An Inquiry into Choteo E-Book

Jorge Mañach Robato

• Herausgeber: Linkgua
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Thought
• Sprache: Spanisch

Seitenzahl: 115

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In the 1920s, many of Cuba's intellectuals, like Jorge Mañach, were confronted with how to deal with a new postcolonial universe whose neocolonial leanings were undeniable. A palpable unease runs throughout An Inquiry into Choteo (first delivered as a lecture in 1928), as Mañach anxiously attempts to explain this idiosyncratic Cuban attitude or humor that he deems prevalent in the first few turbulent decades of the 20th century. Esteemed in the Spanish-speaking world, only two of Mañach's writings, Martí: Apostle of Freedom, 1950 and Frontiers in the Americas: A Global Perspective (1970), have been published in English—a language which, as an adolescent in Massachusetts, Mañach inhabited, and from which he translated throughout his life. The fact that Mañach is a difficult figure to pin down, textually and ideologically across his life, is part of Jacqueline Loss's motivation to carry out this translation of An Inquiry into Choteo, one of the most authoritative essays in Spanish, comparable to other classic meditations on Latin American and national identity such as José Enrique Rodó's Ariel (1900, English 1988), Antonio S. Pedreira's Insularismo: An Insight into the Puerto Rican Character (1934, English 2007), and Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950, English 1962). While Mañach suggested that the pervasiveness of choteo, with its positive and pernicious dimensions, waned by the time of his revision in 1955, An Inquiry into Choteo is all the more relevant in the 21st century, especially within a comparative context, wherein banners of ideology and egalitarianism sometimes obscure the racial and class tensions that reside right below the surface. Analysis of geopolitical maneuverings alone are insufficient to elucidate the intricacies of relationships that emerge, in such texts as Mañach's An Inquiry into Choteo.

Leseprobe

Jorge Mañach y Robato

An Inquiry into Choteo Translated and with an Introduction by Jacqueline Loss

Barcelona 2024

Linkgua-ediciones.com

Credits

Original title: Indagación del choteo

© 2018, Red ediciones S.L.

© Jacqueline Loss

Translated by Jacqueline Loss

in collaboration with

Christina Bauman,

Morgan Handy,

Kevin Johnston,

Sonja Nishku,

and Jacqueline Slemp

e-mail: [email protected]

Cover: Michel Mallard.

Cover image: 1917 Yearbook of the Cambridge High and Latin School

ISBN rústica ilustrada: 978-84-9897-354-9.

ISBN tapa dura: 978-84-1126-122-7.

ISBN ebook: 978-84-9953-950-8.

Any form of reproduction, distribution, communication to the public or transformation of this work may only be performed with authorisation from its copyright holders, unless exempt by law.

Should you need to photocopy or scan an excerpt of this work, please contact CEDRO (www.conlicencia.com; 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47)

Contents

Credits 4

Acknowledgments 9

Translator’s Introduction 11

Positioning Choteo 11

The Vernacular Stranger 13

Mediation: the Subject and his Nation 21

On Translating Mañach 29

21st Century Associations 35

Inquiry into Choteo 41

Author’s Note 43

In Defense of the Trivial 45

An Initial Definition 51

An Inner Assessment 55

Choteo in the Hierarchy of Mockery 57

Choteo and Order 63

Choteo and Prestige 67

Choteo, “Guataquería,” Rebellion 71

Choteo, Humor, Wit, Gracia 73

Levity and Independence 79

Choteo and Improvisation 87

Effects of Choteo 91

Choteo’s Transience 99

Cheerfulness and Audacity 101

Acknowledgments

Without the help, support, and knowledge of various students, friends, and colleagues in different stages of translating An Inquiry into Choteo, this project would not have evolved into what it is. I greatly appreciate the willingness of my former undergraduates—Christina Bauman, Morgan Handy, Kevin Johnston, Sonja Nisku, and Jacqueline Slemp—to have accepted the somewhat irrational challenge of attempting to work as a group to translate this highly challenging essay. Ariana Hernandez-Reguant is partially responsible for that dare, and I thank her. After a semester, we achieved a very rough draft over which, for the past two and a half years, I have labored. Only, before the brilliant and meticulous comments and suggestions of Kristin Dysktra do I realize the full scope of this intellectual striptease. My consultations with Esther Allen from the start of the project similarly remind me how fortunate I am to be able to rely on such expertise. Yael Prizant also provided thought-provoking editorial work. My follies are my own. Lena Burgos-La Fuente, Enrique del Risco, Arturo López-Levy, Marilú Menéndez, María Pérez, Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, and Toba Leah Singer debated the meaning of the term “parejería” with me and helped me to carefully plot out its evolution in time and place. When my students and I had one of the most obscure questions, I approached the encyclopedic Víctor Fowler Calzada, who directed us to Ana Cairo Ballester; she solved our puzzle in no time. Odette Casamayor Cisneros, Ana Dopico, Rachel Price, Rafael Rojas, Vicky Unruh, Alexandra Vazquez, and Esther Whitfield all dedicated their precious time to reading my translation and/or introduction and led me to dig deeper into various topics. In addition, I would like to thank Susana Aho, María Antonia Cabrera Arús, Rosa Helena Chinchilla, Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Matthew Corey, Augusto Espiritu, Isabel Garayta, Dara Goldman, Miguel Gomes, Andrew Hurley, Grettel Jiménez-Singer, Ellen Kanner Loss, Barbara Loss, Daniel Loss, Marilyn Miller, Amanda Moreno, Rolando Prats, Andrew N. Rubin, Sandra Ruiz, César Salgado, Miguel Sirgado, and Armando Suárez Cobián for helping me to sort out one detail or another, and in some cases, really, one detail after another. At a few key moments, I enormously appreciated the ability to rely on the first-rate translations of fragments of this essay, carried out by Gustavo Pérez Firmat. His previous scholarly reckoning with Mañach has helped me better understand this essay. A special thank you to Radamés Molina, a translator himself who has had infinite patience to dialogue with me continually down to the nitty-gritty of criollo phrases, and so much more.

