ILAN STAVANS 291
der, thanks to innumerable, often anonymous translators. Shortly after
Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus was issued in Great Britain, it was readily available in Spanish, first in Madrid
and Barcelona, and immediately afterward across the Atlantic, in large
urban capitals of the southern hemisphere. In the same vein, Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento's masterful Life of Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism evidences the impact of James Fenimore Cooper's fictional frontier dwellers in Argentina and Chile. Jos6 Marti and Ruben Dario, to
name only two of the most distinguished modernistas, were not only well
acquainted with, but strongly influenced by, Walt Whitman, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and the New England Transcendentalists. Edgar Allan
Poe was a decisive force behind the naturalist stories of Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga. All this proves that, by means of translation, Latin America has been well-equipped to follow the intellectual and artistic trends
of its neighbor up north.
But by the mid-early sixties, when John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner were names ubiquitous among readers in
Bogota, Mexico City, and Montevideo, few if any readers in the United
States knew anything about the literature of their southern neighbors.
While a couple of bibliographies were available, there was no reflective
census of what had been done in terms of Latin American literature in
translation, a much needed enterprise that would help us understand
the awakening of Anglo-Saxons to Hispanic and Brazilian cultures.
Among the early enthusiasts was Daniel G. Brinton, whose translations
of the Nahuatl into English, as I stated earlier, helped introduce, anthropologically and poetically, a forgotten civilization. Until the late
twenties, Darfo was probably the region's most distinguished man of letters, but he was far better known in Spain (thanks to his friend, Juan
Ram6n Jim6nez) and only rarely was he mentioned north of the Rio
Grande. Quiroga's Stories of the Jungle appeared in London in 1923,
translated by Arthur Livingstone and published by Methuen; but they
failed to be reprinted in the United States. Few translators were active,
and those who were had tremendous difficulty convincing editors to embark on south-of-the-border projects. An exception was Harriet de Onis,
born in 1899 and wife of the Columbia University professor Federico de
Onis. A folklorist fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese, de Onis was a
crucial innovator in bringing attention, through her 1935 English translation, to Ricardo Giiiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra. She was also responsible for disseminating the works of Cuban ethnographer Fernando
Ortiz, Colombian essayist Germin Arciniegas, Bolivian feminist Ar
