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Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces:

The Translation of Politics and the
Politics of Translation
Gavin Arnall
Version of record first published: 05 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Gavin Arnall (2012): Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces: The Translation of
Politics and the Politics of Translation, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 21:1,
87-102

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2012.663349

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 Gavin Arnall

ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS

LUCES: THE TRANSLATION OF POLITICS
AND THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION

Alejo Carpentier’s novel El siglo de las luces is a fictionalized account of how

Enlightenment ideals traveled during the Age of Revolution, a meditation on how
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European, particularly French, ideas were transformed and implemented in new and unique
contexts (e.g., Spain, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Suriname). Carpentier
thematizes the passage of ideas as a process of translation, both linguistically from French
to Spanish, English, or Dutch, and conceptually, from one specific culture to another with
different demands of relevance and applicability. The novel complicates the classic issue of
the translator’s fidelity to the text in that the responsibility to convey a text’s original
meaning collides with a need to adapt it to the new context. In El siglo, the translator’s
fidelity to the original confronts the revolutionary’s fidelity to the Event in the practice of
translating texts, such as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the
1793 French Constitution, as well as the Event of the French Revolution itself. This paper
will explore the constellation of politics, translation, and fidelity in El siglo, with special
reference to the relationship between political translation to propagate revolution and the
revolutionary politics of translation.

Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces spans geographically from France and Spain to the
Caribbean and temporally from 1789 to 1809 in a fictionalized account of the Age of
Revolution and the dissemination of the ideals of the Enlightenment. El siglo is highly
specific to the period yet generalizable as a meditation on how European, particularly
French, ideas are transformed and implemented in new and unique contexts (e.g.,
Spain, Cuba, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Suriname).1 Néstor Garcı́a Canclini
terms this hybridization; however, Carpentier thematizes the traveling of ideas as a
process of translation, both linguistically from French to Spanish, English, or Dutch,
and conceptually, from one specific culture to another with different demands of
relevance and applicability.2
The novel complicates the classic issue of the translator’s fidelity to the text in that
the responsibility to convey a text’s meaning collides with a need to alter it in its new
geographic and historical context. In El siglo, the translator’s fidelity to the original
confronts the revolutionary’s fidelity to what Alain Badiou would call “the Event” in the
practice of translating texts, such as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen and the 1793 French Constitution, as well as the Event of the French
Revolution itself.3 This article will explore the constellation of politics, translation, and

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 March 2012, pp. 87-102
ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2012.663349
 88 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

fidelity in El siglo, with special reference to the relationship between political

translation to propagate revolution and the revolutionary politics of translation.
El siglo introduces Carlos and Sofia, siblings who live with their cousin Esteban, the
protagonist of El siglo, in a richly furnished house recently inherited from their father.
During their year of mourning, the adolescents construct a private world within this
bourgeois interior, which is soon penetrated by Victor Hughes, a Frenchman and
important historical figure. Victor’s interruption allegorizes the incursion of French
revolutionary ideas into Caribbean, specifically Cuban, culture. His friend Ogé is an
Afro-Caribbean doctor who trained in France and mixes medicine with mysticism.4
Victor and Ogé, who is treating Esteban during a severe illness, know each other from
their involvement in freemasonry, information revealed during their muddled
exposition of the imminence of world revolution. Esteban finds most of the concepts
and issues discussed so exotic that the conversation is unintelligible; neither the
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Frenchman nor the Afro-Caribbean successfully translate the revolutionary ideals with
enough context to convey their meaning to a bourgeois Cuban criollo.
However, Esteban does grasp a few statements, like “[w]e have gone beyond the
age of religion and metaphysics, we are now entering on an age of science”, and some
terms like liberty, happiness, and equality.5 Esteban also “thought he could detect that
Victor and Ogé, though united by the same words, were not in complete agreement
over men, things and methods”.6 Victor and Ogé thus embody the discord between the
French perspective and its (Afro-)Caribbean translation, allegorizing the inevitable
confrontation that ensues when ideas of one culture travel to a new site with its own
unique historical conditions. In an essay entitled “Traveling Theory”, Edward Said
schematizes this process. After developing in a set of contingent circumstances, ideas
circulate beyond their original cultural borders, confronting alternative cultures with
their own unique geographic and historical context. A transformative process of
accommodation and incorporation then alters and shapes the original idea as the idea
alters and shapes its new site.7
Prior to this transformative process of translation, the ideas are literally and
conceptually, in Roberto Schwarz’s term, “misplaced”. For Schwarz, revolutionary
ideas “are often ideas out of place, and they only stop being so when they are
reconstructed on the basis of local contradictions”.8 The conversation between Victor
and Ogé is an early attempt in the novel at the reconstruction of misplaced ideas. In
their discussion of the replacement of the age of religion and metaphysics by the age of
science, Victor dismisses the philosopher Martinez de Pasqually’s occultist and
spiritualist beliefs; Ogé, on the other hand, defends the philosopher’s teachings, stating
that their aim “is to release the transcendental powers dormant in man”.9 While Victor
rejects religion in toto, Ogé also defends the spiritualism of Catholicism.10
In his “De lo real maravilloso americano”, Carpentier stages a similar confrontation
when he contrasts a disenchanted Europe, with its impoverished aesthetic experience
of the fantastic, to a spiritually vibrant Latin America that, because of its faith in
miracles and saints, experiences the fantastic in reality (lo real maravilloso).11 In both
cases, the distinction between the European and the Latin American hinges on the issue
of spirituality and faith. According to Antonio Cornejo Polar, the combination of
heterogeneous cultures often includes at least “one element that does not coincide with
the filiation of the others and thus necessarily creates a zone of ambiguity and
conflict”.12 The secular and materialist ideas of the Jacobins confront an element of
 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES 89

