Latin America

Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad

Author(s): ANNA BRICKHOUSE

Source: PMLA , October 2013, Vol. 128, No. 4 (October 2013), pp. 938-946

Published by: Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23489165

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PML A

theories and

methodologies

Mistranslation,

Unsettlement, La Navidad

ANNA BRICKHOUSE

ANNA BRICKHOUSE, associate profes

sor of English and American studies at

the University of Virginia, is the author

of The Unsettlement of America: Transla

tion, Interpretation, and the Story of Don

Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945 (Oxford UP,

forthcoming).

938

ON 14 OCTOBER 1492, ON THE ISLAND THAT HE HAD JUST NAMED SAN

SALVADOR, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS SEIZED SEVEN TAÍNO INDIANS TO

serve as translators. The abduction was clearly an act of significant forethought, registering Columbus's intention that these interpret ers "inquire and inform ... about things in these parts" (Columbus,

"Letter" 118)—a first step toward the subjugation of all the inhabit

ants of San Salvador, who might one day be "taken to Castile or held

captive" on the island (Columbus, Diario 75). The taking of these in

digenous translators has been no less momentous for contemporary

scholarship, perhaps especially in early modern English and Ameri can literary studies: in the year of the Columbian quincentenary, Ste

phen Greenblatt memorably called it "the primal crime in the New

World ... committed in the interest of language" (24); Eric Cheyfitz concurs that "translation was, and still is, the central act of European

colonization and imperialism in the Americas" (104). Yet the concept

of translation as a wholly imperial instrument, as commonplace in Columbus's day as in our own, has limited our thinking in important

ways (Adorno, "Polemics" 20). As ethnohistorians and literary critics

alike have suggested, the interpretive sway of the "linguistic colonial

ism" model can obscure as much about its Native objects as it reveals

about the purported discursive complexity of its European subjects.1

This essay returns to the scene of this primal linguistic crime to

consider its role as the origins story for an alternative history—one

that, as I tell it here, draws on Native American studies' multilayered

concept of sovereignty to reconsider a canonical episode of colonial

history.2 How we frame and comprehend this episode has obvious bearing on how we write the early American literary past, for Co

lumbus's writings inaugurate the Western record of a now largely anonymous body of Native translators engaged in the acquisition and interindigenous dissemination of diplomatic knowledge and political expertise regarding the hemisphere and the early Atlan tic world. The network of intellectual production and transmission

adumbrated by these Native translators has been easy to overlook

» 2013 anna brickhouse

PMLA 128.4 (2013), published by the Modern Language Association of America

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Anna Brickhouse 939

suit of self-determination," much contem- finally sails to Santa María de la Concepción, porary scholarship unwittingly repeats that he does so because "these men that I have had denial by misrecognizing these captives' use taken ... kept telling me that there they wear of translation to engage in acts of political very large bracelets of gold" (79). Whether or diplomacy in behalf of a self-determining not he has understood his translators' words, people—and thereby to set "at least some of Columbus has followed the signed indica the terms of the debate" (462). Our prevail- tions of their directions and continues to do ing literary and historical narratives of co- so throughout the remainder of the voyage, lonial settlement in the early Americas are Even so, by the time of their arrival at intimately tied to this critical misrecogni- Santa Maria, Columbus loses some confi tion; working against it is a first step toward dence in his interpreters: "I well believe that recovering what I elaborate below as a history all they were saying [of gold bracelets] was a of American ««settlement. In what follows I ruse in order to flee" (79). Already, then, the offer a speculative reading grounded not in possibility of motivated mendacity on the in Columbus's narrow construal of translation terpreters' part haunts the project of transla as an instrument of (European) empire but in tion for which the seven captives have been a series of motivated mistranslations actively detained. Yet Columbus can envision only a dispatched by the collective of indigenous in- limited horizon of possibilities for evaluating terpreters he regarded as his to control. the information supplied by his interpreters:

