Towards a defiant theory of translation

Abstract Novelist and linguist José María Arguedas provides a framework for a theory and approach to translation that takes up Quechua cultural and linguistic defiance. Arguedas grew up with Quechua as the language that expressed the stirrings of his soul and Spanish as the language of domination. Arguedas exemplifies in his writing some of the ways Quechua cosmovisions erupt through Spanish. Quechua “haunts” his Spanish. The haunting speaks to the unresolved social violence of ongoing colonialism. Before exploring the consequences of haunting for action, I describe Arguedas’s translational poetics and politics as a way into one facet of Indigenous defiance in the Americas. Arguedas’s Spanish reflects a forced poetics, to use Édouard Glissant’s term. I then show how translating Arguedas’s work demands attuning oneself to that forced poetics. It is through attuning to one another that we build social and material worlds.