In El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (1977), Argentinian philosopher Rodolfo Kusch aims to recuperate a form of thinking he believes lies at the root of the American continent, though he thinks it is covered or buried underneath a dominant way of thinking imported from Europe. “The search for an Indigenous way of thinking”, he explains, “is motivated not only by the desire to uncover it scientifically, but by the need to rescue a style of thinking which, as I see it, is found in the very depth of América and maintains a certain potency among people born and rooted here” (Kusch, 2010, p. lxxv). Thinking in and from the Americas has an ontological dimension for him: being in the Americas is different from being in Europe. Kusch ties this ontological distinction to a linguistic and grammatical distinction in Spanish that does not exist in English: ser vs. estar. This and other key concepts posed a challenge for my co-translator, the late Maria Lugones, and me as we set out to produce an English translation of his book, which we eventually published as Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América (Kusch, 2010).
The purpose of this essay, however, is not merely to fret over how to translate words from one language to another; rather, it is to consider how translating key concepts in a given body of work can bring worldviews and linguistic horizons into new relationships with one another and engender novel narratives and traditions. As Gaddis Rose (1998) has argued, translating concepts can further be a means of analyzing or interpreting those concepts. Translation, in this reading, is a way of giving textual and material life to the intellectual activity of conceptual analysis, a way of embodying or realizing that analysis in textual form. In the particular case of translating Kusch, deciding whether and if so how to translate key concepts such as estar (to be) or América can provoke a reflection on the practice of translation itself. Thus, translating can be a metapragmatic exercise, engendering thinking by both translator and reader on how languages and conceptual schemas might stand in relation not only to each other but also in relation to an evolving social context in a dynamic way, a dynamism enhanced by the very practice of translation.
To illustrate how translation practices can instigate this kind of reflection, I focus on several difficult-to-translate concepts that Kusch identifies in common words from Latin American Spanish as his entry points to uncover the bases for an autochthonous Latin American philosophical tradition— or Américan philosophical tradition, as he puts it. In particular, the focus is on geographic, aesthetic, and ontological terminology. Some of the key terms Kusch isolates and that I engage with are América (which could be misleadingly translated as “America” or “the Americas”); pulcritud (order or cleanliness) in contrast to hedor (stench) as a binary at the heart of Latin American modernity; and, most of all, as I already mentioned, the distinction in Spanish between estar and ser, on which Kusch bases a complex ontological theory informed by Quechua and Aymara thinking. In subjecting these quotidian terms to exegesis and conferring upon them a philosophical heft, Kusch is not merely describing an existing state of affairs; instead, he points to a beyond, a hoped-for reality for Latin America that does not yet exist. The “América” of his title is aspirational. Correspondingly, we could describe the afterlife of América granted through the linguistic borrowing in our translation as a narrative reframing of the continent. Through the translation, we can see an emergent alternative to hegemonic geographies. If a shimmering, incipient América offers an alternative narrative to conventional geography with its deference to the nation state, national borders, and possibly identity, pulcritud and hedor present an alternative narrative along the axis of aesthetics and urban design, and the distinction between ser and estar an alternative ontological narrative.
The focus on Latin American thinking, social theory and philosophy allows new narratives to come into being. What emerges from the translation of Kusch’s El pensamiento indígena y popular en América is an alternative narrative to those taken for granted in European and Eurocentric thinking. This alternative narrative begins by describing the emergence of Eurocentric modernity as seen from Latin America. Eurocentric modernity, viewed from the margins, posits a split or binary divide between technological innovation, progress, economic advancement, and the lulling comforts of consumerism, on the one hand, and the perceived irrationality, ethnic diversity and Babel of multilingualism on the other. The complementary narrative, also from within the margins, projects an imaginary of América, predicated on a cosmic instability and logics of everyday life that break with positivism, linear reason, Newtonian causality, American pragmatism, the Cartesian divide of mind/body, as well as other dualist ontologies. We viewed the frontier of language as a threshold at which one could cut a hole in the fence – create an opening between languages – rather than a barrier one could only pass through conventional linguistic translation. Selecting a text and translating it is not just a question of aesthetics and semantics, but also of ethics and politics, and even potential futures. Thus translation— what is selected for translation and how it is translated—can also be a question of epistemic justice.
