A Reader on Reading

A culture is defined by that which it can name; in order to censor, the invading culture must also possess the vocabulary to name those things belonging to the other. Therefore, translating into the tongue of the conqueror always carries within the act the danger of assimilation or annihilation; translating into the tongue of the conquered, the danger of overpowering or undermining. These inherent conditions of translation extend to all variations of political imbalance. Guarani (still the language spoken, albeit in a much altered form, by more than a million Paraguayans) had been until the arrival of the Jesuits an oral language. It was then that the Franciscan Fray Luis de Bolanos, whom the natives called “God’s wizard” because of his gift for languages, compiled the first Guarani dictionary. His work was continued and perfected by the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, who after several years’ hard labor gave the completed volume the title of Tesoro de la lengua guarani (Thesaurus of the Guarani Tongue). In a preface to a history of the Jesuit missions in South America, the Paraguayan novelist Augusto Roa Bastos noted that in order for the natives to believe in the faith of Christ, they needed, above all, to be able to suspend or revise their ancestral concepts of life and death. Using the Guaranis’ own words, and taking advantage of certain coincidences between the Christian and Guarani religions, the Jesuits retranslated the Guarani myths so that they would foretell or announce the truth of Christ. The Last-Last-First-Father, Namandu, who created His own body and the attributes of that body from the primordial mists, became the Christian God from the book of Genesis; Tupa, the First Parent, a minor divinity in the Guarani pantheon, became Adam, the first man; the crossed sticks, yvyráyuasá, which in the Guaraní cosmology sustain the earthly realm, became the Holy Cross. And conveniently, since Ñamandú’s second act was to create the word, the Jesuits were able to infuse the Bible, translated into Guaraní, with the accepted weight of divine authority.

In translating the Guaraní language into Spanish, the Jesuits attributed to certain terms that denoted acceptable and even commendable social behavior among the natives the connotation of that behavior as perceived by the Catholic Church or the Spanish court. Guaraní concepts of private honor, of silent acknowledgment when accepting a gift, of a specific as opposed to a generalized knowledge, and of a social response to the mutations of the seasons and of age, were translated bluntly and conveniently as “Pride,” “Ingratitude,” “Ignorance,” and “Instability.” This vocabulary allowed the traveler Martin Dobrizhoffer of Vienna to reflect, sixteen years after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1783, in his Geschichte der Abiponer (History of the Abiponer People), on the corrupt nature of the Guaranís: “Their many virtues, which certainly belong to rational beings, capable of culture and learning, serve as frontispiece to very irregular compositions within the works themselves. They seem like automata in whose making have been joined elements of pride, ingratitude, ignorance, and instability. From these principal sources flow the brooks of sloth, drunkenness, insolence, and distrust, with many other disorders which stultify their moral quality.”

In spite of Jesuit claims, the new system of beliefs did not contribute to the happiness of the natives. Writing in 1769, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville described the Guaraní people in these laconic words: “These Indians are a sad lot. Always trembling under the stick of a pedantic and stern master, they possess no property and are subjected to a laborious life whose monotony is enough to kill a man with boredom. That is why, when they die, they don’t feel any regret in leaving this life.”

By the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, the Spanish chronicler Fernández de Oviedo was able to say of those who had “civilized” the Guaraní people what a Briton, Calgacus, is reported to have said after the Roman occupation of Britain: “The men who have perpetuated these acts call these conquered places ‘peaceful.’ I feel they are more than peaceful — they are destroyed.”

Throughout history, censorship in translation has also taken place under more subtle guises, and in our time, in certain countries, translation is one of the means by which “dangerous” authors are submitted to cleansing purges.