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    An Inquiry into Choteo
    An Inquiry into Choteo
    An Inquiry into Choteo
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    An Inquiry into Choteo

    By Jorge Mañach Robato

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    About this ebook

    In the 1920s, many of Cuba's intellectuals, like Jorge Mañach, were confronted with how to deal with a new postcolonial universe whose neocolonial leanings were undeniable.
    A palpable unease runs throughout An Inquiry into Choteo (first delivered as a lecture in 1928), as Mañach anxiously attempts to explain this idiosyncratic Cuban attitude or humor that he deems prevalent in the first few turbulent decades of the 20th century.
    Esteemed in the Spanish-speaking world, only two of Mañach's writings, Martí: Apostle of Freedom, 1950 and Frontiers in the Americas: A Global Perspective (1970), have been published in English—a language which, as an adolescent in Massachusetts, Mañach inhabited, and from which he translated throughout his life. The fact that Mañach is a difficult figure to pin down, textually and ideologically across his life, is part of Jacqueline Loss's motivation to carry out this translation of An Inquiry into Choteo, one of the most authoritative essays in Spanish, comparable to other classic meditations on Latin American and national identity such as José Enrique Rodó's Ariel (1900, English 1988), Antonio S. Pedreira's Insularismo: An Insight into the Puerto Rican Character (1934, English 2007), and Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950, English 1962).
    While Mañach suggested that the pervasiveness of choteo, with its positive and pernicious dimensions, waned by the time of his revision in 1955, An Inquiry into Choteo is all the more relevant in the 21st century, especially within a comparative context, wherein banners of ideology and egalitarianism sometimes obscure the racial and class tensions that reside right below the surface. Analysis of geopolitical maneuverings alone are insufficient to elucidate the intricacies of relationships that emerge, in such texts as Mañach's An Inquiry into Choteo.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLinkgua
    Release dateDec 1, 2017
    ISBN9788499539508
    An Inquiry into Choteo

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      Book preview

      An Inquiry into Choteo - Jorge Mañach Robato

      9788499539508.jpg

      Jorge Mañach y Robato

      An Inquiry into Choteo

      Translated and with an Introduction

      by Jacqueline Loss

      Barcelona 2024

      Linkgua-ediciones.com

      Credits

      Original title: Indagación del choteo

      © 2018, Red ediciones S.L.

      © Jacqueline Loss

      Translated by Jacqueline Loss

      in collaboration with

      Christina Bauman,

      Morgan Handy,

      Kevin Johnston,

      Sonja Nishku,

      and Jacqueline Slemp

      e-mail: info@linkgua.com

      Cover: Michel Mallard.

      Cover image: 1917 Yearbook of the Cambridge High and Latin School

      ISBN rústica ilustrada: 978-84-9897-354-9.

      ISBN tapa dura: 978-84-1126-122-7.

      ISBN ebook: 978-84-9953-950-8.

      Any form of reproduction, distribution, communication to the public or transformation of this work may only be performed with authorisation from its copyright holders, unless exempt by law.

      Should you need to photocopy or scan an excerpt of this work, please contact CEDRO (www.conlicencia.com; 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47)

