doctrine of Socialism in One Country.

According to Jean-Paul Sartre, Leon Trotsky differed from Stalin in that, through a

close reading of Marx, Trotsky claimed that “the Revolution had to be perpetuallyintensified by transcending its own objectives (radicalization) and progressivelyextended to the entire universe (universalization)”.32 The universality of Marxismeluded Stalin, who opted for a practical particularism over Trotsky’s radicaluniversalism: “What [Stalin] wanted to preserve at any price was not principles, or themovement of radicalization: it was [ . . . ] the Revolution itself inasmuch as it wasincarnated in that particular country”.33 Trotsky and Stalin translated Marx andMarxism based on unique historical conditions, but their translations were radicallydifferent and even opposed. According to Trotsky, Stalin and the Thermidoreanbureaucracy of the Soviet Union betrayed the revolution. However, unlike the betrayalof Lenin or Esteban, Stalin’s act was not committed in an effort to preserve or extend apolitical principle; it was not a strategic mistranslation in the process of universalization. Rather, Stalin’s translation of Marxism as Socialism in One Country


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eliminated the very possibility of universality, resulting in the degeneration of therevolution.34 Stalin’s unfaithful translation did not contribute to the original’s afterlife,but rather to its eventual death. The same could be said, mutatis mutandis, for theFrench revolutionists’ violation of their own principles. The prison in Cayenne is the

death knell of the Jacobins.Confronting the Jacobins with their contradictory actions is not, however, a real

option for either de Ballesteros or Esteban. The revolution at this stage has alreadyentered the Reign of Terror, and criticism would result in an immediate encounterwith the guillotine. Fearing that he would become a victim of the Terror andrecognizing that his work in Spain was not accomplishing its goal, Esteban travels withVictor to Guadeloupe in an effort to extend the ideas of the Enlightenment and theFrench Revolution to the New World. The motif of traveling ideas becomes explicitwhen the narrator reveals that,

[a]s the ships left the mainland astern, the Revolution began to simplify itself in thepeople’s minds; freed from the uproar and rhetoric of street meetings, the Eventwas reduced to its basic elements and pared of contradictions. The recentcondemnation and death of [Georges] Danton became a mere incident on the roadto a distant future which each man saw in the light of his own hopes.35

The ideas of the revolution are represented as originating from, but not limited to,their site of production, and their degeneration in France is replaced with the promiseof life, possibility, and hope in the Caribbean. While Badiou argues that the FrenchRevolution’s principles are made unthinkable if decoupled from Terror, the novel

suggests that certain actions committed during the Terror contradict the revolution’soriginal ideals.36 As these ideals travel, they are liberated from their degeneration inFrance: “[T]he immediate future would be [ . . . ] more egalitarian, morecommunalistic, felt the man who dreamed of the final abolition of inequality, whichcould not survive the last privileges”.37

Nevertheless, the Terror and its contradictions travel across the Atlantic as well,especially in the figure of Victor. Quoting Collot d’Herbois, a major participant in theReign of Terror, Victor states that “[a]nyone who is disloyal to the Jacobins is beingdisloyal to the Republic and to the cause of liberty”.38 The Jacobins mediate a particularnation-state (the Republic) and the universal principle of liberty, reducing the scope of

the latter to the former, reintroducing the logic of Enlightenment in One Country. Notsurprisingly, Esteban is not convinced by Victor’s reductive logic, and he critiquesCollot for being a drunkard and an exploiter of the Terror. When Esteban learns that aguillotine is traveling on the ship to Guadeloupe, Victor responds: “Inevitably. [ . . . ]That and the printing-press are the most essential things we’ve got on board, apartfrom the cannon”.39 Although carrying the Pluviose Decree that would abolish slaveryin the colonies, Victor intends to bring to the Caribbean not only the revolution’s ideals(through the Decree and the printing press), but also its terror (implemented by theguillotine).

