ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a descriptive translation studies (DTS) approach to analyse the attempts to translate Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” by two Spanish American exiles, the Venezuelan Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde and the Cuban José Martí, in 1880s New York City. The chapter examines Poe’s source text and Pérez Bonalde’s translation as significant cultural productions that wield real power within the literary traditions of both source and target cultures. It also points to Martí’s unpublished Poe translations as indications of Martí’s and Pérez Bonalde’s close friendship, as evidence of Poe’s early influence in Spanish America, and as signs of a tantalizing but untapped project from Martí’s literary life. The chapter unveils a different type of transnationalism that Poe scholars have, up to this point, ignored—the role of the translator as a literal transnational figure who, in this case, physically crosses borders to enter the home space of the author of the source text, engages a community of other translators who are also transplants in the home of that writer, and translates the source text in this cosmopolitan but foreign space.
