ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses Robert Burns's reception and influence in the United States and Canada that any study of 'transatlantic Burns' that lacked a perspective on Latin America would be geographically and culturally partial. It confesses at the outset that Burns's poetry is not deeply rooted in the soil of Latin America and his poetry was translated into Hungarian, Norwegian, Finnish, Esperanto, and even Japanese before Spanish and Portuguese. The chapter explores significant contemporary links between the Ayrshire Bard and the cause of Latin American independence that got under way the decade after his death, and briefly considering some parallels between the agrarian poetry of Burns and two Latin American near-contemporaries, the Guatamaltec Jesuit Rafael Landivar and the Venezuelan exile and patriot Andrs Bello. Tracing the Latin American connection through Burns's intellectual and epistolary networks yields richer fruit than the sparse allusions in his verse, associating him at only one remove from some of the major actors on the historical stage.
