ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the phenomenon of inter-subjectivity between the traditional and oral to the contemporary and lexical expression in South America using the translation perspective. The irruption of the written alphabet in the New World led to textual resistance that aimed at repositioning, albeit symbolically, the forms of native expression that had been appropriated, marginalized and disparaged within the new system of colonial communication. This gave way to a third moment, which was key in the formation of Spanish American literary discourse. We refer here to the emergence of the first distinct textuality that incorporates not only the dominant language and code, but also the translation itself as a mechanism of generating writing. This writing was characterized until the second half of the 19th century by two complementary currents that stemmed from the same translationary matrix, as well as two foundational aesthetic models that emerged from the author’s engagement with the tense relationship between both orality and the written alphabet, and native languages and Spanish. Viewing the problem through the lens of translation, as this chapter does, through a panorama of three foundational moments (oral interpretation, transcription to literaturization and the anesthetization of translation), plus a fourth moment of contemporary continuity and rupture (current indigenous poetry) appears to be a necessary interpretative framework through which to expand the analytic possibilities for understanding literature in the languages that have inherited active oral traditions.
