I would like to acknowledge the substantial comments provided by Mona Baker and John Ødemark, and by an anonymous external reviewer. María Constanza Guzmán discussed many of the key concepts with me. I owe an enormous debt to María Lugones (1944-2020) for the years of conversation, collaboration, and collaborative translation that ground this text. Any remaining errors are mine alone.

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” (La búsqueda de un pensamiento indígena no se debe sólo  al deseo de exhumarlo científicamente, sino a la necesidad de rescatar un estilo de pensar que, según creo, se da en el  fondo de América y que mantiene cierta vigencia en las poblaciones criollas) (Kusch, 2010, p. lxxv/1977, p. 11). Thinking in and from the Americas has an ontological dimension for him: being in the Americas is different from being in Europe, to paraphrase Walter Mignolo (2010, p. xviii). Kusch ties this ontological distinction to a linguistic and grammatical distinction in Latin American Spanish that does not exist in English: ser vs. estar, which I explore in some detail below. This and other key concepts posed a challenge for my co-translator, the late María 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) as part of the Duke University Press series Latin America Otherwise.

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 Marilyn 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 excavate the bases for an autochthonous Latin American philosophical tradition—a tradition emerging from and corresponding to everyday life in América, as he might have put it. In particular, the focus in what follows is on geographic, aesthetic and ontological terminology. Some of the key terms Kusch isolates and that I engage with below are América (which could be misleadingly translated as “America”); 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.1 Correspondingly, we could describe the afterlife of América granted through the linguistic borrowing in our translation as a narrative reframing of the continent. I draw on Mona Baker’s understanding of narrative here as including larger configurations rather than narrowly as only “discrete, fully articulated local ‘stories’” (Baker, 2006, p. 4). 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.

I begin by situating Rodolfo Kusch’s philosophical project within its wider context and explaining what I take to be his philosophical method. It is necessary to explore in some detail Kusch’s method of conducting research and drawing on narratives of everyday experiences because that method informed and inspired our own process of translating, as will shortly become clear. I will then turn to our corresponding method of translating his text, focusing on the process of narrative retelling we engaged in.

Situating Kusch and his philosophical method: Narratives of everyday life

Günter Rodolfo Kusch (1922-1979) is best known as an unorthodox philosopher who has been lately embraced as a decolonial thinker in Argentina, and to a lesser extent throughout Latin America. Since 2000, he has become better known to the English-reading public, due in part to the efforts of scholars and critics who have championed his work (Castro-Klarén, 2011; Mignolo, 2010; Peña, 2022; Rivara 2016), and in part to the English translation by María Lugones and me (Kusch 2010), which made it more widely available to that public.

Kusch was born in Buenos Aires to German immigrants and grew up in a middle-class urban milieu. At the Universidad de Buenos Aires, he studied philosophy, especially the work of Martin Heidegger. After graduating, he worked for a time in the Ministry of Education, and in the 1950s earned some recognition as a playwright. Over the course of his career, Kusch taught at various universities, including the Universidad de Buenos Aires and later at the Universidad Nacional de Salta in the Northeast and other provincial universities in the Argentinean Andes and Bolivia. After the military coup and the violent imposition of military law in 1976, Kusch opted to leave Buenos Aires for the village of Maimará in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, the Province of Jujuy, in the Northeast. He died a scant three years later, in 1979.

Kusch’s philosophical outlook evolved in the 1950s through a series of field trips to the Andes in Northern Argentina and Southern Bolivia. He ventured out into the countryside, striking up conversations in open-air markets, in villages, and on farms with campesinos and other rural people, especially people of Indigenous descent. Over time, he formalized this dialogic form of philosophical fieldwork into a methodology that he then practiced throughout his life—using chance encounters as entry points to write on language, epistemology, aesthetics, non-Western logics, and ontology.

Starting with his La seducción de la barbarie: Análisis herético de un continente mestizo (1953), Kusch began to grapple with the legacies of Indigenous thinking, and with worldviews that seemed to follow logics fundamentally different from the European philosophical canon in which he had been trained, but which nevertheless appeared to pervade all spheres of his society—and the continent at large. This was followed by América profunda (2000, originally published in 1962), Indios, porteños y dioses (1966b), De la mala vida porteña (1966a), and the book María Lugones and I translated, El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (1977, originally published in 1970), in addition to other publications. In this body of work, he tried to craft the basis for a way of doing philosophy that is ultimately rooted in Indigenous worldviews and metaphysics but that finds its way in fractured form in the lives of urban people in Latin America, even those who receive a Western education and who seem to be otherwise socialized into and willing to adopt Western values and ways of thinking and acting. Based on this work, Kusch has been characterized as a “philosopher of decolonization and liberation” (filósofo de la liberación y de la descolonización) (Rivara, 2016, p. 2, my translation), a “de-colonial” thinker (Mignolo, 2010, pp. xxiii, xxxv–xxxvi), “one of the key figures of Pensamiento latinoamericano [Latin American thought]” (Peña, 2022, p. 1), and “a pioneer in the effort to understand indigenous thought from within it own matrix” (Castro-Klarén, 2011, p. 426).