they are lying, he reasons, simply because they

Columbus's Diario is a famously medi- are seeking to escape. The logic here is retre ated text: a paraphrase, including some direct active, for while the ship anchors off Santa quotations, written by the Dominican friar Maria two of the San Salvadoran translators Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566), who jump overboard and make their way ashore, owned a copy of Columbus's (now lost) origi- Yet the successful flight of these two interpret nal, which was itself a highly self-conscious ers is followed by several events that not only text intended for the Catholic monarchs.4 belie Columbus's logic but also call into ques Even through the opacity of its textual layers, tion the unidirectionality of imperial transla though, and its fantastical projections of co- tion. After the translators have escaped to the lonial desire, Columbus's Diario reveals that island, where they have presumably commu soon after he has committed the kidnapping, nicated their experience in captivity, a new the abducted interpreters in the making are Native interlocutor draws alongside the ship directing the voyage of supposed discovery. in a canoe. When the man is taken aboard, When Columbus is unsure in what direction Columbus understands the event as the cap

to proceed, he turns to his indigenous cap- ture of another interpreter and decides to use tives, who purportedly tell him "by signs that the opportunity of this unplanned abduction there were so very many [islands] that they to stage a release that will win the Spaniards

T

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because of the still dominant critical ten- were numberless. And they named by their dency to understand translation in the co- names more than a hundred" (Columbus, Di- 0 lonial American context primarily as a tool ario 77). If Columbus's ability to understand ~ of empire, a dutiful metonymy of translatio the captives must be viewed with skepticism, imperii.3 If Columbus violates what Scott Ly- it is nevertheless clear that these captive trans- 3

ons calls the "rhetorical sovereignty" of the lators present him from the beginning with ^ Native captives, denying "the inherent right an overwhelming stream of information that » and ability of peoples to determine their own proves singularly unhelpful, even obstructing communicative needs and desires in the pur- the voyage's progress. And when Columbus

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940 Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad | PMLA

S good favor with the people of Santa Maria that his new interlocutor is carrying two m (81). It never occurs to him that this purported Spanish blancas (silver coins)—"because of a captive might have a tactical motive—raison which I recognized that he was coming from q d'état—of his own for being on the ship. Co- ... San Salvador" (85)—his powers of induc x

lumbus plies him with gifts, sends him back tion still do not extend to their logical con

g ashore, watches as he reunites with the Na- elusion: the intermediary has been shadowing ts tives of Santa Maria, and then imputes to the the movement of the ship, traveling with a m former captive a point of view that he believes foreign currency, and has reasons of his own ¡J himself to have generated and manipulated: for boarding the vessel.

If Columbus cannot see this, neither can 0

<u He considered it a great marvel, and indeed it much contemporary scholarship: both suffer £ seemed to him that we were good people and from what Craig Womack notes are peculiar

that the other man who had fled had done us «forms of myopia that undermine sociopo some harm and that for this we were taking soverd t » (358). But once we reCog him with us. And the reason that I behaved . „ . , . „T .. . . . ... . . ,. r mze every small engagement of these Native in this way toward him, ordering him set tree , , , , ,

, . . ., . .. , interlocutors as a political act ot diplomacy and giving him the things mentioned, was r r / in order that they would hold us in this es- Premised on self-determination, key details teem, so that... the natives will receive [us] 'n Columbus s story begin to appear in a dif well. And everything that I gave him was not ferent light. Consider an earlier scene from worth four maravedís. (81-83) the voyage, when Columbus explores eastern

San Salvador. Coasting along the shore, the So satisfied is Columbus with his dissimula- ship is hailed by large groups of San Salva tion, and with what he imagines to be his con- dorans, who come down to the beach calling trol of an unequal exchange, that both he and and offering water and food to the famished his future readers lose sight of the obvious: voyagers. Columbus, however, soon becomes Columbus's Native interlocutors share his de- "afraid, seeing a big stone reef that encircled sire to create a diplomatic impression, to ma- that island all around" (Diario 75); the waters nipulate cross-cultural perception in order to near this part of San Salvador are treacherous shape the course of future political events.5 for porting. But more dangerous to Columbus

