City of Translation: Poetry and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (2010)

WINNER OF THE PROSE AWARD FOR LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND LINGUISTICS! The two principal questions that The City of Translation sets out to answer are: how did poetry, philology, catechesis, and literary translation legitimate a coterie of right-wing literati's rise to power in Colombia? And how did these men proceed to dismantle a long-standing liberal-democratic state without derogating basic constitutional freedoms? To answer those questions, José María Rodríguez García investigates the emergence, development, and decline of what he calls "the reactionary city of translation"-a variation on, and a correction to, Ángel Rama's understanding of the nineteenth-century "lettered city" as a primarily liberal and modernizing project. The City of Translation makes the tropes of "translatio" the conceptual nucleus of a comprehensive analysis that cuts across academic disciplines, ranging from political philosophy and the history of concepts to the relationship of literature to religious doctrine and the law.