local culture, namely an affinity for mysticism and spiritualism, which produces an
antagonism, an ambiguous and conflictual zone that the translator must navigate.
Whereas Victor’s perspective is typically Eurocentric, Ogé calls for a more complex
configuration of elements that preserves and radicalizes local ideas and traditions.
Victor and Ogé plan to flee Cuba’s political oppression of freemasons and seek
asylum in San Domingo; however, in a chaotic turn of events Victor, accompanied by
Esteban, escapes on a ship to France, marking the beginning of Esteban’s epic journey.
In France, the politically naı̈ve Cuban adolescent goes through a radical transformation,
integrating himself into the Jacobin Clubs and the Masonic Lodges. The result of this
radicalization is that he is “more French than any of them [the Jacobins], more
revolutionary than those who were taking part in the Revolution”.13 It is telling that
this description is followed by an account of Esteban,
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[taking] the floor in a Jacobin Club, and [astonishing] those present with the
suggestion that all they had to do to carry the Revolution into the New World was
to inculcate the ideal of Liberty among the Jesuits who had been expelled from the
Spanish dominions overseas and were now wandering in Italy and Poland.14

Esteban the Cuban is more French than his French counterparts because he recognizes
the necessity of expanding the French Revolution beyond France, because being truly
French means never being merely French. This evokes Eduardo Grüner’s claim that
“the Haitian Revolution is more ‘French’ than the French Revolution since it proposes to
realize objectively the latter’s universality by postulating the full emancipation of, and
by granting full citizenship to, the African-American slaves”.15 Similarly, Esteban’s
French-ness stems from his fidelity to the universalism of the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution. His is a politics of translation that would spread the ideal of liberty
in an effort to realize its universal potential. As George Steiner argues, “[w]here it
surpasses the original, the real translation infers that the source-text possesses
potentialities, elemental reserves as yet unrealized by itself”.16
Victor sends Esteban to the Spanish border to work for the famous Girondist
Jacques Pierre Brissot who is preparing propaganda in Spanish, translating from French
Revolutionary and Enlightenment texts. Once at the border, the Abbé José Marchena,
the first to translate Le contrat social into Spanish, tells Esteban that one must gradually
infuse Spanish culture with French ideals, arguing that “the language of regenerated and
republican France could not yet be used in Spain”, and that, accordingly, one must
respect “certain ultramontane prejudices, which are incompatible with liberty, but
which are too deeply rooted to be extirpated at a single blow”.17 Marchena’s
instructions are politically contradictory in that a gradualist strategy, which echoes the
colonialist discourse that slaves were not yet ready to be free, is combined with a
charge to take local conditions into account and not merely to impose foreign models.
Consenting to Marchena’s advice, Esteban must actively alter the originals both
linguistically and conceptually; his work will not be a mere transposition of words from
one language to another but their rearticulation based on Spain’s particular
circumstances and contradictions. Esteban thereby politicizes what Jacques Derrida, in
his discussion of Walter Benjamin on translation, describes as characteristic of
translation generally: “Translation is writing; that is, it is not translation only in the
sense of transcription. It is a productive writing called forth by the original text”.18
 90 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

Though Benjamin argues that the translator should not consider the receiver when
translating a text in order to avoid reducing translation to the transmission of
information, Marchena’s method shows that such a consideration leads not to the mere
transmission of information but to its active reformulation. Mao, like Marchena,
maintains the principal importance of considering the audience when producing
revolutionary culture: “The first problem is: literature and art for whom?”19 El siglo
extends this question – translation for whom? By allowing this consideration to guide
the practice of translation, the phenomenon of misplaced ideas can be avoided,
enabling Esteban to contribute to what Benjamin calls the afterlife of the original, and,
by extension, to the French Revolution itself.20
All translations, according to Benjamin, conjure a pure, universal language beyond
particular languages, for the original and the translation are “fragments of a greater
language, just as fragments are part of a vessel”.21 Similarly, the ideals of the French
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Revolution, although deriving from a particular national context and tradition, gesture
at a transnational, and indeed universal, political project. As Aimé Césaire writes, the
French Revolution proved that,

liberty is indivisible, that one cannot grant political and economic liberty to the
white planters and keep the mulattos under the stick, that one cannot recognize
the civil equality of the men of the free race and at the same time keep the blacks
in the ergastulum.22

