ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a critical assessment of Fernando Ortiz’s writings on Alexander von Humboldt with an inquiry into the challenges of carrying Humboldt’s writing and thinking into another idiom. It focuses on how Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l’ile de Cuba, a text that was banned in Cuba because of its anti-slavery sentiments, has fared at the hands of different translators since the early nineteenth-century. Alexander von Humboldt visited the island of Cuba twice during his American journey, in 1800 and 1804. The chapter describes Ortiz’s lead in scrutinizing John Thrasher’s infamous defacement of Humboldt’s writing in The Island of Cuba, situating Thrasher’s version in relation to other English, Spanish, and German translations of the text. Thrasher’s own politics were unequivocally proslavery, and, seeing his political fortunes wane by the mid-1850s, he resorted to a different strategy. In Thrasher’s translation, there is none of the breathlessness and even disorientation that comes with reading Humboldt’s long paragraphs.