When Victor and Esteban arrive in Guadeloupe, Victor inaugurates the PluvioseDecree and gives a speech congratulating the former slaves on becoming free citizens.Although an ostensibly triumphal moment for disciples of the French Revolution likeEsteban and for the recently freed slaves, neither group pays attention to Victor:


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Victor’s clear, metallic speech reached [Esteban] in waves, a witty phrase, adefinition of liberty or a classical quotation standing out from the rest by itsemphatic tone. For all his eloquence and vigor, the Word failed to harmonize withthe mood of these people, who had congregated here in a festive spirit, and were

amusing themselves with games or brushing against the opposite sex, and makingsmall effort to understand a language which differed greatly – especially with thatsouthern accent which Victor flaunted like a coat of arms – from their homelylocal patois.40

Mobilizing a musical metaphor, the narrator reveals that Victor’s speech failed totranslate, for its clear and metallic tone did not match the festive spirit of the people.Furthermore, Victor’s southern French is foreign to the local population, whichunderlines the “out of place” character of the speech, its untranslated quality. As Polarmight note, Victor’s style is heterogeneous with the local patois. According to Noe

Jitrik, Carpentier’s El reino is characterized by the “fracture of the unity between the‘represented world’ and ‘the mode of representation’”.41 Victor’s speech utilizes aparticular mode of representation, a certain tone, language, and style, producing asimilar fracture. Given his Eurocentric stance toward Oge’s spiritualism, Victor’srefusal to translate is not surprising, for one’s politics and one’s practice of translationare co-constitutive in El siglo.

Mao was attentive to heterogeneity and the consequent failure of ideas to translate,but, unlike Polar, he was interested in finding a way to surmount the “insurmountableconflict” of heterogeneity.42 For Mao, the way to overcome this conflict involvedcreating a “mass style”, which required that the thoughts and feelings of writers and

artists be fused with the masses. “To achieve this fusion”, Mao argued, intellectuals“should conscientiously learn the language of the masses”.43 Mass style was thus a formof translation, a rearticulation of one’s ideas through a popular language used to bridgethe class heterogeneity between the petit bourgeois intellectual and the workers andpeasants. Although with a generally unsuccessful result, Esteban, de Ballesteros, andMarchena attempted to use translation to bridge the cultural gap between RepublicanFrance and a more traditional, conservative Spain. Perhaps Esteban’s lack of interest inVictor’s speech can be explained by the latter’s failure to recognize the importance of translation in making a text relevant, a failure that resulted in disharmony betweenVictor and those present.

However, Victor seems to recover the lessons from Spain when the Jacobins of France, in a strange reversal of their previous, secular stance, condemn atheism andcelebrate the existence of a Supreme Being. In response to an incredulous Esteban,who asks if he will enforce the worship of a Supreme Being in Guadeloupe, Victorreplies negatively, stating that,

[t]hey still haven’t finished demolishing the church on the Morne du Governement.It would be too soon. We must go about it more slowly. If I were to start talkingnow about a Supreme Bring it wouldn’t be long before the people here wereshowing him nailed to a cross [ . . . ] We’re not in the same latitude here as theChamp de Mars.44


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Esteban notes that Victor’s response is similar to what de Ballesteros would have said inSpain, and, indeed, Victor, like de Ballesteros or Marchena, combines a contradictorypolitics of colonialist gradualism with a strategic consideration of local conditions.45

Due to historical differences, mapped spatially by the metaphor of latitude, Victor, like

de Ballesteros et al., calls for modifications, active (mis)translations of the original.Esteban is right, however, in not only comparing but also contrasting Spain and

Guadeloupe, Victor and de Ballesteros. De Ballesteros held an allegiance to theprinciples of the French Revolution, which he distinguished from its leadership,whereas Victor, like Sartre’s Stalin, is more committed to preserving his own authorityand the authority of those in power. He serves the French revolutionaries rather thanthe French Revolution, evinced by his capitulation, as an outspoken atheist, to the

Jacobin’s sudden reversal of positions. According to Esteban, Victor is,

so completely given over to politics that [his mind] shied away from a critical

examination of the facts, and refused to acknowledge the most flagrantcontradictions; faithful to the verge of fanaticism – for this could indeed be classedas fanaticism – to the pronouncements of the men who had invested him with hisauthority.46

Victor’s refusal to acknowledge blatant contradictions is thus revealed assimultaneously a fanatical faithfulness to the Jacobins and a betrayal of the revolutionand its principles.

