Noam
Apropos cartography, another technical (or linguistictopological) problem we
encountered—which quickly signaled the geopolitical and philosophical complexities presented
by both the original text and our approach as translators—was how to delineate geographic
regions and their connotations in a clear and consistent way that reflected the references in the
original text. Our hope was to avoid reifying ideas of a United States monopoly over the
master-continental signifier America, and at the same time to avoid confirming an
English-language reader’s unconscious sense that the United States is the underived form of
Europe’s New World, its telos, or at least without giving the sense that this text, its Spanish
imaginary, shares that fantasy. This is a problem that will be familiar to most translators and
speakers of Spanish; it has been discussed at length by many non-Anglo-American critics of
Empire from Jose Martí and Alberto Masferrer to Claribel Alegría and Eduardo Galeano.
Imperio, in accordance with customary usage in Latin America, consistently refers to the area
north of the US/Mexico border—and specifically to the U.S.—as Norteamérica. But Mexico, as
a broad landmass north of the isthmus of Central America, is included in the English sense of
North America—it is claimed (and claims itself) as part of the North geographically and
economically (in, for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement), though not
linguistically, politically, or popularly. What to do, then, with terms like Norteamérica or
norteamericano? Condense them into the clunky, more particularly nationalist USAmerica(n)
and thus partition off, perhaps as Heriberto’s text does to some extent, Canada from the North’s
imperial history? Or stick close to the Spanish with North America and risk an uncanny historical
slippage between colonizer and colonized (an option which Heriberto’s text at certain points
might welcome)? This is a language usage issue—a matter of the proper name—that performs
the laceration of the US/ Mexico border, its artificiality and its oscillatory utility. It is a translation
issue that makes vivid Imperio’s figuration of the United States and Mexico as fantasy
co-bodies.