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Reviewed by:
  • Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature by Gayle Rogers, and: Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America by Sarah Ann Wells
  • Gustavo Pellón
Gayle Rogers, Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2016. 296 pp.
Sarah Ann Wells, Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America. Northwestern University Press, 2017. 234 pp.

Rogers's and Wells's books are both comparative studies about modernist literature, but there the similarity ends. Incomparable Empires addresses how the relationship between Spain and the United States changes through readings and translations on both sides of the Atlantic (including the Caribbean) in the aftermath of the War of 1898. Although it spans the twentieth century, its emphasis is on high modernism. Media Laboratories is more narrowly conceived as to subject (authorship), period (late modernism) and geography (despite the "South America" in the title only Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay are represented).

Incomparable Empires studies the significant translation work undertaken by authors from the United States and Spain in the first half of the twentieth century and examines how this work bled into their own writing through citation, recycling, and redirection. Meanwhile, this literary commerce shaped [End Page 462] the concept of empire held by authors in both countries after 1898. With the collapse of what remained of Spain's empire and the emergence of the United States as an imperial power, authors from both countries studied each other's literature as they negotiated a stance toward empire, their homelands and modernity.

The book has an introduction and three parts, each containing two chapters. The introduction gives a succinct but substantial description of the state of academic Hispanism in the United States prior to the 1898 war and the paradoxical rise in interest in Spanish literature and art after the defeat of Spain. Rogers chronicles the pivotal role played by Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of America, who brought dozens of Hispanists and Hispanophone writers to New York in the first two decades of the twentieth century, organized an exhibit in 1909 of works by the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla at the Hispanic Society that was attended by nearly 160,000 visitors in the first month alone, and worked to sponsor the teaching of Spanish in New York City schools and at Columbia University.

Chapter 1 studies Ezra Pound's early fascination and ultimate disenchantment with Spanish literature. Rogers studies Pound's reading of El poema del Cid, his repeated translations of sections of this Spanish medieval epic, and their impact on his writing of the "Ur-Cantos." Chapter 2 is devoted to what Rogers calls John Dos Passos's restaging of the War of 1898, idealizing Spain because of what he perceived as its resistance to "capitalism, homogeneity, centralized nationality, and the devastation of modern war, all of which he saw as ingrained in American culture" (77). Chapter 3 examines Diary of a Newlywed Poet, (1917) in the context of Jiménez's trip to the United States and his marriage to the Barcelona-born, but Puerto Rico and New York-raised translator Zenobia Camprubí and their joint translation into Spanish of twenty-two volumes of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's works between 1914 and 1922. The chapter undertakes a lucid and informative study of modernismo and modernism. For Jiménez modernismo and modernism were always paired, "what good fortune I had to witness the arrival of Spanish American modernismo in Spain in the person of Rubén Darío, and then, some fifteen years later, to be present for the great success of the fundamental works of the greatest American modernists" (129–130). The chapter ends with Rogers's sadly accurate observation that, "Though poets such as Tagore are understood to have been parts of more than one modernist movement across borders and languages, Jiménez was not (and is still not) widely known to Anglophone readers. Spanish literary scholars, too, tend to read him almost exclusively in national contexts" (136). In chapter 4, Rogers studies Unamuno's contradictory attitude towards translation. While assuming a nativist belief that untranslatability is a sign of authenticity, Unamuno...

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