A Meditation on the Translation of Our America

This translation of José Martí's Nuestra América (Our America) and accompanying essay offer English-speaking readers a new version of his seminal text, situating it more firmly within the realm of literary and translation studies, and decentering it from the world of Latin American history or politics, where the extant English translations tend to live in North American libraries. The translator’s meditation focuses on some of the more poetic aspects of Martí's language and the logic he employs to create interconnected evolving metaphors and metonyms, while also explaining some of the lexical and syntactic choices made in key areas that have traditionally caused difficulty with previous translations of this essay.