Victor models his counterparts in France when he, too, contradicts the principlesof the French Revolution by virtually negating the Pluviose Decree, announcing that

“work [is] compulsory. Any negro accused of being lazy or disobedient, argumentativeor troublesome, was condemned to death”.47 Carpentier had already explored thiscontradiction in El reino when Ti Noel notes that King Henri Christophe’s fortress is“the product of a slavery as abominable as that he had known on the plantation of M. Lenormand de Mezy”.48 However, as Cesaire reveals in one of his best plays, thedifference between King Christophe and Victor is that King Christophe was trapped ina tragic set of circumstances. The very fortress that would ensure independence fromthe French reinstatement of slavery required slave labor to produce it.49 Victor, on theother hand, is represented as contradicting the Pluviose Decree without tragedy, for“racial prejudice remained in him from his long residence in San Domingo”.50 When

faced with the alternatives of increased labor productivity or freedom from slavery,Victor’s choice was easy, not tragic. With this course of action he is faithful, again, tothe revolutionaries of France but betrays the revolution’s principles.51

Carpentier decided to include the historical figure of Victor Hughes in his novelbecause he was fascinated by the “dramatic dichotomy” that defined his character.52

Indeed, the novel occasionally depicts Victor as a true radical, despite his fanaticism andracism. Victor clarifies his response to the Thermidorean Reaction: “I shall ignore thisnews. I don’t accept it. I shall continue to recognize no other morality except Jacobinmorality. No one is going to move me from here. And if the Revolution must perish inFrance, it will continue in America”.53 He then turns to Esteban and tells him totranslate the Declaration and the French Constitution, affirming that they willaccomplish in Spanish America what the French had failed to do in Spain. Victor thusplaces himself in the tradition of Simon Rodrıguez, whom Carpentier describes with


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the following words: “While Rousseau’s Emile was never conducive to the foundationof a school in Europe, Simon Rodrıguez founded a school in Chuquisaca based on theprinciples of that famous book; he realized in Latin America what the Europeanadmirers of Rousseau did not”.54 For Victor, translation plays a role in this realiza-

tion, disseminating the ideas of the French Revolution so they may be actualized.Victor’s fidelity to the French Revolution, and not to whoever is in power atthe moment, is tested by the Thermidorean Reaction. With this test he renews his faithin the revolution’s principles and, importantly, also calls for a new round of translation.

While the Thermidorean Reaction seems to renew Victor’s revolutionary fervor,it marks Esteban’s disillusionment with the revolution’s ideals. It is telling that his shiftin political commitment alters his relationship to the practice of translation:

For the present, he had a daily task to perform, which he fulfilled conscientiously,

finding a sort of relaxation, of relief from his doubts, in translating to the best of hisability; he became painstaking, almost pedantic, in his search for the exact phrase,the best synonym or the right punctuation, and was distressed that contemporarySpanish should be so loath to accept the concise locutions of modern French. [ . . . ]Neither the editor-translator nor the typographers believed very much in thewords which would be multiplied and propagated as a result of their labors; but if the task were to be done it must be done correctly, without maltreating thelanguage, and without neglecting anything which was part of the job.55

Like the obsessional neurotic, Esteban is frantically active, busying himself with the

minute details of language to avoid facing the underlying tension that he has lost faith inthe revolutionary principles he is translating.56 His pseudo-engagement serves as asoothing distraction that masks this reality. Upon losing faith in the French Revolution,his fidelity shifts to the French language, which, in turn, alters his practice of translation. Whereas in Spain the focus was on translating misplaced ideas so that theywould be both intelligible and relevant in their new context, in post-ThermidorGuadeloupe Esteban’s concern is the inability of Spanish to render accurately theeloquence of French locutions. The novel subtly gestures at this reversal that privilegesthe source-language over the target-language with the typographer’s tragicomic lack of an “n”, forcing him to replace the tildes with circumflex accents.57

What are the political implications of this shift in Esteban’s mode of translation? Inher essay “The Politics of Translation”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that, whentranslating a text from the Third World, the translator must submit to the rhetoricityof the source-text, to the rhetorical element of its language, in order to avoid “a speciesof the neo-colonialist construction of the non-western scene”.58 She generalizes thisargument, claiming that the task of the translator is to submit to the source-text’srhetoric; however, her examples stem predominantly from the translation of ThirdWorld texts into First World languages. She does not distinguish between theseexamples and the task of the translator when First World texts are translated for theThird World, or, more precisely, when a text of the colonizer is translated into thelanguage of the colonized.59

Esteban’s practice of translation in Spanish America submits to and therebyprivileges the dominant, European language and culture. His practice of translation is


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the linguistic counterpart to Victor’s fanatic political obedience. Could we thereforeassert that Spivak’s submissive mode of translation can sometimes take place in thespace of the hegemonic culture, thereby undoing its generalized claim to radicality?60

The moment Esteban gives up the ideals of the European Enlightenment, he

paradoxically reproduces a colonialist system of linguistic and cultural valuation,submitting to the dominant culture rather than actively transforming it.