Kusch’s growing interest in and engagement with Indigenous thinking gradually made him quite critical of the middle-class milieu in which he grew up and the Eurocentric pieties he felt it upheld. His critique conforms neither to orthodoxies of the traditional left nor to those of the traditional right. In El pensamiento indígena y popular en América, which was first published in 1970, Kusch is iconoclastic to the point of cynicism, rejecting social science, Marxism, and other theoretical and methodological paradigms that would have been popular in the restive days of the 1960s and 1970s among urban intellectuals, liberal-minded reformers, as well as progressives in Argentina, throughout Latin America and beyond. For instance, he argues in the introduction that:

Cuestionarios, materialismo dialéctico, educación pública, sufragio universal o valores espirituales son los slogans de una América activa, pero que en el fondo no pasa de ser sino el pensamiento de una clase media emprendedora, situada en las ciudades de la costa del continente. Frente a ellas se da un pueblo relativamente inerte y hostil o un indígena segregado, que pareciera resistir esa acción. Además, los ideales arriba mencionados son distintos aspectos del pensamiento de una burguesía en crisis, en la cual incluyo gustosamente el más extremista de los revolucionarios utópicos, así como el progresista más emprendedor. Uno y otro son segregados—y la historia lo demuestra—por algo que alienta dentro mismo, del continente. (Kusch, 1977, p. 12).

Questionnaires, dialectical Marxism, public education, universal suffrage, or spiritual values are the slogans of an active América, but at base they are nothing but the thinking of an enterprising middle class, situated in the coastal cities of the continent. Opposed to them stand a relatively inert and hostile pueblo, or segregated Indigenous people, who seem to resist that active posture. Besides, the ideals mentioned above are different aspects of the thinking of a bourgeoisie in crisis, in which I gladly include the most extreme of utopian revolutionaries as well as the most enterprising of progressives. The one and the other are segregated—and history shows this—from and by something that breathes within the continent itself. (Kusch, 2010, p. lxxvi)

Kusch is unsparing in his contempt for the Latin American middle class, including its most revolutionary elements, suggesting that they live an existence alienated from the larger community. The enterprising middle class ignores something that lives within the core of all inhabitants of the hemisphere. That ‘something’ is the chief subject of the book, and, arguably, his entire oeuvre. As the middle class strives for political and social solutions that come from Europe (universal suffrage, public education, even utopian revolution), they repress everything that represents Indigenous thinking or ways of being. For Kusch, this sets up an internal clash which he illustrates by describing how philosophy is studied in Latin American universities versus how it is lived in everyday life:

En materia de filosofía tenemos en América, por una parte, una forma oficial de tratarla y, por la otra, una forma, por decir así, privada de hacerlo. Por un lado está la que aprendemos de la universidad y que consiste en una problemática europea traducida a nivel filosófico y, por el otro, un pensar implícito vivido cotidianamente en la calle o en el campo. (Kusch, 1977, p. 15)

In América we treat philosophy in one of two ways, an official way and a private way. From the university we learn of a European problematic translated philosophically. The other is an implicit way of thinking lived every day in the street or in the countryside. (Kusch, 2010, p. 1)

Studying a European problematic translated from across the Atlantic leads to sterile philosophy and inauthentic ways of being, Kusch argues, and so he chooses to focus on the philosophy of everyday life since, for him, every philosophical system corresponds or should correspond to a form of life:

Cuando Kant enuncia su teoría del conocimiento, lo hace porque en ese momento era imprescindible. Lo mismo ocurre con Hegel, quien expresa el sentir íntimo de la burguesía alemana de su tiempo. Descartes había pensado su cogito, ergo sum, porque así lo exigía el siglo de Richelieu con su razón de estado. El pensar europeo, como bien lo demostró Dilthey, siempre se vinculó a un estilo de vida. (Kusch, 1977, pp. 15–16)

When Kant enunciates his theory of knowledge, he does so because it was necessary at that moment. The same is true of Hegel, who expresses the intimate feeling of the German bourgeoisie of his time. Descartes had thought his cogito ergo sum because the century of Richelieu, with its reason of state, demanded it. European thinking, as Dilthey has so ably demonstrated, always linked itself to a way of life. (Kusch, 2010, p. 1)

Kusch thinks philosophy as it is taught, studied and practiced in América should be closer to the realities of América. “Clearly”, he states, “the issue is not to negate Western philosophy, but to look for a formulation closer to our own lives” (Claro está que no se trata de negar la filosofía occidental, pero sí de buscar un planteo más próximo a nuestra vida) (Kusch, 2010, p. 1/Kusch, 1977, p. 15). He does not seek to offer an alternative philosophy purified of European elements or free of European influence. At this late stage in transnational and global exchanges, this is not possible nor desirable. Nevertheless, he offers a narrative that is critical of taking up European problems of philosophy through an unthinking universalism, writing that is recherché, or dedication to philosophical topics that are rarefied or irrelevant.

Si nuestro papel como clase media intelectual es el de regir el pensamiento de una nación, tenemos realmente la libertad de asumir cualquier filosofía? ¿Cuál es, en suma, nuestra misión? ¿Consistirá en representar y tamizar el sentir profundo de nuestro pueblo o consiste simplemente en incrustarnos en su periferia detentando especialidades que nuestro pueblo no requiere? Evidentemente ésta es la paradoja que plantea el quehacer filosófico cuando se lo toma en profundidad. (Kusch, 1977, p. 22)

If our role as middle class intellectuals is to lead the thinking of a nation, do we really have the freedom to adopt any philosophy? In sum, what is our mission? Will it consist in representing and sifting through the depth of the sensibility of our people, or does it consist simply in lodging ourselves in its periphery, retaining specializations our people do not require? Evidently, this is the paradox that the philosophical task poses when it is taken in its depth. (Kusch, 2010, p. 6)

Kusch then proceeds to describe his own method, modelling himself on a contemporary intellectual of note—the influential historian and critic Miguel León-Portilla.