En route to the next island, Fernandina, is his failure to recognize that the Natives' ges Columbus's ship is approached again by a turing, their communication of apparent hos lone canoe. This time a Native intermediary pitality in summoning the Spaniards toward not only approaches the vessel but virtually the reef, may require more than a literal in offers himself as a potential translator: "He terpretation. Before he has even encountered came up to the ship and I had him enter, their words, Columbus has already failed to which was what he asked" (85; my emphasis). imagine that the diplomacy of the San Sal By this point the initial European act of ab- vadorans, like all international diplomacy duction has become something else entirely: a involving a potentially dangerous opponent, diplomatic engagement initiated by an indig- might deploy the appearance of social niceties enous agent. Columbus nevertheless clings to to effect underlying strategy. As the voyage the unidirectional model of statecraft, outlin- continues, Columbus's inability to conceive ing a plan to carry this new voyager to Fer- of a Native interest in manipulating the flow nandina and "give him all of his belongings of information—to apprehend the multidirec in order that, through good reports of us ... tionality of diplomacy that underlies all trans the natives will give us of all that they may lation in this milieu—will continually distort have" (85). Even when Columbus observes his view of what is occurring as the voyagers

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12 8.4 Anna Brickhouse 941

king, like the hospitality-proffering Natives of

San Salvador, deliberately gave directions that

guided the vessel onto the reef, the text reg

other men needed for making a settlement, namely, a physician, a tailor, a gunner, and the like" (86). Students often know the names

. , . _ of Columbus's ships—the Santa Maria, the isters a hint of reproach toward Guacanagari x , , .... , . , ,

, , r Pinta, and the Nina—but they have rarely simply by recording his fervent invitation. , , . .. . „

r ' ' ® heard of the first Christian town, the ear Columbus understood the founding of ,. . . . , ., . . , ,

0 liest American colony, the original lettered La Navidad to be no less momentous than the .. , . . ,. ... . r

city of the imperial imagination, to use An kidnapping of the first seven Taino translators. , Rama>s phrase As Columbus's son Fernando Colón explains why? Because La Navidad was gone when in his biography of his father, the admiral Columbus returned in 1493. In the account of

,, , , r. , ,, Diego Alvarez Chanca, the physician on the reasoned that God had caused the shipwreck , p ± ,. . .

,, , , second voyage, first discovery becomes south to pass that he should make a settlement , , . . TT- • 1 « . . .. , 1 , ,. j era gothic as the ship arrives at Hispaniola. there, so that the Christians he left behind ° r , , , might trade and gain information about that ^ Spaniards find two corpses near the bank country and its inhabitants by learning their of the river and tw0 more bodies upstream, language and trading with that village [so and their ship is followed by a canoe of Taino that] when he returned . .. with reinforce- Indians who row away as soon as the Span ments, the colonists would be able to guide iards turn around and try to approach them, him in settling and subjugating that land.6 Columbus orders the lombards to be fired in

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pursue an ultimately fruitless itinerary in On his return to Spain from the West Indies, search of gold, back and forth from Cuba to Columbus made careful notations about La S Hispaniola, "according to the indications that Navidad—and not only for his own conve these Indians that I have give me" (109). nience. The notes had a symbolic purpose and

Nowhere is this more apparent than dur- were meant for a wider audience; as Fernando 3 ing the occasion of Columbus's founding of put it, "The admiral thought it well to men La Navidad, the first European settlement tion these facts in order to make known the ft in the Americas. The precise location of this position of the first Christian town founded in

settlement remains unknown, though arche- the Western world" (85). In his famous letter ologists continue to search for it in Haiti, near from the first voyage, dated 15 February 1493, the northern coast where one of Columbus's Columbus announces with fanfare, In this

ships was wrecked in December 1492, cata- island of Hispaniola, I have taken possession lyzing his decision to build a fort using the °f a large town which is most conveniently remains of the vessel. Columbus's Diario situated for the goldfields ... and have built blames the wreck on a disobedient steers- a f°rt there. It is perhaps his most profound

man who left the helm to a cabin boy against act °' co'on'a' nam'ng during a voyage based the admiral's express orders, with disastrous on tb's linguistic process. I have named this consequences. But the account later suggests town Villa de Navidad ( Letter 120). a different explanation for the accident when DesPite the Presti§e Columbus invested it introduces Guacanagari, the Taino "king," in this site> few university students today who "had sent to invite and beg [Columbus] could readil? identlfy La Navidad as the first to come with the ships to his harbor" (279; EuroPean settlement in the Americas: one

