ABSTRACT
In 1532, almost at the height of the Spanish empire, the humanist Juan Luis Vives declared: “Interpretations [referring to translations] are not only beneficial, but they are of prime necessity for all disciplines and all arts, as well as for all circumstances of life.” 1 This statement, a product of an imperial, expansionist, multilingual and muticultural—however much denied— sectarian, feudal, repressive, and authoritarian society, is not entirely inadequate or irrelevant to a colonized, underdeveloped, and demoralized society, a society increasingly fragmented in its institutions, increasingly disbelieving and more cynical as to capabilities—and consequently each day more impotent—the society whose literature we will examine. I do not believe that the relevancy of this statement is necessarily the result of a stroke of irony. It responds to a need and to a process which has become controversial, long neglected by a significant part of our intelligentsia, and certainly a traumatic process, but above all, one which is central to our historical experience, with deep, though largely ignored, cultural implications. I am referring to the diaspora, the massive uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, that bidirectional movement which leaves its mark as much on those who leave as on those who stay behind, and those who now will remain here or on those who return. All this has become intrinsic to our national experience, and curiously enough it validates for the colony the same appreciation given 450 years earlier for the metropolis, although with different causes and purposes.