The French Revolution’s ideal of liberty is necessarily universal; it cannot exclude

certain groups without contradicting the principle itself. The nature of the original thus
calls for its translation, for its circulation beyond its original context. Yet Esteban, in
his role as a politically engaged translator, must respect certain prejudices that are
“incompatible with liberty”. The tension between the French Revolution’s universal
principle of liberty and the active, but also unfaithful, translation of its texts contradicts
and thereby limits the principle’s scope. When Esteban agrees to follow Marchena’s
instructions, does he embody what Badiou calls the Thermidorean subjectivity, that is,
a subjectivity that renders unintelligible the truths produced in a specific revolutionary
sequence?23 Although Esteban agrees to modify French texts in a way that contradicts
their ideal of liberty, he does so with the ultimate goal of extending the ideal and
contributing to its universalization. Esteban as a translator seems to be paradoxically
both faithful and unfaithful to the original, both Jacobin and Thermidorean.
Mao addresses a similar paradox with his theorization of the principal and non-
principal contradictions of a particular historical context. As Slavoj Žižek explains,

in order to win the fight for the resolution of the principal contradiction [class
struggle], one should treat a particular contradiction as the predominant one, to
which all other struggles should be subordinated. In China under the Japanese
occupation, patriotic unity against the Japanese was the predominant thing if
Communists wanted to win the class struggle – any direct focusing on class struggle in
these conditions went against class struggle itself.24

Similarly, in the initial phase of extending liberty to Spain, the translator must alter
certain texts so that they may coexist with cultural prejudices that contradict liberty.
 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES 91

To fail to do so and to insist on the centrality of liberty at the wrong moment is to be

guilty of what Žižek calls “dogmatic opportunism”.25 This political position actually
goes against the ideals it purports to uphold by dogmatically placing them in the axial
position of any political sequence irrespective of its particular historical conditions,
thereby impeding the struggle for liberty.
In the early stages of political propaganda, the unfaithful translation is the most
faithful, insofar as a betrayal of the text’s meaning leaves open the real possibility of its
future realization. Recalling that Lenin went directly against Marx by propagating
socialist revolution in a relatively backward rather than an advanced, industrialized
country, Žižek asserts that, “it is an inner necessity of the ‘original’ teaching to submit
to and survive this ‘betrayal’, to survive this violent act of being torn out of one’s
original context and thrown into a foreign landscape where it has to reinvent itself –
only in this way, universality is born”.26 José Aricó argued that this Leninist gesture of
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“betrayal” is an act of translation, that translation is the mother of universality.27

Esteban’s practice of translation, aimed at making concrete the abstract universal of
liberty, thus enacts the Leninist gesture of translation avant la lettre.28
Though following Marchena’s advice, Esteban’s translations do little to alter
Spain’s political culture, for much of his work remains “piled up in a cellar”.29
According to Esteban’s friend and fellow agitator Martı́nez de Ballesteros, the Jacobins
are to blame, for they have “[turned] on the best friends the Revolution has got” by
persecuting foreigners during the Reign of Terror.30 De Ballesteros continues:

So much for their ideas of making the Revolution universal anyway; they’re only
thinking about the French Revolution now. And the rest . . . they can rot!
Everything here is coming to mean its opposite. They make us translate a
Declaration of the Rights of Man into Spanish, and out of its seventeen principles they
violate twelve every day. They took the Bastille, just to set free four forgers, two
madmen, and a sodomite, yet they found a prison in Cayenne which is far worse
than any Bastille.31

De Ballesteros thus points to the degeneration of the French Revolution, moving from
Universal Enlightenment to Enlightenment in One Country, which ineluctably brings
to mind Joseph Stalin’s doctrine of Socialism in One Country.
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, León Trotsky differed from Stalin in that, through a
close reading of Marx, Trotsky claimed that “the Revolution had to be perpetually
intensified by transcending its own objectives (radicalization) and progressively
extended to the entire universe (universalization)”.32 The universality of Marxism
eluded Stalin, who opted for a practical particularism over Trotsky’s radical
universalism: “What [Stalin] wanted to preserve at any price was not principles, or the
movement of radicalization: it was [ . . . ] the Revolution itself inasmuch as it was
incarnated in that particular country”.33 Trotsky and Stalin translated Marx and
Marxism based on unique historical conditions, but their translations were radically
different and even opposed. According to Trotsky, Stalin and the Thermidorean
bureaucracy of the Soviet Union betrayed the revolution. However, unlike the betrayal
of Lenin or Esteban, Stalin’s act was not committed in an effort to preserve or extend a
political principle; it was not a strategic mistranslation in the process of
universalization. Rather, Stalin’s translation of Marxism as Socialism in One Country
 92 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

eliminated the very possibility of universality, resulting in the degeneration of the

revolution.34 Stalin’s unfaithful translation did not contribute to the original’s afterlife,
but rather to its eventual death. The same could be said, mutatis mutandis, for the
French revolutionists’ violation of their own principles. The prison in Cayenne is the
death knell of the Jacobins.
Confronting the Jacobins with their contradictory actions is not, however, a real
option for either de Ballesteros or Esteban. The revolution at this stage has already
entered the Reign of Terror, and criticism would result in an immediate encounter
with the guillotine. Fearing that he would become a victim of the Terror and
recognizing that his work in Spain was not accomplishing its goal, Esteban travels with
Victor to Guadeloupe in an effort to extend the ideas of the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution to the New World. The motif of traveling ideas becomes explicit
when the narrator reveals that,
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[a]s the ships left the mainland astern, the Revolution began to simplify itself in the
people’s minds; freed from the uproar and rhetoric of street meetings, the Event
was reduced to its basic elements and pared of contradictions. The recent
condemnation and death of [Georges] Danton became a mere incident on the road
to a distant future which each man saw in the light of his own hopes.35

