Nagualli: Tzvetan Todorov, "Columbus as Interpreter," The Conquest of America

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Tzvetan Todorov, "Columbus as Interpreter," The Conquest of America

Columbus does not succeed in his human communications because he is not interested in them. We read in his journal for December 6, 1492, that the Indians he has taken on board his ship try to escape and are distressed to find themselves far from their island. "Moreover he did not understand them any better than they understood him, and they were greatly afraid of the people on this new island. Therefore, in order to make converse with its people, he would have had to tarry there for several days. But he did not do so, in order to see further lands and from doubt that the weather would hold." Everything is in the sequence of these few sentences: Columbus's summary perception of the Indians, a mixture of authoritarianism and condescension; the incomprehension of their language and of their signs; the readiness with which he alienates the other's goodwill with a view to a better knowledge of the islands he is discovering; the preference for land over men. In Columbus's hermeneutics human beings have no particular place.

2 comments:

Edgar GarciaJanuary 22, 2012 at 6:41 PM
paramount: "the preference for land over men;" i.e. that's Olson's version of Americanism. . .
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Edgar GarciaJanuary 24, 2012 at 1:04 PM
"That is, the gate to the center was, here, as accurate as what you and i have been (all along talking about - viz., man as object in field of force declaring self as force because is force in exactly such relation & can accomplish expression of self as force by conjecture & displacement in a context best, now, seen as space more than a time such."
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about | co-curators

Here uncoils a collective psychogeography of the Americas—a personal exploration of indigenous poetics and epistemes. With a specific focus on Nagualism, the native American practice of self-splitting and metamorphosis, this collective project (executed as a continuous exchange between its collaborators) confirms that metamorphosis is a rapid, ongoing process without beginning or end, an antinomous exchange of excess in limitless operation. So while we post here, a chattering seed grows suddenly to a green stalk while a stone or mountain teems with personhood and animacy; and we match that overflow with overflow. Thus do we redistribute cosmic energy. Its first transfer long preceded our arrival; but we continue the exchange, the extension which is likewise our rootedness. To a great extent, this is simply a record of the personal reading habits of its co-curators, Jose-Luis Moctezuma and Edgar Garcia.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a californiano and a current doctoral student at the University of Chicago. His studies focus on technologies of the image in poetry, cinema, and literature. His work has been/will be published by Berkeley Poetry Review, PALABRA, Cerise Press, and MAKE Magazine. He is an editor and writer at Hydra Magazine.

Edgar Garcia's poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Big Bridge, Damn the Caesars, Exit 9, Jacket2, Los Angeles Review of Books, MAKE Magazine, Mandorla, Sous les Pavés, and Those That This: Arts Journal. Author of Mayan Texts: A Galactic Birth Canal (Burnt Water Booklets, 2010) and Boundary Loot (Punch Press, 2012), he was also formerly a writer and editor at Hydra Magazine. An anthology that he has co-edited titled American Literature in the World is forthcoming from Columbia UP. In 2015 he completed a Ph.D. in American Literature at Yale University and began as Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.