Mucho más importante que el instrumental extranjero me pareció el trabajo del mejicano León-Portilla sobre la filosofía náhuatl. Considero que este autor brinda un método muy claro, aunque traté de ampliarlo con el trabajo de campo, no sólo por la ausencia de textos quechuas y aymaras, sino también para verificar las observaciones hechas a raíz del análisis de los pocos himnos quechuas que se conservan. (Kusch, 1977, p. 13)

Much more important than the foreign instrument is the work of the Mexican León-Portilla on Náhuatl philosophy. I think this author offers us a very clear method—although I have tried to widen it with fieldwork. I have done so not only because of the absence of Quechua and Aymara texts, but also to verify the observations made as a result of the analysis of the few Quechua hymns that have been preserved. (Kusch, 2010, p. lxxvii)

Miguel León-Portilla (1922-2019) was a rigorous and gifted researcher who fashioned philological and exegetical tools that generations of researchers in several fields continue to use and build upon. He combined philological work with translation to study Nahua people’s world view and thought (pensamiento), as he put it in one of his most cited works (León-Portilla, 1990, p. vii, also see 2015, 2007). León-Portilla offered a nuanced reading of Nahua culture as well as its linguistic legacies, and the body of scholarship he produced has led to a wider embrace of Nahua culture and the Nahuatl language in contemporary Mexico as well as among Mexican-Americans, or Chicanxs. Methodologically, and this must have inspired Kusch, León-Portilla combined techniques from various disciplines, drawing on archaeological methods as he deciphered the pictographs left on ruins of the Aztec empire, poring over the codices and other manuscripts left by Nahua intellectuals and scribes, and studying the manuscripts of noted colonial missionaries such as Bernardino de Sahagún (León-Portilla, 1999).

Trained as a philosopher rather than as a linguist or historian, Kusch nevertheless also draws on colonial-era texts (especially vocabularios or early missionary glossaries of Indigenous languages) and on first-hand examination of monuments such as the Bennett Monolith. He took the unusual step (for a philosopher) of conducting research in a way that resembles what ethnographers would call participant-observation: observing shamanic rituals, interviewing Ceferino Choque, a shaman or witch doctor, and Apaza Rimachi, whom he describes as a blind witch from Tiahuanaco, as well as other yatiris (shamans or witch doctors), curanderos (healers) and brujos (witches), noting interactions he found revealing. Some of these interactions took place in Spanish, or at least the Spanish inflected by Quechua as it is spoken throughout the Andes, while others were primarily conducted in Quechua or Aymara; in the latter case, Kusch relied on an interpreter. This kind of material is usually considered more the domain of linguists, anthropologists and folklorists than philosophers. Kusch also visited archaeological sites and from these visits he elaborated novel interpretations of pre-Columbian ruins in Southern Bolivia and Northern Argentina. He noted how Indigenous cosmogonies are evident in the layout of stone shrines, the iconography rendered on ancient monoliths, and the renowned pictographs of the sixteenth-century itinerant Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala. He used these sources of qualitative evidence to explore the ontological, temporal, spatial and epistemic dimensions of Quechua and Aymara thinking and the presence of their cosmologies in everyday practices such as making agricultural decisions on water use, ritualistically reading coca leaves, and deciding whether to take a journey. Significantly, Kusch saw how these Indigenous elements of language and belief emerged in fragmentary form in contemporary popular speech in cities, among both the middle and working class, and this led him to argue that Indigenous roots lie at the core of popular culture, even when these Indigenous roots are suppressed or denied.

These methods are consistent with Kusch’s goal of uncovering a philosophy as it is lived on the streets and in the countryside. As he develops his argument in Indigenous and Popular Thinking (Kusch, 2010), he narrates these relatively mundane encounters that he presents as evidence or as points of departure for his larger narrative about being and thinking in the Americas. Kusch’s reliance on common turns of phrase and everyday conversations has been noted by several scholars. Walter Mignolo, for instance, characterizes Kusch’s “philosophical method” as drawing “from anecdotes and verbal expressions, from Aymara (mainly) and other languages’ vocabularies (dichos y decires populares)”and suggests that he “derives, infers, interprets the philosophically unsaid in the expression or the anecdote” (Mignolo, 2010, p. xxviii). Kusch sifts through these popular sayings, stories he hears, retelling of myths, and anecdotes he recounts to see what they can tell him about Indigenous realities.

Kusch developed this method in order to engage Indigenous ways of thinking. Through his fieldwork, he tries to enter into the “rhythmic” thinking, as he puts it, that beats in the heart of América. In other words, this work of philosophy does not take the form of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a systematic philosophical treatise, nor is it an ethnographic portrait. Instead, Kusch builds a bridge, or, better, a tunnel—burrowing or sensing his way in. Thus, Kusch sees his project not so much as a means of representing Indigenous or popular thinking, but rather as a laneway he provides, or an opening he is forging, with the aim of rescuing or retrieving that which had been left behind, the shattered and splintered residua after five centuries of colonial depredation.

At the centre of this project is the question of being (estar):

A su vez, no podía estar ausente en este trabajo el esbozo de un pensamiento americano que gire en torno al concepto del estar. Creo que dicho término logra concretar el verdadero estilo de vida de nuestra América, en la cual entrarían blancos y pardos, y ofrece, desde un punto de vista fenomenológico, una inusitada riqueza. Va implícito en dicho término esa peculiaridad americana a partir de la cual recién habremos de ganar, si cabe, nuestro verdadero lugar, y no esa penosa universalidad que todos pretendemos esgrimar inútilmente. (Kusch, 1977, pp. 13–14)

What could not be absent in this work is a sketch of an Américan thinking that turns on the concept of estar. I believe this term succeeds in concretizing the true way of life of our América, including white and brown people alike, and offers an unexpected richness from a phenomenological point of view. Implicit in this term is that Américan peculiarity which could ground our reaching our true place, rather than that burdensome universality to which we all pointlessly aspire. (Kusch, 2010, p. lxxvii)