The ideas of the revolution are represented as originating from, but not limited to,
their site of production, and their degeneration in France is replaced with the promise
of life, possibility, and hope in the Caribbean. While Badiou argues that the French
Revolution’s principles are made unthinkable if decoupled from Terror, the novel
suggests that certain actions committed during the Terror contradict the revolution’s
original ideals.36 As these ideals travel, they are liberated from their degeneration in
France: “[T]he immediate future would be [ . . . ] more egalitarian, more
communalistic, felt the man who dreamed of the final abolition of inequality, which
could not survive the last privileges”.37
Nevertheless, the Terror and its contradictions travel across the Atlantic as well,
especially in the figure of Victor. Quoting Collot d’Herbois, a major participant in the
Reign of Terror, Victor states that “[a]nyone who is disloyal to the Jacobins is being
disloyal to the Republic and to the cause of liberty”.38 The Jacobins mediate a particular
nation-state (the Republic) and the universal principle of liberty, reducing the scope of
the latter to the former, reintroducing the logic of Enlightenment in One Country. Not
surprisingly, Esteban is not convinced by Victor’s reductive logic, and he critiques
Collot for being a drunkard and an exploiter of the Terror. When Esteban learns that a
guillotine is traveling on the ship to Guadeloupe, Victor responds: “Inevitably. [ . . . ]
That and the printing-press are the most essential things we’ve got on board, apart
from the cannon”.39 Although carrying the Pluviose Decree that would abolish slavery
in the colonies, Victor intends to bring to the Caribbean not only the revolution’s ideals
(through the Decree and the printing press), but also its terror (implemented by the
guillotine).
When Victor and Esteban arrive in Guadeloupe, Victor inaugurates the Pluviose
Decree and gives a speech congratulating the former slaves on becoming free citizens.
Although an ostensibly triumphal moment for disciples of the French Revolution like
Esteban and for the recently freed slaves, neither group pays attention to Victor:
 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES 93

Victor’s clear, metallic speech reached [Esteban] in waves, a witty phrase, a

definition of liberty or a classical quotation standing out from the rest by its
emphatic tone. For all his eloquence and vigor, the Word failed to harmonize with
the mood of these people, who had congregated here in a festive spirit, and were
amusing themselves with games or brushing against the opposite sex, and making
small effort to understand a language which differed greatly – especially with that
southern accent which Victor flaunted like a coat of arms – from their homely
local patois.40

Mobilizing a musical metaphor, the narrator reveals that Victor’s speech failed to
translate, for its clear and metallic tone did not match the festive spirit of the people.
Furthermore, Victor’s southern French is foreign to the local population, which
underlines the “out of place” character of the speech, its untranslated quality. As Polar
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might note, Victor’s style is heterogeneous with the local patois. According to Noé
Jitrik, Carpentier’s El reino is characterized by the “fracture of the unity between the
‘represented world’ and ‘the mode of representation’”.41 Victor’s speech utilizes a
particular mode of representation, a certain tone, language, and style, producing a
similar fracture. Given his Eurocentric stance toward Ogé’s spiritualism, Victor’s
refusal to translate is not surprising, for one’s politics and one’s practice of translation
are co-constitutive in El siglo.
Mao was attentive to heterogeneity and the consequent failure of ideas to translate,
but, unlike Polar, he was interested in finding a way to surmount the “insurmountable
conflict” of heterogeneity.42 For Mao, the way to overcome this conflict involved
creating a “mass style”, which required that the thoughts and feelings of writers and
artists be fused with the masses. “To achieve this fusion”, Mao argued, intellectuals
“should conscientiously learn the language of the masses”.43 Mass style was thus a form
of translation, a rearticulation of one’s ideas through a popular language used to bridge
the class heterogeneity between the petit bourgeois intellectual and the workers and
peasants. Although with a generally unsuccessful result, Esteban, de Ballesteros, and
Marchena attempted to use translation to bridge the cultural gap between Republican
France and a more traditional, conservative Spain. Perhaps Esteban’s lack of interest in
Victor’s speech can be explained by the latter’s failure to recognize the importance of
translation in making a text relevant, a failure that resulted in disharmony between
Victor and those present.
However, Victor seems to recover the lessons from Spain when the Jacobins of
France, in a strange reversal of their previous, secular stance, condemn atheism and
celebrate the existence of a Supreme Being. In response to an incredulous Esteban,
who asks if he will enforce the worship of a Supreme Being in Guadeloupe, Victor
replies negatively, stating that,

[t]hey still haven’t finished demolishing the church on the Morne du Governement.
It would be too soon. We must go about it more slowly. If I were to start talking
now about a Supreme Bring it wouldn’t be long before the people here were
showing him nailed to a cross [ . . . ] We’re not in the same latitude here as the
Champ de Mars.44
 94 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

Esteban notes that Victor’s response is similar to what de Ballesteros would have said in
Spain, and, indeed, Victor, like de Ballesteros or Marchena, combines a contradictory
politics of colonialist gradualism with a strategic consideration of local conditions.45
Due to historical differences, mapped spatially by the metaphor of latitude, Victor, like
de Ballesteros et al., calls for modifications, active (mis)translations of the original.
Esteban is right, however, in not only comparing but also contrasting Spain and
Guadeloupe, Victor and de Ballesteros. De Ballesteros held an allegiance to the
principles of the French Revolution, which he distinguished from its leadership,
whereas Victor, like Sartre’s Stalin, is more committed to preserving his own authority
and the authority of those in power. He serves the French revolutionaries rather than
the French Revolution, evinced by his capitulation, as an outspoken atheist, to the
Jacobin’s sudden reversal of positions. According to Esteban, Victor is,
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so completely given over to politics that [his mind] shied away from a critical
examination of the facts, and refused to acknowledge the most flagrant
contradictions; faithful to the verge of fanaticism – for this could indeed be classed
as fanaticism – to the pronouncements of the men who had invested him with his
authority.46

