The Nature of Space by Milton Santos (review)

Abstract

translating milton santos In his contribution to this symposium, Trevor Barnes notes that Milton Santos opens "e Nature of Space by apologizing for the fact that the book took twenty-!ve years to write, explaining that it was due to care rather than negligence. Barnes adds that writing this magnum opus took twenty-!ve years in part due to the complex, cosmopolitan nature of the content, and in part because it was forged through an intellectual life based in Santos’ political dissidence, which kept him on the move and actively dedicated to intervening in the world. My translation of Santos’ tour de force took nearly a decade for reasons that I would like to think Santos, as Federico Ferre&i put it in his contribution to this symposium, “would have loved” (this issue, p. 205) To translate this work with the care that it merited o(en required that I (re)visit the texts that Santos dialogued with to best interpret what he was saying—a time-consuming intellectual endeavor. I also translated this book in the o* hours, where they existed, of work in a community political organization, where constant crises kept us on the move and a rigorous study of the world required engaging a heterodox body of theory and history, all of which also informed this translation. +at is all to say that in the same way that Santos’ life and work were interwoven, so