Translator’s Introduction

Positioning Choteo

Some years back, an esteemed professor whose seminar I adored brought me into his office to talk about my writing, from which he had gathered I was not a native English speaker. In fact, I am a native English speaker. But I felt obliged to imagine a justification for his query. I have inherited a less than perfect attachment to English idiomatic expressions and, in all likelihood, a few watered-down Germanic constructions that mutated into something else when they came into contact with my mostly elected affinities in Spanish. These characteristics can put me into an awkward position when it comes to translating, since, on occasion, I can be delayed to notice when foreign constructions are not entirely intelligible in English. However, more importantly, I appreciate the discomfort inspired by unusual constructions, taking grammar and style to be a mirror into individuals and the context in which they reside and express themselves. There is much to be said about the value of estrangement. Theorist Lawrence Venuti posed a challenge about fluency, bringing attention to “domestic values” that the translator inscribes within the texts through the decisions she makes. He goes so far as to say that: “A translator may find that the very concept of the domestic merits interrogation for its concealment of heterogeneity and hybridity which can complicate existing stereotypes, canons, and standards applied in translation.”1

Even prior to translation, texts, in their original, are often wrestling with difference, with that belief in multiple communities of interpreters in a single nation; some of what interests me in Jorge Mañach’s An Inquiry into Choteo is the author’s own discomfort. As a specialist in Cuban literature, I had prolonged coming to know this essay up close, on account of its cultural centrality and its rhetorical eccentricity. Only through a tedious and multi-step process of translation have I come to better understand why An Inquiry into Choteo is one of those essays which many Cubans would say, of course, that they have read, but that likely they have not in its entirety. And yet, the performance of “choteo,” the performance of a certain attitude toward sobriety and jocularity, is far older than Mañach’s original 1928 essay and continues to constitute an important aspect of Cubanía or Cubanness. The following explanation of Cuban “exceptionalism” provided by Louis A. Pérez, Jr. is important to keep in mind as we get to know Mañach’s choteo.

The forms through which Cubans developed the terms of collective self-awareness must themselves be understood as facets of the character of the Cuban: a people confident of a special destiny foretold in their history. At some point in the nineteenth century, Cubans developed the capacity to adopt an external vision as a perspective on themselves, to see themselves from the outside as a way to both contemplate the world at large and take measure of their place in that world. That they belonged they never doubted.2

Mañach’s exploration of choteo is one of many such inquiries into the exceptionalism of the Cuban identity, a quest that has not disappeared in the present day.

As persistent as choteo remains in Cubans’ collective memory are Cubans’ ambivalent feelings toward it, not just on the island, but in the diaspora as well. Attesting to choteo’s longitude and malleability within global Cuban cultures is José Esteban Muñoz’s invocation of it in his 1994 analysis of the queer Cuban-American feminist performers, Ela Troyano and Alina Troyano (whose stage name is Carmelita Tropicana). Muñoz suggests that for these sisters, choteo, like camp, is a strategy of cultural critique that “can be a style of colonial mimicry that is simultaneously a form of resemblance and menace.” In so doing, Muñoz challenges what he sees as Mañach’s “pathologizing” of choteo, viewing it instead as a “strategy of self-enactment that helps a colonized or otherwise dispossessed subject enact a self through a critique of the normative culture.”3

The Vernacular Stranger

I would agree that Mañach pathologizes choteo, but there is much more. An unease is palpable throughout An Inquiry into Choteo, one, I would say, that corresponds not only to an emerging nation’s necessity to gain “stable footing,” but also to the author’s individual experience as a postcolonial subject, who is, in turn, negotiating how, in the position of an intercontinental traveler, he also forms part of that emerging Cuban nation. In the 1920s, many of Cuba’s intellectuals, like Mañach himself, were confronted with how to deal with a new postcolonial universe whose neocolonial leanings were undeniable. Following Cuba’s independence from Spain, the United States significantly intervened in the Cuban economy, and, as Vicky Unruh maps, “Cuban intellectuals registered deep ambivalence toward the U.S. market-driven work ethic.”4 In turn, the performance of choteo, whose attitudinal traits include, mockery, levity, and distraction, puts a damper on the kind of sought-after, clear, transparent labor, associated with that work ethic.