Victor’s refusal to acknowledge blatant contradictions is thus revealed as

simultaneously a fanatical faithfulness to the Jacobins and a betrayal of the revolution
and its principles.
Victor models his counterparts in France when he, too, contradicts the principles
of the French Revolution by virtually negating the Pluviose Decree, announcing that
“work [is] compulsory. Any negro accused of being lazy or disobedient, argumentative
or troublesome, was condemned to death”.47 Carpentier had already explored this
contradiction in El reino when Ti Noel notes that King Henri Christophe’s fortress is
“the product of a slavery as abominable as that he had known on the plantation of
M. Lenormand de Mézy”.48 However, as Césaire reveals in one of his best plays, the
difference between King Christophe and Victor is that King Christophe was trapped in
a tragic set of circumstances. The very fortress that would ensure independence from
the French reinstatement of slavery required slave labor to produce it.49 Victor, on the
other hand, is represented as contradicting the Pluviose Decree without tragedy, for
“racial prejudice remained in him from his long residence in San Domingo”.50 When
faced with the alternatives of increased labor productivity or freedom from slavery,
Victor’s choice was easy, not tragic. With this course of action he is faithful, again, to
the revolutionaries of France but betrays the revolution’s principles.51
Carpentier decided to include the historical figure of Victor Hughes in his novel
because he was fascinated by the “dramatic dichotomy” that defined his character.52
Indeed, the novel occasionally depicts Victor as a true radical, despite his fanaticism and
racism. Victor clarifies his response to the Thermidorean Reaction: “I shall ignore this
news. I don’t accept it. I shall continue to recognize no other morality except Jacobin
morality. No one is going to move me from here. And if the Revolution must perish in
France, it will continue in America”.53 He then turns to Esteban and tells him to
translate the Déclaration and the French Constitution, affirming that they will
accomplish in Spanish America what the French had failed to do in Spain. Victor thus
places himself in the tradition of Simón Rodrı́guez, whom Carpentier describes with
 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES 95

the following words: “While Rousseau’s Emile was never conducive to the foundation
of a school in Europe, Simón Rodrı́guez founded a school in Chuquisaca based on the
principles of that famous book; he realized in Latin America what the European
admirers of Rousseau did not”.54 For Victor, translation plays a role in this realiza-
tion, disseminating the ideas of the French Revolution so they may be actualized.
Victor’s fidelity to the French Revolution, and not to whoever is in power at
the moment, is tested by the Thermidorean Reaction. With this test he renews his faith
in the revolution’s principles and, importantly, also calls for a new round of
translation.
While the Thermidorean Reaction seems to renew Victor’s revolutionary fervor,
it marks Esteban’s disillusionment with the revolution’s ideals. It is telling that his shift
in political commitment alters his relationship to the practice of translation:
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For the present, he had a daily task to perform, which he fulfilled conscientiously,
finding a sort of relaxation, of relief from his doubts, in translating to the best of his
ability; he became painstaking, almost pedantic, in his search for the exact phrase,
the best synonym or the right punctuation, and was distressed that contemporary
Spanish should be so loath to accept the concise locutions of modern French. [ . . . ]
Neither the editor-translator nor the typographers believed very much in the
words which would be multiplied and propagated as a result of their labors; but if
the task were to be done it must be done correctly, without maltreating the
language, and without neglecting anything which was part of the job.55

Like the obsessional neurotic, Esteban is frantically active, busying himself with the
minute details of language to avoid facing the underlying tension that he has lost faith in
the revolutionary principles he is translating.56 His pseudo-engagement serves as a
soothing distraction that masks this reality. Upon losing faith in the French Revolution,
his fidelity shifts to the French language, which, in turn, alters his practice of
translation. Whereas in Spain the focus was on translating misplaced ideas so that they
would be both intelligible and relevant in their new context, in post-Thermidor
Guadeloupe Esteban’s concern is the inability of Spanish to render accurately the
eloquence of French locutions. The novel subtly gestures at this reversal that privileges
the source-language over the target-language with the typographer’s tragicomic lack of
an “ñ”, forcing him to replace the tildes with circumflex accents.57
What are the political implications of this shift in Esteban’s mode of translation? In
her essay “The Politics of Translation”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that, when
translating a text from the Third World, the translator must submit to the rhetoricity
of the source-text, to the rhetorical element of its language, in order to avoid “a species
of the neo-colonialist construction of the non-western scene”.58 She generalizes this
argument, claiming that the task of the translator is to submit to the source-text’s
rhetoric; however, her examples stem predominantly from the translation of Third
World texts into First World languages. She does not distinguish between these
examples and the task of the translator when First World texts are translated for the
Third World, or, more precisely, when a text of the colonizer is translated into the
language of the colonized.59
Esteban’s practice of translation in Spanish America submits to and thereby
privileges the dominant, European language and culture. His practice of translation is
 96 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

the linguistic counterpart to Victor’s fanatic political obedience. Could we therefore

