Vera M. Kutzinski

Translations of Cuba: Fernando Ortiz, Alexander von Humboldt, and the curious case of John Sidney Thrasher

Abstract This essay combines a critical assessment of Fernando Ortizs writings on Alexander von Humboldt with an inquiry into the challenges of carrying Humboldts writing and thinking into another idiom. My focus is on how Humboldts Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba (1826), 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. I follow Ortizs lead in scrutinizing John Thrashers infamous defacement of Humboldts writing in The Island of Cuba (1856), situating Thrashers version in relation to other English, Spanish, and German translations of this text. I argue that Thrashers case, while no doubt extreme, represents a difference in degree but not in kind when compared to how other translators have handled Humboldt to make him more “readable.”

Unspeakable things translated: Langston Hughes’s poems in post-World War II Germanies

ABSTRACT Translators negotiate relative distances and proximities within a fluid space that simultaneously separates and connects languages. In this essay, I examine mid-twentieth-century German-language translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry as they straddle the transnational and translinguistic area of the Atlantic Ocean in an attempt to break the silences that the post-war tabooization of the word Rasse (race) had produced. Hughes’s German translators, I argue, used this transarea to create a discursive space within which to address, albeit stealthily, the racialization not of Jews but of “persons of color.” In these translations, we can glimpse the beginnings of a critique of domestic racisms which still awaits full exploration.

Everything is interrelated, even the errors in the system: Alexander von Humboldt and globalization

Abstract This article is an English version of the final chapter of Ettes Alexander von Humboldt und die Globalisierung: das Mobile des Wissen, published by Insel in 2009.

About an attempt to climb to the top of Chimborazo

Abstract Alexander von Humboldt wrote the final version of “Über einen Versuch den Gipfel des Chimborazo zu ersteigen” [About an Attempt to Climb to the Top of Chimborazo] almost 50 years after his return from the Americas. He published it in his Kleinere Schriften [Shorter Writings] in 1853, a scan of which is available from Google Books. As Humboldt himself mentions, he based a good part of this essay on his travel diary from 23 June 1802. Although he followed his diary fairly closely, Humboldt, as was his wont, updated the essay to include recent information. The earlier version from 1838 lacks the later, revised essays copious endnotes.