Kusch sets up a particular understanding of estar (to be) at the core of a “way of life” that is particular or peculiar to América. He finds in this common verb what makes Indigenous philosophy qualitatively different from conventional philosophy as it is studied in Buenos Aires or Berlin. “I insist”, he says, “on the opposition between the urban and the Indigenous styles of thinking” (hice especial hincapié en la oposición entre el estilo de pensar del ciudadano y del indígena) (Kusch, 2010, p. lxvii/Kusch, 1997, p. 13). Later, he concretizes this distinction thus:

La distancia real que media entre un pensar indígena y un pensar acorde con la filosofía tradicional, es la misma que media entre el término aymara utcatha y el término alemán Da-sein. Heidegger toma esta palabra del alemán popular, en primer término porque Sein significa ser, con lo cual podía retomar la temática de la ontología tradicional, y en segundo término, porque Da, que significa ahí, señalaba la circunstancia en que había caído el ser. (Kusch, 1977, p. 20)

The real distance between an Indigenous way of thinking and a way of thinking consistent with traditional philosophy is the same as that between the Aymara term utcatha and the German term Da-sein. Heidegger takes up this word from ordinary German speech, first because Sein signifies being (ser)—which allowed him to take up again the themes of traditional ontology—and second because Da—which means “there”—signaled the circumstance into which being had fallen. (Kusch, 2010, p. 4)

For Kusch, Heidegger’s philosophy belongs to a German middle class of his time and place:

Su mérito consiste en haber retomado en el siglo xx el tema de ser en una dimensión exacta, tal como en realidad la vivía la clase media alemana, la cual siempre sintió como propia esa caída del ser, con todas sus implicaciones angustiosas. Si a ella agregamos los conceptos de tiempo y de autenticidad, advertimos que una temática así hilvanada, no dista del pensamiento propio de una burguesía europea que siente la crisis del individuo y que trata de remediarla. (Kusch, 1977, p. 20)

[Heidegger’s] merit lies in having taken up in the twentieth century the theme of being with an exactitude that befitted the lives of the German middle class. This class had always felt the fall of being as its own, with all of the anguish that implies. If we add to it the concepts of time and authenticity, we notice that a thematic so threaded is not so far from the thinking of a European bourgeoisie which feels the crisis of the individual and tries to remedy it. (Kusch, 2010, p. 4)

Using the same logic, Kusch seeks to carve out a space for a philosophy that corresponds to the phenomenology of the everyday in Indigenous América, and in broader stroke throughout América, albeit in fragmentary form:

Pero mucho más propio del sentir indígena seria el término utcatha. Según el mismo autor [Bertonio] significa “estar”. […] En suma, se trata de un término cuyas acepciones reflejan el concepto de un mero darse o, mejor aún, de un mero estar, pero vinculado con el concepto de amparo y de germinación. Ahora bien, es evidente que el sentir profundo de un indio, cuando está en la calle Buenos Aires de La Paz y decide tomar un camión para ir a su ayllu, ha de ser en términos de utcatha y no de Da-sein. (Kusch, 1977, pp. 20–21).

But the term utcatha is much closer to the Indigenous sensibility. Bertonio translates utcatha as “estar”. […]. The meanings of utcatha reflect the concept of a mere givenness or, even better, of a mere estar, but linked to the concept of shelter and germination. The depth of feeling of an Indian when he is on Buenos Aires Street in La Paz and decides to take a bus to his ayllu must be understood in terms of utcatha and not Da-sein. (Kusch, 2010, p. 5)

As is clear in this citation from our English translation, we preserved estar (to be) in our translation and we preserved the accent é in América in the book title and throughout. We wanted to offer these concepts as an opening into Kusch’s thinking, influenced by his own method. As Kusch remarks in an early passage:

Pero no podía quedar el trabajo limitado únicamente a la exhumación del pensamiento indígena. Considero que este pensamiento nos abre la comprensión de los problemas americanos y, por consiguiente, la segunda parte del libro está dedicada a medir las posibilidades que dicho pensamiento ofrece. (Kusch, 1977, p. 13)

But I could not limit this work to exhuming Indigenous thinking. I think this thinking opens our understanding of the problems of América; thus, the second part of the book is devoted to weighing the possibilities this thinking offers. (Kusch, 2010, p. lxvii)

We wanted our translation to embody these possibilities, these contingent futures for an América that has the potential to break apart or dismantle a sense of reality as stable and uniform. Kusch characterized Indigenous thinking as seminal, in the sense of generative and dynamic, and he wanted to capture a reality that was always subject to a vuelco, or kuty—that is, to a cosmic shift or revolution. Influenced by his philosophical method as much as by the way he linked thinking with being, we wanted to translate his text, and the key concepts he chose to engage with, in a way that was consistent with the insights he provided rather than simply render Spanish words into English as a semantic task. The latter project would have in any case proved difficult, not only because Kusch moved between Quechua, Aymara and Spanish, but also because the conceptual interpretation of popular speech he engages in has no counterpart in the dominant modalities of Anglophone speech and perception. Instead, we thought, the translation should act as an opening in a metaphorical fence between Spanish, Quechua and Aymara on the one hand, and English on the other, an opening that can allow words and concepts to move back and forth among these different worlds. What this entailed in practice was preserving words or concepts from the original in select cases. As we recontextualized these key concepts in our English-language text, they inevitably took on new nuance and meaning. América in an English text means something different from América in a Spanish text, as I explain in more detail below.

