| Negotiating
the Frontier: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History
Anthony
Pym 1999
Entr'acte: Imaginary Ships
At the Mediterranean
end of the Ramblas in Barcelona, as many millions of tourists
surely remember, there is a statue of Columbus pointing
out to sea. The statue raises several questions. For example,
why is it in Barcelona? Columbus actually sailed from Palos,
near Huelva, in the very south of Spain. And then, since
he is gesturing seaward, as seems logical, why is he pointing
east rather than west?
The first problem
has a kind of solution, since it was in Barcelona that the
admiral eventually reported back to Queen Isabel after his
voyage of discovery. But the second question, the unreasoned
gaze eastward, remains a mystery for thinking tourists.
Could the statue perhaps be pointing to a fate that was
not entirely Columbian?
On 3 August 1492
the admiral and his ships sailed from Palos. The previous
day, on 2 August 1492, ten rather different ships did indeed
set out from Barcelona (Rovira i Virgili 1978: 7. 126-127,
361; Marcó i Dachs 1977: 375). They carried
more than 4,000 Jews from various parts of Catalonia, Aragon,
and Valencia, responding to the expulsion order signed by
the Catholic Monarchs on 31 March of that year. Unlike Columbus,
those Jews generally did not proceed to southern islands.
Most would appear to have gone eastwards,out to a Mediterranean
diaspora, to the Levant, the Ottoman world, especially Salonika,
perhaps as Columbus is trying to tell us.
Try to think
of the minds aboard those ships. Not just the Jews, who
were the first of a long series of exiled cultural groups:
waves of Conversos, Moriscos, Jesuits, afrancesados,
Liberals, and Republicans would also follow the paths of
exile. Try to think of Columbus’s sailors as well, out there
in small ships on an unknown ocean, similarly ejected by
an expanding culture, their leader perhaps similarly guided
by uncompromising faith in an unseen god and the written
letter. This latter group was analogously moving because
of personal or professional necessity: Gould (1924) lists
87 men aboard, of which 16 had their profession given as
no more than ‘cabinboy’ (grumete) and four (actually 5.6%
of the named professions) are followed by the mention ‘criminal.’
Columbus and his motley crew should no doubt represent the
empire; the expelled Jews and later exiles might be caste
as victims of imperialism. Yet that is not quite what the
admiral’s statue is pointing to.
Surely Columbus
was an intercultural figure in the service of the Spanish
crown, just as Jewish intellectuals had been for centuries?
From Genoa, he wrote a Castilian mixed with Portuguese;
some have claimed he was Catalan, or Jewish; he certainly
had a Converso interpreter on board. At base, the Genoan
was perhaps an obsessive intercultural impresario with an
empirical research project to sell, plying his wares first
to the Portuguese and perhaps English courts (Las Casas1951:
1.153) before finding favour with Isabel of Castile. If
his royal service was to go out and engage further frontiers
for Hispanic culture, could not the role of the expelled
Jews and their later intellectual followers, in some kind
of historical unconscious beyond immediate motives, have
been to do something similar? No, that would be too perverse
a parallel.
And yet, isn’t
it a little too easy to say, for example, that the conquistadores
persecuted and the Hispanic Jews were persecuted, and that
is the only difference that counts? It does count, but it
is not all. These groups were not directly opposed to each
other; they were both peripheral manifestations of a strident
and repressive monoculture that was pushing outwards on
both fronts. One of the problems with facile victimologies
is that the results of such movements are too easily discounted
as legitimate culture, as if the outcasts had automatically
lost everything. If we are disposed to see Hispanic culture
continuing in the conquered Americas, expanding the cultural
frontiers of the Castilian language, we should also be prepared
to find Hispanic culture in the Ladino tradition and the
Judeo-Spanish of the Sephardic dispersal to Salonika, Venice,
Rome, Naples, Livorno, and Ferrara, in the Jewish Spanish
known as Haketiya in Morocco and Tituani in Oran, in the
Romance of the Moriscos also in northern Africa, and indeed
in the Castilian written and published in Amsterdam, Rome,
London, Paris, Moscow, Buenos Aires, or Mexico by a long
series of cultural exiles.
If we can think
in terms of intercultures and frontier societies, all those
places must house the Hispanic culture that interest us.
It is perhaps the kind of culture where we tend to find
translators. Let us check this. Let us try to think through
the minds of those who once went out in ships.
- Last update
9 February 1999
|