The extent to which Esteban renounces the ideals of the revolution becomes clearwhen, upon accepting a job from Victor that entails “distributing [in Suriname . . . ]several hundred printed copies of the Decree of Pluviose of the Year Two, translatedinto Dutch, and accompanied by a call to revolt”, he decides that he will throw theleaflets into a river.61 However, after witnessing a horrific scene in which runawayslaves are punished by having their legs amputated, he changes his mind and distributesthe leaflets, telling the slaves to read them, “[o]r if you can’t read, then find someonewho can read them for you”.62 The illiteracy of slaves is another theme that Carpentier

had already explored in El reino, with scenes that complicate our understanding of theinfluence of French revolutionary ideals in the Caribbean. For example, the narrator of El reino notes that the black population did not read “the latest prints received fromParis” because “slaves were unable to read”.63 Another reference to illiteracy and thelimits of European influence occurs when Ti Noel somewhat humorously uses theGrande Encyclopedie not as reading material but as furniture upon which to eatsugarcane.64

El siglo extends the issue of illiteracy and cultural influence to translation. What isthe role of a (translated) text in shaping ideas when its intended audience cannot readit? Is the translation of written culture politically relevant when the majority of the

population is illiterate? El siglo suggests that the slaves must hear the text and thattranslation, as with Victor’s speech, encompasses oral as well as written texts. GivenCarpentier’s mania for historical research, it should be no surprise that these answersare historically accurate. In his analysis of Leger-Felicite Sonthonax’s decree that theDeclaration should be “printed, published, and posted everywhere necessary”, NickNesbitt argues that, contrary to the Habermasian contention that the public sphere islimited to a literate elite, hundreds of thousands of slaves discussed, analyzed, andcritiqued this document.65 The translation of the ideas of the French Revolution does,therefore, have a purpose, but the dissemination of these ideas may be predominantlythrough oral rather than written channels.

The influence and political relevancy of the ideals of the French Revolution arechallenged again when Sieger, a Swiss planter and colonist living in French Guiana, tellsEsteban and a heterogeneous group of historical figures that “[a]ll the FrenchRevolution has achieved in America is to legalize the Great Escape which has beengoing on since the sixteenth century. The blacks didn’t wait for [the French], they’veproclaimed themselves free a countless number of times”.66 He also states that thePluviose Decree, “didn’t bring anything new into this continent; it was just one morereason for proceeding with the everlasting Great Escape”.67 With these passages,Sieger, although with radically different political commitments, aligns himself withhistorians like Carolyn Fick and Michael-Rolph Trouillot, who argue that Jacobinismand texts like the Declaration were limited in their contribution to the slave rebellions of the Caribbean.68 In El reino, Carpentier explores other influences that are likely to havecontributed to the slave revolts, such as Vodun, suggesting, in accord with theorists


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like Gruner and Nesbitt, that the slaves’ struggle against exploitation was prefigured incertain elements of their own culture.69

Yet Nesbitt encourages us to consider the widespread dissemination of theFrench revolutionary ideals, a project made extremely visible in El siglo, as the

condition of possibility for the slaves to become translators themselves. According toNesbitt, the public posting of the Declaration provoked “an unheralded power totranslate a North Atlantic language these slaves did not speak into their ownexperiential idiom, the desire to express their insight into the categorical need todestroy plantation slavery in the language of the Rights of Man”.70 Early in the novelOge’s discussion with Victor and Esteban about the coming world revolution hints atthis power to translate. When news reaches Cuba of murder and pillage by the slaves of Saint-Domingue, Oge contends that the unrest “coincided too closely with otherevents, of universal import, to be merely a revolt of black incendiaries and violators of women”.71

Questioning official discourse and its propensity to tarnish the legitimacy of insurrection, Oge also notes that “after a certain July 14th [the storming of theBastille]”, rumors had been circulating about slaves in the process of “transforming theworld”.72 Here, again, the ideals of the revolution are spread orally, as the slaves, uponlearning of the world-historical events in France, translate their significance to conformto local circumstances. Accordingly, we could say that the slave uprisings of theCaribbean are the slaves’ translations of the storming of the Bastille. By translating suchan event, the slaves, too, are faithfully participating in the concrete universalization of Enlightenment principles, producing their own texts rather than merely receivingthem.