There is a long tradition of translators refusing to offer smooth, seamless texts for easy consumption by the target audience, even though the contemporary aesthetic for English readers at least seems to demand just that kind of easy-to-assimilate text. This refusal by translators to meet the expectations of their audience can have different motivations, including the desire to bring the reader closer to the writer’s worldview, to paraphrase Schleiermacher (Schleiermacher, 1992, p. 6). Lawrence Venuti famously termed this technique “foreignization” (Venuti, 2008). A foreignized text draws attention to itself and in the best of cases can momentarily arrest the attention of a reader, even defamiliarize them with the conventions and norms of their language and make them reflect on the experience of reading. At worst, as Antoine Berman has pointed out, the resulting text will lean toward the unintelligible (1992, p. 4). Our own strategy to navigate this dilemma was to try and bring the reader along to new horizons, to signal to the reader that they were reading a text originally written in Spanish, and one that they would have to work to understand, while we tried to ease that passage by glossing key terms and explaining their constellation.

I characterized translating Kusch’s text as breaching a fence between languages to bring a reader to new horizons. In this approach to translation, the languages are not regarded as distinct and discontinuous with one another, but rather as part of a larger ecology on which a border has been imposed. The border can be torn asunder or opened, thus linking the languages separated by it. This understanding of language and translation is akin to translanguaging,2 an approach where languages are not treated as discreet and separate, but rather are brought together to form a repertoire of words and phrases, where the distinction between them is understood as an ideological construct (García & Wei, 2014; Canagarajah, 2011). Translanguaging is thus a way of articulating new realities, new ways of being and acting in evolving social, cultural and political contexts, as Creese et al. put it (2018, p. 26). It refers to

new language practices that make visible the complexity of language exchanges among people with different histories, and releases histories and understandings that had been buried within fixed language identities constrained by nation-states. (García & Wei, 2014, p. 21)

Translanguaging is the enactment of language practices which “use different features that had previously been independently constrained by different histories, but which now are experienced in speakers’ interactions as one new whole” (Creese et al., 2018, p. 27).

As translators, we came to this project with a recognition of how English and Spanish are already connected in myriad ways—by geography, by history, and most of all, by agile users of language whose continued creativity forms the basis for García’s (2009) notion of translanguaging. In a curious way, this approach to the translation also paid homage to the original, since Kusch’s original text similarly combines different languages (Aymara, Quechua, Spanish) and registers—from the colloquial Spanish spoken in Latin America, including popular sayings and expressions, to the rarefied language of philosophy and linguistics, including the specialized vocabulary used to discuss Heidegger, Kant, and Whorf in Spanish.

We developed a more nuanced sense of which of Kusch’s key concepts needed to stay in Spanish and which we could translate, and how, from our own version of translation fieldwork. We retraced Kusch’s steps in the Andes and got to know people in Maimará, in the North of Argentina, where Kusch lived the final years of his life, and where his widow still resided. Through extended stays, we took better measure of the worlds he encountered while living there. The next section describes our background research in more detail.

Researching and translating Kusch

In 2003, María Lugones invited me to co-translate Rodolfo Kusch’s El pensamiento indígena y popular. I accepted the invitation, and in order to understand the context of Kusch’s work, including his observation of interactions with people in the Argentinean and Bolivian Andes and his remarks on rituals and the use of common speech, we decided to do some preliminary background research. We conducted field research for several months in Jujuy, in the Puna of Argentina, in the altiplano or high Andean plateau, near the border with Bolivia. Through several research stays in Jujuy, we were able to ask philosophers as well as everyday rural people how they understand concepts that were key for Kusch: concepts such as Pachamama (Mother Earth), kuty (the turning over of the universe), and utcatha (which Kusch connects with being, dwelling and germination).3 Spending several months in Jujuy allowed us to visit some of the sites Kusch visited, observe the type of rituals he observed, speak to philosopher Mario Vilca, a Kusch expert from the Puna, Lucila Bugallo, an anthropologist, as well as various curanderos and curanderas (healers), and participate in daily Andean life—from the kitchen to the marketplace. Our experiences deepened our understanding of Kusch’s project and answered many of the riddles we had to solve as translators of his text.

I was not uncritical of the text we were translating. Given Kusch’s propensity to use 400-year-old colonial-era glossaries and bilingual dictionaries (vocabularios), I suspected his knowledge of Quechua and Aymara might have been spotty. Elizabeth Lanata, Kusch’s widow, confirmed as much. As a linguistic anthropologist, I found Kusch’s practice of relying on these dictionaries flawed. For example, he does not seem to take into account the fact that Quechua and Aymara as languages have evolved since the colonial era, or that the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries, as assiduous as they may have been, might have been unreliable lexicographers (Price, 2023, pp. 23–52). A philosopher who does linguistic analysis, comparative philology and fieldwork, Kusch engages in other practices that would also raise eyebrows among anthropologists. He draws connections across time (five centuries) and space (from the North of Argentina to various points in Bolivia and even to the Hopi in what is now the United States) in the use of ritual and symbol in a way that many contemporary ethnographers might find hasty or haphazard. At other points we had trouble working out his logic, including his exploration of numerology, and how he associates different ruins in ways we found esoteric.

Vigilance was thus warranted. Yet one can lose the forest for the trees. Kusch’s methodological innovation of doing fieldwork as a philosopher, for example, is inspiring. Similarly, his discussion of the instability of the cosmos in the Quechua worldview and the corresponding necessity for ritual action to try and stave off the kuty, or an overturn in the cosmos, is compelling. One must propitiate the Pachamama or she may swallow you. I found this striking, given the idealized portrait of Indigenous life that is sometimes painted as a harmonious coexistence between Indigenous people and nature. Even if one quibbles with the small things, in other words, Kusch’s most basic motivation is to reach for an Américan thinking that is not contained by European thought, and this we believed was a worthwhile endeavour that needed to be captured in the translation.