      Contents

      Credits 4

      Acknowledgments 9

      Translator’s Introduction 11

      Positioning Choteo 11

      The Vernacular Stranger 13

      Mediation: the Subject and his Nation 21

      On Translating Mañach 29

      21st Century Associations 35

      Inquiry into Choteo 41

      Author’s Note 43

      In Defense of the Trivial 45

      An Initial Definition 51

      An Inner Assessment 55

      Choteo in the Hierarchy of Mockery 57

      Choteo and Order 63

      Choteo and Prestige 67

      Choteo, Guataquería, Rebellion 71

      Choteo, Humor, Wit, Gracia 73

      Levity and Independence 79

      Choteo and Improvisation 87

      Effects of Choteo 91

      Choteo’s Transience 99

      Cheerfulness and Audacity 101

      Acknowledgments

      Without the help, support, and knowledge of various students, friends, and colleagues in different stages of translating An Inquiry into Choteo, this project would not have evolved into what it is. I greatly appreciate the willingness of my former undergraduates—Christina Bauman, Morgan Handy, Kevin Johnston, Sonja Nisku, and Jacqueline Slemp—to have accepted the somewhat irrational challenge of attempting to work as a group to translate this highly challenging essay. Ariana Hernandez-Reguant is partially responsible for that dare, and I thank her. After a semester, we achieved a very rough draft over which, for the past two and a half years, I have labored. Only, before the brilliant and meticulous comments and suggestions of Kristin Dysktra do I realize the full scope of this intellectual striptease. My consultations with Esther Allen from the start of the project similarly remind me how fortunate I am to be able to rely on such expertise. Yael Prizant also provided thought-provoking editorial work. My follies are my own. Lena Burgos-La Fuente, Enrique del Risco, Arturo López-Levy, Marilú Menéndez, María Pérez, Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, and Toba Leah Singer debated the meaning of the term "parejería" with me and helped me to carefully plot out its evolution in time and place. When my students and I had one of the most obscure questions, I approached the encyclopedic Víctor Fowler Calzada, who directed us to Ana Cairo Ballester; she solved our puzzle in no time. Odette Casamayor Cisneros, Ana Dopico, Rachel Price, Rafael Rojas, Vicky Unruh, Alexandra Vazquez, and Esther Whitfield all dedicated their precious time to reading my translation and/or introduction and led me to dig deeper into various topics. In addition, I would like to thank Susana Aho, María Antonia Cabrera Arús, Rosa Helena Chinchilla, Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Matthew Corey, Augusto Espiritu, Isabel Garayta, Dara Goldman, Miguel Gomes, Andrew Hurley, Grettel Jiménez-Singer, Ellen Kanner Loss, Barbara Loss, Daniel Loss, Marilyn Miller, Amanda Moreno, Rolando Prats, Andrew N. Rubin, Sandra Ruiz, César Salgado, Miguel Sirgado, and Armando Suárez Cobián for helping me to sort out one detail or another, and in some cases, really, one detail after another. At a few key moments, I enormously appreciated the ability to rely on the first-rate translations of fragments of this essay, carried out by Gustavo Pérez Firmat. His previous scholarly reckoning with Mañach has helped me better understand this essay. A special thank you to Radamés Molina, a translator himself who has had infinite patience to dialogue with me continually down to the nitty-gritty of criollo phrases, and so much more.

      Translator’s Introduction

      Positioning Choteo

      Some years back, an esteemed professor whose seminar I adored brought me into his office to talk about my writing, from which he had gathered I was not a native English speaker. In fact, I am a native English speaker. But I felt obliged to imagine a justification for his query. I have inherited a less than perfect attachment to English idiomatic expressions and, in all likelihood, a few watered-down Germanic constructions that mutated into something else when they came into contact with my mostly elected affinities in Spanish. These characteristics can put me into an awkward position when it comes to translating, since, on occasion, I can be delayed to notice when foreign constructions are not entirely intelligible in English. However, more importantly, I appreciate the discomfort inspired by unusual constructions, taking grammar and style to be a mirror into individuals and the context in which they reside and express themselves. There is much to be said about the value of estrangement. Theorist Lawrence Venuti posed a challenge about fluency, bringing attention to domestic values that the translator inscribes within the texts through the decisions she makes. He goes so far as to say that: A translator may find that the very concept of the domestic merits interrogation for its concealment of heterogeneity and hybridity which can complicate existing stereotypes, canons, and standards applied in translation.¹

      Even prior to translation, texts, in their original, are often wrestling with difference, with that belief in multiple communities of interpreters in a single nation; some of what interests me in Jorge Mañach’s An Inquiry into Choteo is the author’s own discomfort. As a specialist in Cuban literature, I had prolonged coming to know this essay up close, on account of its cultural centrality and its rhetorical eccentricity. Only through a tedious and multi-step process of translation have I come to better understand why An Inquiry into Choteo is one of those essays which many Cubans would say, of course, that they have read, but that likely they have not in its entirety. And yet, the performance of choteo, the performance of a certain attitude toward sobriety and jocularity, is far older than Mañach’s original 1928 essay and continues to constitute an important aspect of Cubanía or Cubanness. The following explanation of Cuban exceptionalism provided by Louis A. Pérez, Jr. is important to keep in mind as we get to know Mañach’s choteo.

      The forms through which Cubans developed the terms of collective self-awareness must themselves be understood as facets of the character of the Cuban: a people confident of a special destiny foretold in their history. At some point in the nineteenth century, Cubans developed the capacity to adopt an external vision as a perspective on themselves, to see themselves from the outside as a way to both contemplate the world at large

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