As with Victor’s speech, music and translation are combined when Sieger refers tothe transcultural practice of the slaves of Bahıa, who are “demanding the privileges of Equality and Fraternity to the rhythm of a macumba, and so introducing the djuka-druminto the French Revolution itself”.73 The implications of this statement, combinedwith the passages above, radically contradict Sieger’s conservative politics. GivenSieger’s assertion that slave culture was rebellious before the entrance of Enlightenment principles onto the scene, this passage inverts the predominantpractice of translation in El siglo. Rather than the translation of European ideas for or bythe slaves, the slaves, like Caliban, are translating their own ideas into the language of the colonizers.74

Expanding on Nesbitt’s thesis regarding the slave’s power to translate, this passagecould be read as the slaves’ attempt to make their struggle intelligible to those who lackthe experience of slavery, thereby forcing the European colonists to recognizethe contradiction between their principles and the institutions of their colonies.By instantiating their demands in the language of the French Revolution, the slaves, inDerrida’s analysis, transform the original “even as it also modifies the translatinglanguage. This process – transforming the original as well as the translation – is thetranslation contract between the original and the translating text”.75 Although forDerrida the translation contract is a promise of reconciliation never fulfilled, El siglorepresents this reciprocal process between languages as a harmonious combination of French Revolutionary lyrics with Afro-American beats.

After a long journey, Esteban returns to Cuba without any hope for worldrevolution or the propagation of the French revolutionary ideals. He is therefore


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unhappy to find that the island he left almost two decades ago has radicalized whilehe was gone. Carlos and Sofia have founded a small Androgynous Lodge, “with thepolitical aim of spreading the philosophical writings which had fostered theRevolution”.76 Moreover, Esteban is extremely irritated, to the point of cursing in

French, when he realizes that the Spanish translations circulated by the Lodge arehis translations, that his work is still being utilized to further a cause that he has given up.For the de-politicized Esteban, the ideas of the French Revolution cannot be translatedor reconstructed, as Schwarz suggests, on the basis of local conditions; they aredoomed to be misplaced ideas. The novel reveals, once again, the close relationshipbetween political commitment and a commitment to translation.77

This scene nicely concludes Carpentier’s meditation on translation by highlightingthat, although the translator may actively intervene by altering the original bothlinguistically and conceptually, others are equally free to utilize the text for their ownpurposes. By the end of El siglo, Esteban is a repentant ex-revolutionary, completely

contaminated with political pessimism; however, his political interventions, histranslations, live on and continue to shape Caribbean politics. Accordingly, Esteban is afigure for the French Revolution itself, a revolution that continued to inspireEuropeans (Victor), Caribbean criollos (Sofia, Carlos), and African slaves to realize itsuniversalist principles even after the termination of its political sequence andsubsequent Thermidorean Reaction.

To conclude, the novel represents translation as a diverse practice that caninvolve writing (Esteban), elocution (Victor), or rebellion (the slaves). The politicallyradical translator is represented as an active participant in the expansion of theFrench Revolution, rearticulating its ideals to contribute to their universalization. The

practice of translation can enable ideas to travel and can ensure their relevancy in their newlocation. Translation thereby provides a technique for overcoming cultural division, a keystruggle in the development of world revolution, and, in this particular case, thedissemination of Enlightenment and particularly French revolutionary ideals.

El siglo shows that a mistranslation can sometimes be the most faithful to the textwhereas a “faithful” translation can oftentimes disguise betrayal. Moreover, the noveldemonstrates that translation can contribute to the afterlife of a political event or to itsdegeneration and death. Finally, it avows that politics and translation are co-constitutive, that politics informs the practice of translation and that the practice of translation is a performance of politics.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Michael Arnall, Nick Nesbitt, and Rachel Price, whose commentson the content and presentation of this article were an immense help in preparing it forpublication.

Notes1 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 Cubacaused him to revise the novel and his later qualification that he only revised the scenein which Victor and Sophia part ways, so as to avoid melodrama. Rather than provide


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further speculation on this issue, I have chosen to focus on the articulation of politicsthrough the novel’s explicit historical referent, the Age of Revolutions. For anoverview of the historical circumstances surrounding the novel’s delayed publication,see Roberto Gonzalez Echevarrıa, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1990), 213–225.2 See Nestor Garcıa Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity ,

trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (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 Oge’s brother is named Vincent, it becomes clear thatOge, too, is a reference to a historical figure, namely, Vincent Oge, the man whofought 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 ibid.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 ibid., 72.11 Alejo Carpentier, “De lo real maravilloso americano”, A. Carpentier: Valoracion multiple

(Havana: Casa de las Americas, 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 Rıos, and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004),104.

