In/Subordination: Pseudo/Translation and the Cultural Cold War in Juan Gelman's The Poems of Sidney West

Abstract

Abstract From 1968 to 1969 the Argentine modernist Juan Gelman invented and translated into Spanish a contemporary from the United States, named Sidney West, who wrote about small-town mid-American life. Traducciones III: Los poemas de Sidney West ( Translations III: The Poems of Sidney West ) is a pseudotranslation—a text disguised as a translation that in fact has no corresponding original. While most critics identify Gelman's recourse to pseudotranslation as a personal undertaking, this essay examines the experiment for the first time within the inter-American Cold War context of the 1960s, locating pseudo/translation as an in/subordinate poetic protocol particularly well equipped for intervening in the soft-power mechanisms of US cultural imperialism—in ways that are both treasonous and collaborative. This essay recovers the anti-imperialist politics of the West poems, expands conversations on translation in Gelman's poetry, and proposes pseudo/translation as a new, bifocal mode of reading for texts that forge cross-cultural contact.