, . , T ., . . r . ~ that, in Fernando's words, included a fortress my emphasis). In this version of events, Co , , . , « j . 1 along with thirty-six men, a great store of lumbus appears to have been deliberately , , ,

^ r, trading goods and provisions, arms and artil approaching the island, in response to Gua- , , , ,, „ ,

„ .... , .. lery, the ship s boat, carpenters, caulkers, and canagari s summons. Whether or not this / 1 C' »v«n« «ûrt/in/i tv» n Ir 1 n /Y n PûfflûtYlûtit

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942 Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad | PMLA

2 hope of summoning the Spaniards, "but there can unsettlement, centered on the writings of m [is] no reply" (Chanca 145). The next day Co- failed settlements, lost colonies, disappeared 0 lumbus searches the land and finds the fort colonists, obstructed and abandoned colonial 0 burned and the "village demolished by fire" efforts as well as willfully false and otherwise £

01

£

(146). Only at this point will Columbus and failed translations? g his men accept what they have been told by Such a narrative requires a reparative ap ■c one of the captive interpreters, now a seasoned proach to a written colonial archive that we m transatlantic voyager, fluent in Spanish, who think we already know—an approach that * has the information through his own channels seeks imaginative or speculative possibilities

£ of transmission: that the settlers at La Navi- and their consequences rather than the mere « dad are "all dead" (146), destroyed by those exposure of flawed ideological positions. It

whom Columbus had earlier pronounced "the requires moving beyond the hermeneutics most timorous people in the world" ("Letter" of suspicion focused solely on the translation 120). Their translator in chains has known the of empire and the imperial uses of transla violent ending for some unspecified stretch of tion—beyond a new-historicist conception time, perhaps even since the founding of La of translation as the distorting projection of Navidad—but so unsettling is this outcome of the colonizer onto the words of the colonized, the first American settlement that, as Chanca a mere "fiction of translation" on "parade as puts it, "we had not believed the story" (146). linguistic coherence."9 The exclusionary his

torical disposition of the written archive is With this unnamed transatlantic inter- itself a powerful lens onto what Diana Tay

preter as its initial narrator, the demise of La lor has called the "repertoire" of subaltern Navidad offers a kind of alternative origins history; as a part of that repertoire, the oc story for what I am calling the "unsettlement eluded history of indigenous knowledge pro of America," a phrase enlisted here in several duction will become more visible to us when interrelated ways. Unsettlement signifies in we reframe scenes of imperial translation its literal sense as the destroying or thwart- as moments of strategic and motivated mis ing of settlement along with the active at- translation underwriting a longue durée of tempt to discourage European colonization. American unsettlement. In this sense it offers a heuristic for a wide The distinction between translation and

range of texts related to settler colonialism mistranslation is, of course, an artificial and in the Americas, including many of those unstable one, as shown by a venerable geneal that depend on and record the work of in- ogy of translation theory, from Walter Benja digenous translators. But unsettlement also min through the contemporary work of Susan argues for the kinds of counterfactual histori- Bassnett, Lawrence Venuti, Edwin Gentzler,

cist practices that work against the assumed and others. Yet even in the field of transla inevitability of European settlement in the tion studies—until recently nearly invisible Americas and of the institutions and legacies to American literary studies, as Kirsten Silva of conquest. The story of La Navidad is but Gruesz has observed (85-87)—there remains

one of many consigned to relative obscurity a tendency to downplay the relevance of by the history of those privileged, "success- translation theory to the intellectual labor of ful" settlements that tend to organize our indigenous interpreters in the colonial Amer narratives of early (North) American literary icas, as if the role of hermeneutic subject were history: Jamestown, Plymouth, Massachu- somehow naturally restricted to the transla setts Bay, Rhode Island. What might a more tor of texts and not available to the interpreter disruptive narrative look like, one of Ameri- between speaking subjects.10 When indige

