South American Culture

...Donn Byrne had the gift...

...Possibly it takes more than a knowledge of English as well as Spanish...

...Alert and gay, abounding in humor, with great descriptive power, it is safe to prophesy that Hugo Wast will be a decided success here, provided his best sellers in Argentina are better translated than is usually the case with us...

...It would be interesting to trace from this growing literature, from which most of us are now barred, the fundamental differences of the two great American continental cultures, North and South—truly essential differences, though in the South they have aspired to those outward political forms which seemed good to us...

...Lord Dunsany could do it...

...Why not add Romulo Gallegos's Dona Barbara, that shrewd and ruthless tragic product of the cattle ranges of the Venezuelan upper Orinoco branch valleys...

...Each one of these examples, and a whole rich South American literature besides, is peculiar to the particular soil from which it sprang...

...Nothing (by way of passing example) could be further apart than the Argentinian gaucho, the Venezuelan llanero and the North American cowboy, although all engaged in the same business of following vast hordes of semi-wild cattle on continent-wide plains and through desert mountains...

...W. H. Hudson's work stands alone for perfect comprehension of the field and perfect reproduction in a language alien to its whole spirit...

...Thomas Walsh could have done it to perfection...

...And, to judge from The Flying Cromlech, so could Hugh de Blacam do it, or from another angle, The Bridge of San Luis Rey shows that Thornton Wilder might...

...The seeming similarities blind us, in business as in diplomacy...

...628 THE COMMONWEAL October 22, 1930 SOUTH AMERICAN CULTURE IN VIEW of the present newsmaking activities of our southern neighbors, there is particular interest in a rumor that some publishing house is translating into English Hugo Wast's fine series of novels based on the history and customs of Argentina, from the discovery and first settlement, through the War of Independence: the gaucho life of the high plains and the genesis of revolutions up to the gradual transition from limitless cattle range to ranch, the passing of the free gaucho and the growth of labor and the city labor unions...

...but it could be, and it is well worth somebody's doing...

...Not even the local terminology for usual daily things is the same from people to people of the southern continent, whether by infiltrations from the Indian communities in which the colonists settled, or because of intrinsic differences in the early colonists themselves, whether of inscrutable Basque or hardy, rude Catalonian origin, Gothic Castilian, austere Aragonese or soft, passionate, halfMoorish Andalusian...

...It will be only a very first class knowledge of both languages that can turn them into English without fear of loss in the operation...

...Or that characteristic and typical Colombian lyric, Maria, of Jorge Isaacs, over which it is still etiquette to weep softly, though absolutely nothing "happens" in the whole book...

...Incidentally it would be most helpful in many ways to North American Catholics, for there is none of these stories that is not laid against a Catholic background...

...Those differences go to the very root of our relations, even when they concern very similar things on both continents...

...It is not at all a hack translator's work...

...Our diplomats and consuls have rarely known quite how to deal with the No Pernaletes and the Mujiquitas of Dofia Barbara, whether as jefe politico, jefe civil, provincial judge or territorial cacique...

...Perhaps what is needed is that special thing that only Ireland produces in English...

...It is pure sentiment and description...

...They will find favor not only with all readers of good yarns but also with serious students of South American civilization and culture...

...Because we have not known how to understand them, our relations have become difficult and frequently embittered when their acts affected our citizens, and instead of translating and reading in good English what their own people say about them (since it is too much to ask that we read Spanish or Portuguese...

...It is quite possible to translate into English the dignity and poetry of the best Spanish writing without the stuffiness which is usually produced by the well-meaning hack...

...He had in high degree that Celtic poetry in perfect English that we mean: he was one in both languages, and his role, before he died, would have been to give us that wealth of golden literature of the Spanish tongue...

...we fall into the way of conducting our diplomacy through the Marine Corps in the smaller capitals and nod gravely but without understanding before the same fundamental differences in the great peoples of the southern hemisphere...

...If anyone is working seriously on Hugo Wast's cycle, why should publishers not go further, and include in one edition the many South American and Central American authors covering the same historical and cultural plane among other peoples of the Latin continent ? Why not, for instance Salome Jil (Jose Milla) in his Guatemalan historical portraits, from the first mediaeval tournament in armor on American soil, through the tragedy of la Sinventura, the tragic lady of Pedro Alvarado (The Fair God of Lew Wallace), the adventures of the half-Spanish son of Sir Francis Drake, the destruction by fire and flood of Guatemala the Chivalrous...

...In the way of literary pleasure and cultural—perhaps even political—profit one could hardly do anything more valuable than to produce an edition of South American literature in first-class translation...

...That would have to be handled carefully and delicately as would also Don Jose Milla's somewhat archaic style...

...Or Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdes, that vivid romance of Havana in 1830, and the tragedy of slavery...