Deciding whether to translate key concepts meant we had to be clear about the context of translation: were we going to treat Latin America as a land apart and translate the Spanish, Aymara and Quechua across the linguistic border? Or were we going to try and build a bridge, treating an Anglophone audience as part of the larger project that Kusch may have had in mind? This was a metapragmatic consideration in the sense that it was about deciding on the context for the translation. In the end, we decided to keep the key words in the original language since translating them could, we felt, stunt Kusch’s ambition and his careful exegesis of the core concepts intended to channel the reader into the unstable reality he thought characterized the everyday in América.

Marilyn Gaddis-Rose has suggested that translations of literary texts can, in effect, be a form of literary criticism (1998, p. 7), a critical interpretation of a work of literature. In applying her understanding of the translation of poetry and fiction to the translation of philosophy and the human sciences more generally, I am extending her argument: translating concepts elaborated in academic texts, I would argue, involves actively interpreting these concepts, building on them, lending them an afterlife, in Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase (Price, 2008). Translating concepts from Latin American philosophy, moreover, is a form of analysis from which new narratives of modernity can emerge. In other words, translating is, or can be, a means of constructing new narratives, or of revealing existing ones to a new audience. In the case of Latin American philosophy, a translation can also provide the necessary scaffolding for these alternative narratives of modernity to circulate and prosper in new environments.

The translator’s task of midwifing narratives, including new narratives, can be aided by paratextual activities such as the convention of prefacing a translated book with a translator’s introduction, glossing, footnoting, writing reviews and stand-alone academic articles (including the present one) and providing interviews. Paratextual material of this type allows translators to act as cultural brokers, contextualizing Latin American philosophy for a new audience, participating in the cultural and linguistic refraction of a text (Lefevere, 2000) from one language ecology to another—even, at the margins, participating in entwining those ecologies together through various processes of knowledge transfer (Guzmán, 2020).

Adapting Gaddis-Rose’s (1998) method of reading a translation alongside its original, I will now focus on a number of core concepts in Kusch’s philosophy. My analysis of these concepts is reflected in the translation, and it is intended to promote new narratives that highlight the interdependence as well as the conflict and tensions between Eurocentric knowledge and the type of thinking emerging from Latin America, with Kusch as a leading example of the latter. These alternative narratives are manifest in the translation and further elaborated on in our “Translators’ Introduction”(Lugones & Price, 2010).

América

América is a common word in Latin America, but we were unable to find a fair equivalent in English. One obvious translation, America, we rejected out of hand, given that America denotes the United States in most contexts. Indeed, through a strange kind of linguistic imperialism, the United States seems to have arrogated the word America to itself. It has done the same with the United States: Mexico is also officially named the “United Mexican States” but is hardly ever referred to as such—only as “Mexico”. As my co-translator once pointed out to me, the United States of America arguably has no name that does not in itself enact or represent a kind of imperialism.

Kusch also occasionally uses the terms sudamericano and latinoamericano, among others, but he most often uses América and at times its adjectival form, americano, which is consistent with his emphasis on the Indigenous presence throughout the hemisphere. The Americas might have worked as a translation for América, but we were concerned that this would still have framed the continent within a kind of European or Eurocentric view of the world. Latin America would have emphasized Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking perspectives whereas Kusch clearly wished to centre Indigenous peoples throughout the continent, including the Hopi, Navajo, and others in the Northern part of the continent. Had he been writing today, Kusch might have used the increasingly popular Abya Yala, but that term was not as common with non-Indigenous writers in the early 1970s.

América with an accent had several advantages. Keeping the Spanish term signalled to the reader that the text was a translation, and secondly, it defamiliarized the term, the language, and the continent for the English-language reader in a salubrious way. Retaining the accent in an English language context is a provocation, as it draws attention to the contrast between a conventional geography of the continent and what América could portend. Where Kusch was simply using the conventional Spanish word to refer to the continent, the accent in English conferred a new and unexpected nuance, we hoped. América does not refer to a given geographic entity, much less a nation or a geo-political formation. It recuperates the past and present even as it leans towards the future. Kusch’s vision of América unearths half-buried forms of life from within urban and rural habitats that draw on the rhythmic thinking and thousand cosmologies of Indigenous nations that snake their way through contemporary life. These ways of living and thinking are nonetheless marked by the erosion brought on by waves of settler colonialism over the last five centuries. América is impure and unstable—it is a contingent possibility, it is incipient, not a fully realized place.

Retaining the accent makes the exercise reflexive, since América, as I believe Kusch intended it, challenges the boundaries that mark where one language, identity, or nation ends and another begins. It troubles the linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries among Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone, Indigenous, and Spanish speakers, as well as speakers of various patois, creoles, and Papiamentu throughout the hemisphere. Maintaining América in Spanish—or, framed differently, bringing it into English with an accent—loops us into a hermeneutical circle.

Pulcritud vs. hedor

If América, as a concept, signals an alternative narrative of geography, the distinction between pulcritud and hedor provides an alternative narrative along the axis of aesthetics and urban design, and the distinction between ser and estar an alternative ontological narrative.

In América Profúnda (2000), another work by Rodolfo Kusch that has not yet been translated, Kusch observes that a line runs down the centre of the continent between pulcritud and hedor. Despite the terms’ originating in a book other than the one we translated, I include them here because I believe they complement the other concepts and distinctions we grappled with, and because they provide further insight into the narrative Kusch elaborated and the trajectory of his thought over the course of his many books. I have also begun to translate this book into English. The distinction between pulcritud and hedor could be rendered loosely in English as contrasting order, cleanliness and neatness with stench, stink or pestilential odour. For Kusch, this contrast marks the distinction between modernity and the connotations of Indigeneity, where Indigenous people are often described by a (racist) dominant culture as smelly or stinking. It should go without saying that the distinction is imagined rather than real. Yet it informs people’s individual perceptions—it is a visceral, phenomenological reaction to the supposed stench of the subaltern. But also, clearly, modernity and the search for order (pulcritud) and discipline in Latin America encompass nation-building projects, economic programmes and development schemes.4

