Traduttore/Traditore: Motivated Mistranslation and the Unsettlement of America

Works of tremendous energy and ambition during the past few years have enriched our insights into early contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas in large part by shouldering the challenge of understanding alternative, nonalphabetic writing systems. Annette Kolodny, in her pioneering book In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (2012), deciphers Mi’kmaq pictographic bark scrolls with the help of Mi’kmaq elders in an effort to recover native understandings of early contact with Europeans. Birgit Rasmussen’s Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (2012) discusses Ashinaabeg birch bark scrolls, Incan quipu, and Haudenosaunee wampum, among other non-Western notational frameworks. Both studies challenge conventional ideas of what constitutes a literary source.

Anna Brickhouse shares these scholars’ interest in recovering indigenous perspectives on early encounters with Europeans, but she relies on traditional alphabetic literary sources. The result, however, is no less groundbreaking than these works focused on alternative literacies. Deploying the traditional tools of the literary scholar—particularly the art of close reading and paying attention to conventions of genre—Brickhouse’s book thoroughly unsettles traditional perspectives on an intriguing early encounter. The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945, is a brilliant, imaginative piece of literary and historical detective work, one that makes clear the importance of integrating translation studies into American studies generally, and transnational American studies in particular. That Brickhouse manages to do so in a genuine page-turner (in several sections) is all the more impressive. I sincerely hope she kept the movie rights.

Europeans took the words of native translators like the man named Paquinquineo (who later became known as Don Luis de Velasco) at face value, as recorded by the Spanish friars who employed him as a translator; they failed to consider that he may have had instrumental reasons for saying things he said, that he may have been exercising a level of agency inconceivable to the Spanish colonial and religious authorities. Brickhouse refuses to credit this fascinating sixteenth-century interpreter with less agency and intelligence than his employers. The result is a startlingly new understanding of what may turn out to be an astutely orchestrated effort on the part of a man who was indigenous, multilingual, and cosmopolitan, to protect the land of his birth from Spanish colonization.

Brickhouse begins with the familiar outlines of the story. A Spanish ship sails into what is now the Chesapeake Bay in 1561 and takes on board an Algonquian-speaking Indian named Paquinquineo (later christened Don Luis de Velasco). Over the next 10 years he crosses the Atlantic four times; lives in Spain, Cuba, the Floridas, and Mexico City; becomes bilingual; receives a classical education and a royal allowance; and proposes to Spanish colonial and religious leaders the project of returning to his birthplace, Ajacán, to convert the inhabitants and establish a Spanish settlement there.

The stories that Don Luis tells about the abundance of Ajacán are appealing to his Spanish interlocutors and in 1570 he departs Cuba and sails up the Atlantic coast to his homeland with a group of Jesuits who are charged with forming a colony. Upon their arrival, Don Luis acts as a translator between the Natives and the settlers; he informs the Jesuits that the people of Ajacán are delighted by this turn of events and are indeed imploring the Spaniards to stay. Yet when the ship’s pilot returns eighteen months later to deliver supplies, the settlement at Ajacán has disappeared.…

(1)

A young woodsman who accompanied the Jesuits explains what happened: “The Jesuits were murdered, he claims, by their own translator, the cosmopolitan Don Luis de Velasco” (1).

In this erudite, far-ranging book, Brickhouse tracks the story of Don Luis through Jesuit and Dominican colonial letters and reports in Spanish, nineteenth-century revisionist histories in English, an obscure twentieth-century American historical novel, and everything in between. Although the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century...