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12 8.4 Anna Brickhouse 943

story line, exemplified by the tale of Squanto in chains, those who survived the voyage to (c. 1585-1622), who, though "initially the vie- Spain and back—participated in a process of

to negotiate a treaty . . . which led to over indigenous, as the translators and would-be fifty years of peaceful coexistence" (Gentzler translators traveled from island to island and 12-13). This sunny Anglo-American model from the Americas to the European contact of indigenous interpreter reasserts itself even zones created by their arrival in Spain. From in the scholarly realm most dedicated to dis- the moment they were directing the course mantling the concept of the transparently of Columbus's voyage off Hispaniola, these faithful translation. translators were forming and participating in

We need to reimagine the place of an interindigenous and hemispheric network early American literature in the "transía- of knowledge production whose contours and tion zone," to borrow Emily Apter's phrase, implications even compromised texts such as where translation and mistranslation alike Columbus's Diario may help us discern, become "means of repositioning the subject Indeed, within the broad translation zone in the world and in history" (6). Such a focus of the Red Atlantic it is indigenous knowledge, will bring transatlantic and hemispheric ap- rather than culture, that comes to the fore, proaches into dialectical relation rather than tempering the logic of multiculturalism, par privilege one by occluding the other (Bauer, ticularly the idiom of authenticity ever pres Cultural Geography; Hill; Voigt). At the same ent in scholarly encounters with indigenous time, putting unsettlement front and center history and culture. In some sense multicul in a reconstellated literary history speaks turalism and new historicism are flip sides of to the recent emphasis in Native American a single, highly durable coin: on one side we studies on the "outernational" or global di- see the powerful, self-authenticating technol mensions of Native American history and ogy of European literacy, and on the other an culture, in which United States literary his- abundance of Native cultural perspectives to tory becomes a short-lived part of a "Ion- be subsumed by a contested but still unified ger and larger continental history that is by "American" literature (Bauer, "Early Ameri definition predominantly Native American" can Literature"; Brooks, "Digging" 234-37). (Calloway 200). Mistranslation and unsettle- Instead, by recognizing what Walter Mignolo ment formed vital parts of the history of what calls the "double process of translation" by Jace Weaver calls the "Red Atlantic"—a space which indigenous epistemologies appropriate created by the movement of "Native ideas, re- and transform rather than simply resist their sources, and peoples themselves traveling] colonial counterparts, we might look in the the Atlantic with regularity and [becom- early modern Americas for the Native concep ing] among the most basic defining compo- tual origins of the so-called New World, for nents of Atlantic cultural exchange" (Weaver the discernible traces of the acquisition and 422)—and thus also contributed to what Rob- transmission of knowledge—in transatlantic

y nous interpreters become the object of analy- ert Warrior has aptly termed Native "intellec sis, the critical focus seems to narrow rapidly, tual trade routes" (People 181) and what Sean S reducing them either to victims of "histori- Kicummah Teuton has called the "interna- - cally specifiable acts of translative violence" tional imaginary" produced by "indigenous

»

(Krupat 32) or to romanticized facilitators of cosmopolitanism." Such perspectives clarify 3

Native-European harmony. The latter formu- the extent to which Columbus's interpret- ^ lation is a staple of the proleptic United States ers—those who escaped, those who remained n

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tim of a British kidnapping, seemed to for- transatlantic discovery and exchange that was ê give the horror of his abduction [and] helped not simply Native-European but also inter- «

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944 Mistranslation, Unsettlement, La Navidad f PMLA

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and hemispheric, Native-European and inter indigenous, contexts—and for the means by which this circuit of knowledge transmis sion came to shape historical outcomes and the historical record itself (Mignolo, Darker Side 224-25; Mignolo and Schiwy). To at tend to the role of Native translators in the unsettlement of America is to unsettle our

own modes of knowledge production, and to ask what we can learn from the demands that

these translators make on the interpretive processes that guide us.