assert that Spivak’s submissive mode of translation can sometimes take place in the
space of the hegemonic culture, thereby undoing its generalized claim to radicality?60
The moment Esteban gives up the ideals of the European Enlightenment, he
paradoxically reproduces a colonialist system of linguistic and cultural valuation,
submitting to the dominant culture rather than actively transforming it.
The extent to which Esteban renounces the ideals of the revolution becomes clear
when, upon accepting a job from Victor that entails “distributing [in Suriname . . . ]
several hundred printed copies of the Decree of Pluviose of the Year Two, translated
into Dutch, and accompanied by a call to revolt”, he decides that he will throw the
leaflets into a river.61 However, after witnessing a horrific scene in which runaway
slaves are punished by having their legs amputated, he changes his mind and distributes
the leaflets, telling the slaves to read them, “[o]r if you can’t read, then find someone
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who can read them for you”.62 The illiteracy of slaves is another theme that Carpentier
had already explored in El reino, with scenes that complicate our understanding of the
influence of French revolutionary ideals in the Caribbean. For example, the narrator of
El reino notes that the black population did not read “the latest prints received from
Paris” because “slaves were unable to read”.63 Another reference to illiteracy and the
limits of European influence occurs when Ti Noel somewhat humorously uses the
Grande Encyclopédie not as reading material but as furniture upon which to eat
sugarcane.64
El siglo extends the issue of illiteracy and cultural influence to translation. What is
the role of a (translated) text in shaping ideas when its intended audience cannot read
it? Is the translation of written culture politically relevant when the majority of the
population is illiterate? El siglo suggests that the slaves must hear the text and that
translation, as with Victor’s speech, encompasses oral as well as written texts. Given
Carpentier’s mania for historical research, it should be no surprise that these answers
are historically accurate. In his analysis of Léger-Félicité Sonthonax’s decree that the
Déclaration should be “printed, published, and posted everywhere necessary”, Nick
Nesbitt argues that, contrary to the Habermasian contention that the public sphere is
limited to a literate elite, hundreds of thousands of slaves discussed, analyzed, and
critiqued this document.65 The translation of the ideas of the French Revolution does,
therefore, have a purpose, but the dissemination of these ideas may be predominantly
through oral rather than written channels.
The influence and political relevancy of the ideals of the French Revolution are
challenged again when Sieger, a Swiss planter and colonist living in French Guiana, tells
Esteban and a heterogeneous group of historical figures that “[a]ll the French
Revolution has achieved in America is to legalize the Great Escape which has been
going on since the sixteenth century. The blacks didn’t wait for [the French], they’ve
proclaimed themselves free a countless number of times”.66 He also states that the
Pluviose Decree, “didn’t bring anything new into this continent; it was just one more
reason for proceeding with the everlasting Great Escape”.67 With these passages,
Sieger, although with radically different political commitments, aligns himself with
historians like Carolyn Fick and Michael-Rolph Trouillot, who argue that Jacobinism
and texts like the Déclaration were limited in their contribution to the slave rebellions of
the Caribbean.68 In El reino, Carpentier explores other influences that are likely to have
contributed to the slave revolts, such as Vodun, suggesting, in accord with theorists
 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES 97

like Grüner and Nesbitt, that the slaves’ struggle against exploitation was prefigured in
certain elements of their own culture.69
Yet Nesbitt encourages us to consider the widespread dissemination of the
French revolutionary ideals, a project made extremely visible in El siglo, as the
condition of possibility for the slaves to become translators themselves. According to
Nesbitt, the public posting of the Déclaration provoked “an unheralded power to
translate a North Atlantic language these slaves did not speak into their own
experiential idiom, the desire to express their insight into the categorical need to
destroy plantation slavery in the language of the Rights of Man”.70 Early in the novel
Ogé’s discussion with Victor and Esteban about the coming world revolution hints at
this power to translate. When news reaches Cuba of murder and pillage by the slaves of
Saint-Domingue, Ogé contends that the unrest “coincided too closely with other
events, of universal import, to be merely a revolt of black incendiaries and violators of
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women”.71
Questioning official discourse and its propensity to tarnish the legitimacy of
insurrection, Ogé also notes that “after a certain July 14th [the storming of the
Bastille]”, rumors had been circulating about slaves in the process of “transforming the
world”.72 Here, again, the ideals of the revolution are spread orally, as the slaves, upon
learning of the world-historical events in France, translate their significance to conform
to local circumstances. Accordingly, we could say that the slave uprisings of the
Caribbean are the slaves’ translations of the storming of the Bastille. By translating such
an event, the slaves, too, are faithfully participating in the concrete universalization of
Enlightenment principles, producing their own texts rather than merely receiving
them.
As with Victor’s speech, music and translation are combined when Sieger refers to
the transcultural practice of the slaves of Bahı́a, who are “demanding the privileges of
Equality and Fraternity to the rhythm of a macumba, and so introducing the djuka-drum
into the French Revolution itself”.73 The implications of this statement, combined
with the passages above, radically contradict Sieger’s conservative politics. Given
Sieger’s assertion that slave culture was rebellious before the entrance of
Enlightenment principles onto the scene, this passage inverts the predominant
practice of translation in El siglo. Rather than the translation of European ideas for or by
the slaves, the slaves, like Caliban, are translating their own ideas into the language of
the colonizers.74
Expanding on Nesbitt’s thesis regarding the slave’s power to translate, this passage
could be read as the slaves’ attempt to make their struggle intelligible to those who lack
the experience of slavery, thereby forcing the European colonists to recognize
the contradiction between their principles and the institutions of their colonies.
By instantiating their demands in the language of the French Revolution, the slaves, in
Derrida’s analysis, transform the original “even as it also modifies the translating
language. This process – transforming the original as well as the translation – is the
translation contract between the original and the translating text”.75 Although for
Derrida the translation contract is a promise of reconciliation never fulfilled, El siglo
represents this reciprocal process between languages as a harmonious combination of
French Revolutionary lyrics with Afro-American beats.
After a long journey, Esteban returns to Cuba without any hope for world
revolution or the propagation of the French revolutionary ideals. He is therefore
 98 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