Rodolfo Kusch draws the distinction between pulcritud and hedor in order to cover a wide range of phenomena of I/Other relations that mark the conventional relationship between the urban middle-class and its others (such as the urban underclass, the rural, people of the African diaspora, and Indigenous): “the streets stink, they stink of the beggar, and so does the old Indian [sic: “la vieja india”] who speaks to us but we understand nothing she says, just as it’s true that we are clean and orderly” (las calles hieden, que hiede el mendigo y la india vieja [sic], que nos habla sin que entendamos nada, como es cierta, también, nuestra extrema pulcritud)5 (Kusch, 2000, p. 16). This is a psycho-social phenomenon for Kusch: “the truth is we’re afraid, a fear of not knowing how to call all of this that is irritating us, that is outside and that makes us feel vulnerable and trapped” (La verdad es que temenos miedo, el miedo de no saber cómo llamar todo eso que nos acosa y que está afuera y que nos hace sentir indefensos y atrapados) (Kusch, 2000, p. 11). By invoking a “we”, Kusch is criticizing a social class—city-dwellers from the middle-class—in which he includes himself. From that insider perspective, he uncovers and denounces the psychological impulse to push away or quell that which cannot be contained by oneself. Calling oneself clean and orderly is a way of calming that psychic dissonance: “there’s a certain satisfaction in thinking that effectively, we’re clean and that the streets are not, nor is the beggar nor the old Quechua woman” (“Hay cierta satisfacción de pensar que efectivamente estamos limpios y que las calles no lo están, ni el mendigo aquel, ni tampoco la vieja quechua”) (Kusch, 2000, p. 11).

Kusch writes disparagingly of how this fearful urban middle-class imagines a solution to the problem of the disorder and the miasma of bad smell that emanates from the streets of América:

[…] El borracho de chicha, el indio rezador o el mendigo hediento, será cosa de internarlos, limpiar la calle e instalar baños públicos. La primera solución para los problemas de América apunta siempre a remediar la suciedad e implantar la pulcritud. (Kusch, 2000, p. 13)

If it’s the guy drunk on chicha, the Indian beseeching us or the foul-smelling beggar then it’s nothing other than a question of putting them in prison, cleaning up the street, and installing public bathrooms. The first solution that América always tries is to clean out the squalor and install order.

The fix to the problems of dirt and disorder is to build more prisons, pick up the garbage, and engage in better urban planning.

The division between pulcritud and hedor also operates on the level of language. Hedor brings us to a rougher aesthetic. In the context of translation, an aesthetics of hedor has an affinity with the notion of textual resistance Lawrence Venuti articulated several decades ago and his parallel ethical injunction to “do wrong at home […] by deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience” (Venuti, 2008, p. 16). The defamiliarization brought about by the linguistic smuggling of hedor into English arrests the eye of the reader, drawing attention to the process of translation, alerting the English-language reader to the textual manipulation exercised by the translation. An hedor aesthetics also has some affinity with what Glissant called the right to opacity: “We claim our right to opacity” (Nous réclamons le droit à l’opacité) (Glissant, 1990, p. 209, my translation). The text need not reveal all the secrets of the writer, it need not yield to an aesthetic of transparency. Transparency can be an oppressive aesthetic. Transparency or the desire for transparency can also be an epistemicidal force, whereas that which is constructed as hedor resists the verbal hygiene imposed by pulcritud. The hedor creeps out from under the imposed order, seeps out through its cracks and forces new cracks, and in this way constantly threatens the pulcritud, the colonial linguistic order and hygiene. This is the linguistic conflict that runs through América in speech and oral traditions, as well as in writing. It provides the basis for this alternative narrative of modernity, and of an official, superior language.

Kusch’s highlighting of the distinction between hedor and pulcritud is an attempt at recasting the narrative of modernity in the West and Latin America (and perhaps elsewhere too). If the dominant developmentalist narrative in Latin America is one of the spread of Western reason, literacy, republicanism, representative democracy, progress, linear time, capitalism, Western education, and the imposition of Western binary understandings of gender and sexuality, then the threat of hedor, of Indigenous resurgence, challenges and complicates that narrative, since it eschews many of the nostrums typically woven into narratives of progress. It also complicates the conventional framing of politics as a left-right continuum. Kusch constructs an alternative framing of modernity. He examines the contours of European thought and explains how, from that Eurocentric point of view, América is wretched and hapless. But from within the hedor, from within the view of the streets or that which is Black or Indigenous or working-class, the urge to cleanliness and order rests on a psycho-social preoccupation with resolving inner conflict into an obsession with developmental projects and goals that are, at root, just a form of suppressing the existential instability that is also a cosmic instability. Rather than dwelling on that moment of psychological uncertainty and discomfort and confronting the inherent social volatility, societies and individuals motivated by an urge for pulcritud try to find technological fixes or political solutions—whether Marxist, technocratic, Chicago School economics, or any number of alternatives.

Ser vs. estar

The last example concerns a philosophical distinction that rests on a linguistic category. In Spanish, ser and estar are usually translated as forms of the verb “to be”. As elementary students of Spanish conventionally learn, ser refers to permanent or existential statements (“I am tall”), and estar to accidental, circumstantial or temporary conditions (“I am sad”). They are both as common in Spanish as the verb “to be” in English—in other words, they are basic building blocks of speaking and writing and provide the girding for language, action, existential statements, identity claims, descriptions, referring and predicating, and so on.

Kusch attaches considerable weight to the distinction between these two verbs and gives it a peculiarly Latin American twist, tied to Indigenous ontologies.