Notes

1. In the ethnohistory field, James Axtell, e.g., notes that

Columbus's attempt at seizing linguistic power indicates no

"cause for smugness in the language department" (23). At the same time a long tradition of historical studies has fo cused on Native translators as cultural brokers rather than

(or sometimes in addition to) victims of imperial transla

tion, presenting disparate models of translation in the pro cess. Eric Hinderaker provides an excellent overview of this

work. In literary studies, Joshua Bellin and Laura Mielke;

Lisa Brooks, in Common Pot and "Digging"; Kristina Bross and Hilary Wyss; Matt Cohen; Laura Donaldson; and Phil

lip Round, among others, have shown that technologies of

literacy and print were not simply the overpowering im perial weapons once theorized by Tzvetan Todorov; they were elements of both "colonial Native subject formation" and the "syncretic literary practices" formed "within the

Native spaces of communicative performance" (Round 11).

Brooks, e.g., elaborates a "spatialized writing tradition" in northeastern North America that incorporated and altered

European literacy on its arrival, instead of succumbing to it {Common Pot 12), while, as Sabine MacCormack observes,

at the other end of the hemisphere indigenous "networks of communication... reached as far as the Inka frontiers and

the Amazon valley" (106).

2. The debates on sovereignty in its legal, political, and literary dimensions are wide-ranging and complex. Most pertinent here is the work that contests the implied opposition of Western knowledge and Native culture (in particular, Lyons; Warrior, People and Tribal Secrets; Womack; and Weaver and, in Latin American studies, Mignolo, Local Histories, and Adorno, Guarnan Poma)—

a dichotomy that inevitably casts the history of invasion as a story of European intellectual development versus

indigenous cultural resistance. Jace Weaver's essay on the "Red Atlantic" has been indispensable as a model for

balancing the conceptual frame of Native political sov

ereignty with the interindigenous transmission of ideas and knowledge in the colonial era (and before).

3. Though I use the shorthand phrase colonial Ameri

can, I am referring to the multiple and heterogeneous contexts of European colonialism in the Americas, which

unfolded differently at different times and in disparate British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish milieus. The term colonial as applied to the Americas has been called

into question by some scholars, as Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti note in their useful overview of the his

tory of this debate; see also Michael Warner. My use of co

lonial American follows scholarship on settler colonialism by Patrick Wolfe and others as well as the work of Aníbal

Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein; Mignolo, in Darker Side and Local Histories; and José David Saldivar in assum

ing that the operations of colonialism in the early modern Americas constituted a dramatic historical shift, influ

encing without necessarily replicating all future forms of European (and United States) colonialism, while also

producing a larger and varied coloniality of power that shaped and continues to shape modernity and the modern

colonial world in which we now live, inevitably making terms such as modern and early modern problematic.

4. On the textual status of Columbus's Diario and

other writings, see Jane xxvi-xxxiii, xlv-xlvi; Hulme 17;

and studies by Cummins; Fernández-Armesto; Henige; and Zamora, Reading.

5. Vilches discusses the mutual manipulation of trade depicted in Diario (70-73).

6. Colón 5. On the biography's questionable author ship, which has been attributed to Fernando (or Her nando) Colón, see Rumeu de Armas.

7. The 15 February letter, published in J. M. Cohen's edition of The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus as "Letter of Columbus to Various Persons . . . ," was one

of four versions announcing the news of the first voy age. This version survives in copies addressed to Luis de Santángel and Rafael Sánchez and is thus also called the Santángel-Sánchez letter to distinguish it from the 4 March "Letter to the Sovereigns," a copy of which was discovered and published in 1989 by Antonio Rumeu de Armas and later translated into English by Margarita Zamora, who also analyzes the discrepancies between the two versions and the history of their dissemination ("Christopher Columbus's 'Letter'").

8. As Nicolás Wey Gómez argues, Columbus under stood his project as a discovery of the tropical South.

9. Cheyfitz 205. Alternatively, see Gentzler, citing Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, on the "fictional turn" in translation

studies, which emphasizes the productive potential of fic tion in theorizing translation (108-09). The Taino and Cuban scholar José Barreiro's 1993 novel The Indian Chron

icles, e.g., postulates a suppressed translation of the diary of Diego Colón, one of Columbus's Native translators.

10. Michael Cronin examines the marginalization of interpreters and the "specificity and sophistication of oral

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12 8.4 Anna Brickhouse 945

thinking" in translation studies; as Doris Sommer notes of

modern courtrooms, " [Interpreters, true to their title, often

shape the exchanges more than simply translate them" (102).

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