Literature of the Americas in the making: U.S. writers and translation in Sur, 1931-1944

2013

This essay engages history of translation by examining one of its most important contributors: Sur, a literary journal that Victoria Ocampo ran for 45 years and 340 issues. The most celebrated Latin American writers of the 1960s ‘Boom’ unanimously recognized that their key literary influences were those that they had first read in translation in Sur. Specifically, the essay focuses on the translations of North American literature in Sur’s early years: E. Hemingway, M. Twain, L. Hughes, K. A. Porter, E. A. Poe, H. Melville, e. e. cummings, W. Whitman, H. James, and most prominently, W. Faulkner, are translated by J. L. Borges, E. Pezzoni, J. Bianco, R. Baeza, BioyCasares, and M. Acosta. Whil…