Es curioso que el castellano marginal que se habla en Sudamérica, especialmente cuando se quiere hablar bien, resulta excesiva y sospechosamente decantado, hasta el punto de que este último termina por ser sumamente incómodo. Por ejemplo, una expresión como yo soy, siempre va compañada de cierto esfuerzo, por el cual lo, que se es, está pegado al sujeto y afirmado enfáticamente. Además, nunca se es totalmente médico. (Kusch, 1977, p. 251)

It is odd that the marginal Spanish spoken in South América, particularly when one wants to speak properly, becomes excessively and suspiciously qualified, to the point that it becomes very cumbersome. For example, though an expression such as I am is always accompanied by a certain effort, so that what one is is glued to the subject and emphatically affirmed, one never is totally what the predicate expresses. (Kusch, 2010, p. 158)

For Kusch, whose goal, after all, is to reveal Indigenous and popular thinking in América, the distinction marks an ontological contrast between, on the one hand, a Western conceptualization of subject-object relations, corresponding to ser, in which the world is fixed, definable, knowable, and subject to the laws of cause and effect, and, on the other hand, an “unstable relation among the elements of the cosmos”, signified by estar (Lugones & Price, 2010, p. lviii). It is important to underscore that Kusch’s central claim is that the grammatical distinction in Spanish between ser and estar has taken on a special significance in Latin American popular usage. As I showed above, Kusch ties estar, as used in América, to the Aymara term utcatha, and thus to an Aymara ontology. He implies that this grammatical distinction performs a particular function in Latin America that it does not necessarily perform in the Spanish spoken in Spain or elsewhere. Kusch uses as an example the popular expression estar/estoy trabajando (“to be working/I am working”) instead of yo trabajo (“I work”). He suggests that this routine usage in América captures a tentative, protean subject in a shifting, unstable universe, “as if whatever one is doing were the momentary product of a great instability which hovers in an unseen background” (como si aquello en que se anda fuera el producto momentáneo de una gran inestabilidad que se cierne en un trasfondo que no se ve) (Kusch, 2010, p. 159/Kusch, 1997, p. 251). He also ties this reliance on estar to the Quechua notion of the kuty, or what he calls, following Guamán Poma de Ayala and others, Pachakuti, the vuelco, the turning over of the universe. For the Quechua, the history of the planet and the universe is marked by five great ages, each of which ended with a kuty of cataclysmic remaking of the cosmos. The universe, and the planet, the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, remains subject to this cosmic instability, where everything and anything can be lost, swallowed, annihilated or overturned. The second half of Kusch’s book, and especially its crescendo, is concerned with elaborating this distinction and this quality of instability as it emerges in popular speech in Argentina and, by extension, throughout the rest of the Spanish-speaking and Indigenous parts of the continent.

Esto coincide con la característica argentina, por no decir americana, que pareciera consistir en sumergir todo lo que es estable dentro de la circunstancia, como si aquello en que se anda fuera el producto momentáneo de una gran inestabilidad que se cierne en un trasfondo que no se ve. Un gobierno recién instalado es siempre inestable, lo que se tiene también es inestable, y aun la opinión propia va acompañada por la disculpa del me parece a mí. En general se sumerge lo estable en lo inestable, o sea que se puebla el mundo de circunstancias, y se reduce lo que es a lo que está. (Kusch, 1977, p. 251)

This [use of the verb estar] coincides with the Argentinean and, even more widely, Américan characteristic, which seems to consist in submerging everything stable within circumstance, as if whatever one is doing were the momentary product of a great instability which hovers in an unseen background. A recently established government is always unstable, what one owns is also unstable, and one even excuses one’s opinion by accompanying it with it seems to me. Generally, the stable is submerged in the unstable, that is, the world is populated by circumstances, and what is reduced to what está. (Kusch, 2010, pp. 158–159)

Being dwells within circumstance; this Indigenous worldview is not one of harmony with nature. Quite the contrary, people must constantly engage in ritual propitiation of the Pachamama as insurance against an overturn or vuelco. For Kusch, in other words, this cosmic instability has bubbled up through the colonially imposed Spanish language, inflecting it with an Indigenous sensibility, albeit as broken shards. Glissant would refer to a similar phenomenon as forced poetics. Poetics is forced when a subordinate people tries to push their expression through the colonizer’s language (Glissant, 1999, p. 120–121).

My co-translator María Lugones and I tried to introduce this philosophical distinction in our English translation by preserving estar and ser, not only because the distinction was key for Kusch, but also because we thought it could be a useful contribution to English-language philosophy. The distinction between estar and ser provides an alternative narrative of modernity along the axis of cosmology and ontology.

Conclusion

Kusch longs for an América that is potential, not yet real, and that is currently manifest only in fragments. He tries to recuperate an Indigenous thinking that could help realize that vision of América. Correspondingly, we sought in our translation to shore up that vision where current identities and categories may be inadequate or out of sync with what Kusch wants to bring into being (Griffiths, 2012, p. 22).

The theory of translation that informs this article assumes that translating texts in the human sciences is a form of doing original social analysis, in this case as critique or critical elaboration of an original text. Translation thus goes beyond merely transposing meaning from one set of signs to another. Translators consciously attempt to reveal the epistemic foundations on which the source relies. Translation in this sense is a creative act to the extent that all critical work, such as literary criticism, art history, or philosophical critique are creative acts.

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. Visión de los vencidos: Relaciones indígenas de la Conquista is the title of a celebrated historiographic text that is simultaneously a translation of Nahua thought by Miguel León-Portilla (2007). Although the published translation has the title Broken spears: Aztec accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (2006), a literal translation might be “The viewpoint of the vanquished: Indigenous accounts of the Conquest”. Eurocentric modernity, viewed from the margins (as in León-Portilla’s text), 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.