unhappy to find that the island he left almost two decades ago has radicalized while
he was gone. Carlos and Sofia have founded a small Androgynous Lodge, “with the
political aim of spreading the philosophical writings which had fostered the
Revolution”.76 Moreover, Esteban is extremely irritated, to the point of cursing in
French, when he realizes that the Spanish translations circulated by the Lodge are
his translations, that his work is still being utilized to further a cause that he has given up.
For the de-politicized Esteban, the ideas of the French Revolution cannot be translated
or reconstructed, as Schwarz suggests, on the basis of local conditions; they are
doomed to be misplaced ideas. The novel reveals, once again, the close relationship
between political commitment and a commitment to translation.77
This scene nicely concludes Carpentier’s meditation on translation by highlighting
that, although the translator may actively intervene by altering the original both
linguistically and conceptually, others are equally free to utilize the text for their own
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purposes. By the end of El siglo, Esteban is a repentant ex-revolutionary, completely

contaminated with political pessimism; however, his political interventions, his
translations, live on and continue to shape Caribbean politics. Accordingly, Esteban is a
figure for the French Revolution itself, a revolution that continued to inspire
Europeans (Victor), Caribbean criollos (Sofia, Carlos), and African slaves to realize its
universalist principles even after the termination of its political sequence and
subsequent Thermidorean Reaction.
To conclude, the novel represents translation as a diverse practice that can
involve writing (Esteban), elocution (Victor), or rebellion (the slaves). The politically
radical translator is represented as an active participant in the expansion of the
French Revolution, rearticulating its ideals to contribute to their universalization. The
practice of translation can enable ideas to travel and can ensure their relevancy in their new
location. Translation thereby provides a technique for overcoming cultural division, a key
struggle in the development of world revolution, and, in this particular case, the
dissemination of Enlightenment and particularly French revolutionary ideals.
El siglo shows that a mistranslation can sometimes be the most faithful to the text
whereas a “faithful” translation can oftentimes disguise betrayal. Moreover, the novel
demonstrates that translation can contribute to the afterlife of a political event or to its
degeneration and death. Finally, it avows that politics and translation are co-
constitutive, that politics informs the practice of translation and that the practice of
translation is a performance of politics.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Michael Arnall, Nick Nesbitt, and Rachel Price, whose comments
on the content and presentation of this article were an immense help in preparing it for
publication.

Notes
1 There has been much speculation regarding the relationship between El siglo and the
Cuban Revolution. This is largely due to Carpentier’s claim that the events in Cuba
caused him to revise the novel and his later qualification that he only revised the scene
in which Victor and Sophia part ways, so as to avoid melodrama. Rather than provide
 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES 99

further speculation on this issue, I have chosen to focus on the articulation of politics
through the novel’s explicit historical referent, the Age of Revolutions. For an
overview of the historical circumstances surrounding the novel’s delayed publication,
see Roberto González Echevarrı́a, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 213 –225.
2 See Néstor Garcı́a Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity,
trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press: 1995).
3 See Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Baker (New York: Verso, 2006),
124 – 139.
4 When Carpentier reveals that Ogé’s brother is named Vincent, it becomes clear that
Ogé, too, is a reference to a historical figure, namely, Vincent Ogé, the man who
fought for the rights of mulatto property owners in Paris in 1789. See Nick Nesbitt,
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Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 142.
5 Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral, trans. John Sturrock (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 70.
6 ibid.
7 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 226, 227.
8 Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson
(New York: Verso, 1992), 39.
9 Carpentier, Explosion, 71.
10 ibid., 72.
11 Alejo Carpentier, “De lo real maravilloso americano”, A. Carpentier: Valoración multiple
(Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1977), 100 – 117.
12 Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Indigenismo and Heterogeneous Literatures: Their
Double Sociocultural Statute”, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed.
Ana del Sarto, Alicia Rı́os, and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004),
104.
13 Carpentier, Explosion, 96.
14 ibid.
15 Eduardo Grüner, La oscuridad y las luces: Capitalismo, cultura y revolución (Buenos Aires:
Edhasa, 2010), 34. “la Revolución haitiana es más ‘francesa’ que la francesa, puesto que ella
sı́ se propone objetivamente realizar aquella universalidad al postular la plena
emancipación y otorgar igualmente plena ciudadanı́a a los esclavos afroamericanos
[author’s translation].”
16 Georges Steiner, “The Hermeneutic Motion”, The Translation Studies Reader, ed.
Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2002), 197.
17 Carpentier, Explosion, 102.
18 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed.
Christie McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 153.
19 Mao Tse-Tung, “Conclusion”. Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. Available
online at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/YFLA42.html.
20 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, The Translation Studies Reader, 77.
21 ibid., 81.
22 Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris:
Présence Africaine, 1981), 342. “la liberté est indivisible, que l’on ne pouvait
 100 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

