The City of Translation: Poetry and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (review)

The City of Translation sets out to examine the influence of literature on political life and that of political life on literature through the guiding figure of Colombian statesman and letrado Miguel Antonio Caro (1843–1909). Rodríguez García studies how literature and philology legitimated the late nineteenth-century bureaucrat-literati dismantling of the liberal state that had been bequeathed by the Colombian Revolution of Independence, and, particularly, how these Colombian right-wing letrados effectively used poetry and philology to undermine the legitimacy of the political order, doing so without explicitly derogating constitutional freedoms.

Prominent in the book’s title, translation serves to identify how the Colombian reactionary lettered city “rephrased” texts in order to make them conform to their own conservative ideologies, providing mainly resonances with Scripture and Catholicism. The Colombian reactionary lettered city studied by the author was, in sum, a city of philological and literary re-coding. As an example of this ideological re-coding, Rodríguez García provides the “translation” of the constitutional notion of igualdad into ecualidad. In God’s eyes all persons are equal (igualdad), but in positive legislation the approach offered was ecualidad: the idea that since all persons are different by nature, equal rights to civil government should be had only by elite Colombians with proper education and the alleged moral superiority that stems from good breeding (21–22).

The core questions on the intersection of philology and politics are discussed in the four chapters of the book. Chapter 1, “The Colombian Lettered City—Philology, Ideology, Translation,” discusses Miguel Antonio Caro and La Regeneración at length, focusing on the dismantling of federalism at the hands of Colombia’s reactionary lettered group. The most reactionary in this group, Caro among them, were not only active in politics but aimed to re-Christianize society after the wake of the more secular liberal state, leading Rodríguez García to consider the theocratic philology of these Christian fundamentalists. The author discusses in particular how the theocratic state used philology to subvert legislation, viewing inherited laws as sufficiently multiple (accumulating rather than superseding) for jurists to need philological training or sensibility in order to interpret laws. Put differently, inherited jurisprudence and philology demanded similar skills of textual interpretation and recognition of original and contextual meanings and intent, a fact exploited by reactionary letrados. As Rodríguez García assesses, Colombian reactionary legists like Caro debunked the liberal-democratic state by complementing and even “correcting” legislation, advancing Christian doctrine as a source of law, and allowing for the poetry and historiography of elite laypersons to have the force of law. The chapter discusses as a main example the textual criticism of Andrés Bello’s juristic writing—the Código Civil of Chile—comparing it to La Regeneración’s theocratic philology.

Chapter 2, “The Regime of Translation in Caro’s Colombia,” interprets the relation between translation and politics in Caro’s writings. As vice president (1885–1898), Caro had few governmental limits and no accountability, ruling behind the scenes and by use of edicts. With the Constitution of 1886, with which he was involved to a great extent, the president could assume extraordinary faculties at will, de facto suspending the legal order. Contravening even this retrograde 1886 constitution, Rodríguez García examines how La Regeneración ruled in what amounted to “a permanent state of exception” (47), in a period that also saw the signing of a Concordat with the Vatican, which gave the Church complete control of the educational system as well as complete immunity in civil courts. This chapter also answers an additional goal of the book: to make more available to Latin Americanists the religious, theological, and legal texts that supported production of meaning in the late nineteenth century. As such, the chapter provides an account of Hispanic political theories of sovereignty by figures like Gabriel René-Moreno, Francisco Suárez, and Álvarez...