13 Carpentier, Explosion, 96.14 ibid.15 Eduardo Gruner, La oscuridad y las luces: Capitalismo, cultura y revolucion (Buenos Aires:

Edhasa, 2010), 34. “la Revolucion haitiana es mas ‘francesa’ que la francesa, puesto que ellası se propone objetivamente realizar aquella universalidad al postular la plena

emancipacion y otorgar igualmente plena ciudadanıa 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 ibid., 81.22 Aime Cesaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Revolution francaise et le probleme colonial (Paris:

Presence Africaine, 1981), 342. “la liberte est indivisible, que l’on ne pouvait


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accorder la liberte politique ou economique aux planteurs blancs et maintenir lesmoulates sous la ferule; que l’on ne pouvait reconnaıtre l’egalite civile aux hommes decouleur libres et dans le meme temps maintenir les negres dans l’ergastule [author’stranslation].”

23 Badiou, 136.24 Slavoj Zizek, “Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, Slavoj Z ˇ iz ek presents Mao:

On Practice and Contradiction (New York: Verso, 2007), 6.25 ibid.26 ibid., 2.27 Jose Arico, “Introduccion”, Mariategui y los orı genes del marxismo latinoamericano

(Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978), xlviii.28 We should note that Arico’s sense of translation is not the kind of translation Zizek

critiques in his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. For Zizek, there is a fundamental difference between the impossible

universality of the “never-won neutral space of translation” and the concreteuniversality of the ethico-political act. Through Arico, however, it is possible to readtranslation and concrete universality together. For Zizek’s on the impossibleuniversality of translation, see Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essayson September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 66.

29 Carpentier, Explosion, 114.30 ibid., 111.31 ibid.32 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume Two, trans. Quintin Hoare

(New York: Verso, 2006), 100.33 ibid., 101.

34 See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Dover Publications, 2004).35 Carpentier, Explosion, 117.36 Badiou, 129, 135, 136.37 Carpentier, Explosion, 118.38 ibid., 122.39 Carpentier, Explosion, 124.40 ibid., 142.41 Noe Jitrik as cited in Polar, 105.42 Polar, 114.43 Mao, “Introduction”.

44 Carpentier, Explosion, 146.45 ibid.46 Carpentier, Explosion, 145.47 ibid., 152, 153.48 Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World , trans. Harriet de Onıs (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 116. According to Sibylle Fischer, thiscontradiction plagued the French Caribbean because its nations were founded on thenotion of liberty while its economic and social institutions were inherited fromcolonialism 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 Cesaire’s representation of the tragedy of King Christophe, see Aime Cesaire,La tragedie du roi Christophe (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1970).

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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 ibid., 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 lafundacion de una escuela en Europa, Simon Rodrıguez fundo en Chuquisaca unaescuela basada en los principios del libro famoso, es decir, realizo en America lo queno 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 Zizek, “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 Englishmay 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 ibid., 241.63 Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World , 5, 6.64 ibid., 164.65 Nesbitt, 77, 78.66 Carpentier, Explosion, 231.67 ibid., 232.68 See Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from

Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). See also Michael-RolphTrouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press,

1995).69 Nesbitt, 43. Gruner, 301.70 Nesbitt, 36.71 Carpentier, Explosion, 82.72 ibid.73 ibid., 232.74 See Roberto Fernandez Retamar, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in

Our America”, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: Universityof 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

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degree”, an imported idea or belief that represents an alien (European) reality. WhileLarsen identifies the central problem of the novel, the traveling of ideas, his analysismakes no mention of translation, the novel’s key to refashioning misplaced ideas innew, geographically and historically distinct, contexts. See Neil Larsen, “Alejo

Carpentier: Modernism as Epic”, Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative, and Nationin the Americas (New York: Verso, 2001), 115–126. For Schwarz on ideology to thesecond degree, see Schwarz, 23.

Gavin Arnall is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

His interests include Latin American, French Caribbean, and Quechuan cultural

production, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and translation. He recently published “Aesthetics

and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Ranciere” in Critical Inquiry.

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