As a translator and researcher, I have been compelled by the social and personal unease within Mañach’s essay that nuances its frequently authoritative tone. Born in Sagua La Grande in Villa Clara, Cuba, in 1898, the final year of Cuba’s war for independence, to a father from Galicia, of Catalan lineage, and a Cuban mother, Mañach began a life of travel at the age of nine, since his father opposed independence, and decided to move his family out of the new republic to live in Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. While that detail, in itself, does not entirely explain the participant/witness position that Mañach adopts toward the Cuban idiosyncrasy of choteo, it does shed light on some of his wavering within the essay: for instance, his shifting between the first-person singular (I) and plural (we) to the third-person singular (he, in this case) and plural (they), a device that is not uncommon within Cuban Spanish, but is somewhat more pronounced in Mañach, and his more explicit shift in positionality when he imagines what it could feel like to arrive in Cuba from abroad, almost like Alejo Carpentier in his 1939 well-known chronicle, “Havana seen by a Cuban Tourist.” Mañach’s rhetoric may sound somewhat antiquated to the 21st century reader whether in Spanish or in English. Its intricacies have been solidly studied by critics before me. For instance, José Prats Sariol deems Mañach’s style as reminiscent of 19th century modernism,5 whereas Rafael Rojas suggests that it begins as impressionistic and moves toward more transparency. As Rojas delineates, this shift occurs in the process of Mañach’s becoming more engaged with addressing the necessities of Cuban civil society.6

Mañach called himself the “forastero vernáculo”7— the “vernacular stranger” or the “vernacular foreigner”—terms that resonated as I tackled seemingly convoluted expressions. Mañach sets out to analyze choteo in an orderly fashion, yet choteo seems to continually escape the bounds of the territory that he claims it inhabits. That is to say that while sound bites of this essay abound, they fail to capture the entirety of the significance of the term for Mañach. In part, I would say that that insufficiency relates to Mañach’s own “vernacularly strange” and inevitable performance.

In a slightly unpredictable manner that echoes Mañach, Gustavo Pérez Firmat gestures toward this challenge that Mañach’s analysis of choteo presents to academic and cultural cooption. He describes how the author “carries the reader along without obstructing his path with detours of meaning or barriers to understanding” only to reveal that the essay is not “the straightforward, unencumbered exposition that it might at first appear to be,” taking on the form of choteo, in its own “lapses of attention.”8 In so doing, he makes clear the centrality of “distraction” within Mañach’s definition—a characteristic with which Cuban cinephiles are likely familiar. Mañach’s preoccupation with Cubans’ easy distraction may remind readers of the complaints of Sergio, the protagonist of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 Memories of Underdevelopment, who, as he watches the Cuban people, and especially the women in his life, experience the revolution, utters: “One of the things that really gets me about people is their inability to sustain a feeling, an idea, without falling apart. Elena turned out to be totally inconsistent. It’s pure alteration, as Ortega would say. She doesn’t connect one thing with another. That’s one of the signs of underdevelopment.”9

Like Sergio, Mañach was an admirer of the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset. His senior by only fifteen years, Ortega y Gasset was the focus of one of Mañach’s most acclaimed essays, “Imagen de Ortega y Gasset,” published one year after Mañach’s 1955 revised edition of An Inquiry into Choteo.10 Ortega y Gasset’s influence resonates in Mañach’s concern over the deformation of values and the disintegration of mass society. Like many others encountered in An Inquiry into Choteo, complaints over Cubans’ inconsistency continue to be heard in the present. These days, however, rather than associate that trait with the transforming republic, Cubans attribute it to the failures of the revolution of 1959. As Mañach alternatively somberly critiques and values Cubans’ tendency to not take anything seriously within An Inquiry into Choteo, readers may yearn for some comic relief, as they try to keep up with choteo’s transforming meanings.11

But, beyond the transforming meanings, Mañach notes in the revised edition of his essay that the ubiquity of choteo has diminished over time, as a result of different experiences. In particular, in a footnote, he suggests that the revolutionary processes of the 1930s and 1940s led to tragic excesses that, in other words, diminished Cubans’ propensity toward levity.

Mañach even remarks upon translation a couple of times within the essay (a fact that is not, at all, surprising, given that he, himself, translated, among others, George Santayana, around the time he was thinking about choteo).12 First, translation becomes a topic when Mañach indicates the extent to which choteo translates into a form of mockery, and second, when he compares the early twentieth century comedies of the Spanish brothers Álvarez Quintero to Cuban choteo, revealing that their humor is likewise “difficult to translate.” Pérez Firmat contrasts Mañach’s negative view of Cuba’s reliance on foreign models with his own positive perspective on Cuba’s particular and original “translation sensibility.”13 For Narciso J. Hidalgo, this phrase overly emphasizes the easily assimilable elements of Cuban identity; that is, the intralingual translation on the Spanish-Cuban axis, rather than the African-Cuban one.14