accorder la liberté politique ou économique aux planteurs blancs et maintenir les

moulâtes sous la férule; que l’on ne pouvait reconnaı̂tre l’égalité civile aux hommes de
couleur libres et dans le même temps maintenir les nègres dans l’ergastule [author’s
translation].”
23 Badiou, 136.
24 Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, Slavoj Žižek presents Mao:
On Practice and Contradiction (New York: Verso, 2007), 6.
25 ibid.
26 ibid., 2.
27 José Aricó, “Introducción”, Mariátegui y los orı́genes del marxismo latinoamericano
(Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978), xlviii.
28 We should note that Aricó’s sense of translation is not the kind of translation Žižek
critiques in his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and
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Related Dates. For Žižek, there is a fundamental difference between the impossible
universality of the “never-won neutral space of translation” and the concrete
universality of the ethico-political act. Through Aricó, however, it is possible to read
translation and concrete universality together. For Žižek’s on the impossible
universality of translation, see Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays
on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 66.
29 Carpentier, Explosion, 114.
30 ibid., 111.
31 ibid.
32 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume Two, trans. Quintin Hoare
(New York: Verso, 2006), 100.
33 ibid., 101.
34 See Léon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Dover Publications, 2004).
35 Carpentier, Explosion, 117.
36 Badiou, 129, 135, 136.
37 Carpentier, Explosion, 118.
38 ibid., 122.
39 Carpentier, Explosion, 124.
40 ibid., 142.
41 Noé Jitrik as cited in Polar, 105.
42 Polar, 114.
43 Mao, “Introduction”.
44 Carpentier, Explosion, 146.
45 ibid.
46 Carpentier, Explosion, 145.
47 ibid., 152, 153.
48 Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, trans. Harriet de Onı́s (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 116. According to Sibylle Fischer, this
contradiction plagued the French Caribbean because its nations were founded on the
notion of liberty while its economic and social institutions were inherited from
colonialism and required a consistently high level of labor power. See Sibylle Fischer,
Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), 269.
49 For Césaire’s representation of the tragedy of King Christophe, see Aimé Césaire,
La tragedie du roi Christophe (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970).
 ALEJO CARPENTIER’S EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES 101

50 Carpentier, Explosion, 152.

51 For the Jacobin’s and particularly Maximilien Robespierre’s betrayal of the French
Revolution’s principles in favor of property and economic interest, see C. L. R.
James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 62 – 84.
52 Carpentier, Explosion, 351.
53 ibid., 156.
54 Alejo Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso”, Obras Completas: Ensayos (Havana:
Letras Cubanas, 1984), 190. “[M]ientras el Emilio de Rousseau no propicia nunca la
fundación de una escuela en Europa, Simón Rodrı́guez fundó en Chuquisaca una
escuela basada en los principios del libro famoso, es decir, realizó en América lo que
no realizaron los europeos admiradores de Rousseau [author’s translation].”
55 Carpentier, Explosion, 158.
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56 For more on the politics of the obsessional neurotic, see Slavoj Žižek, “Afterward to
the Second Edition: What is Divine about Divine Violence?”, In Defense of Lost Causes
(New York: Verso, 2009), 475, 476.
57 Carpentier, Explosion, 157.
58 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation”, The Translation Studies
Reader, 371.
59 See Spivak’s brief discussion of Farida Akhter’s claim that the US term “gendering”
cannot be translated into Bengali, which follows her statement that the translator
“must be able to confront the idea that what seems resistant in the space of English
may be reactionary in the space of the original”. , 376.
60 Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Mestizaje, Transculturation, Heterogeneity”, The Latin
American Cultural Studies Reader, 117.
61 Carpentier, Explosion, 239.
62 ibid., 241.
63 Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, 5, 6.
64 ibid., 164.
65 Nesbitt, 77, 78.
66 Carpentier, Explosion, 231.
67 ibid., 232.
68 See Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from
Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). See also Michael-Rolph
Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press,
1995).
69 Nesbitt, 43. Grüner, 301.
70 Nesbitt, 36.
71 Carpentier, Explosion, 82.
72 ibid.
73 ibid., 232.
74 See Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in
Our America”, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2005), 3– 45.
75 Derrida, 122.
76 Carpentier, Explosion, 263.
77 Neil Larsen reads Esteban’s dismay at the presence of the ideals of the French
Revolution in his native Cuba alongside Schwarz’s notion of an “ideology to the second
 102 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES

degree”, an imported idea or belief that represents an alien (European) reality. While
Larsen identifies the central problem of the novel, the traveling of ideas, his analysis
makes no mention of translation, the novel’s key to refashioning misplaced ideas in
new, geographically and historically distinct, contexts. See Neil Larsen, “Alejo
Carpentier: Modernism as Epic”, Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative, and Nation
in the Americas (New York: Verso, 2001), 115 – 126. For Schwarz on ideology to the
second degree, see Schwarz, 23.

Gavin Arnall is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

His interests include Latin American, French Caribbean, and Quechuan cultural
production, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and translation. He recently published “Aesthetics
and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière” in Critical Inquiry.
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