Revista de Estudios Hispánicos

This volume advances a recent and growing academic interest in translation in the context of urban space, most extensively explored to date by Sherry Simon in Translating Montreal (2006) and Cities in Translation (2011), as well as her edited volume Speaking Memory (2016). Drawing on Simon’s dual insights into the city as a multilingual space of constant translation, and of translation as more than a two-way model of exchange between familiar and foreign cultures, Regina Galasso and Evelyn Scaramella’s edited collection seeks “to explore how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural contexts, as well as how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city’s past and present literary and cultural practices” (6). Noting that translation “is the ideal idiom for studying the city because of the rich interpretive space of cultural and historical diversity that it generates” (2), the editors define it “not only as an art carried out by translators and writers, but also as an analytical tool that opens new ways of understanding the literary experiences and representations of Iberian and Latin American cities” (6).

The resulting work is an eclectic and often exciting mix of insights into a range of cities, cultural practices, and modes of writing from across the Americas, also including a chapter on Barcelona. The autobiographical contributions by Suzanne Jill Levine, Peter Bush, and Ilan Stavans, as well as the creative bilingual piece by Urayoán Noel, add to the volume’s eclecticism and capture its mood of restless, conversational, urban movement. This is appealing for the way it interweaves academic perspectives and personal lives in accounting for the lived experience of cities and their languages.

The only difficulty with this approach is that it produces something a bit scattered and at the same time very focused on North America, especially New York, where the editors and a number of the contributors are based. More than a third of the chapters and a good portion of the prologue, as well as the book’s cover image, are devoted to that city, while Ilan Stavans’s opening, autobiographical account makes the volume feel like something of a homage to “Nuyol.” Of course, the fabled multilingualism of this city and some of its most powerful modernist novels—Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer—more than justifies its incorporation into a study of translational cultural practices, but to give it such prominence in a volume seeking to understand “the literary experiences and representations of Iberian and Latin American cities” (6)—as the editors claim in their Introduction—is perhaps more questionable. The volume does include chapters on the major cosmopolitan or multilingual cities of the Spanish-speaking world—Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Havana—but it is nonetheless strange not to find a wider and more balanced distribution of places and languages, and some reference to such major Iberian and Latin American authors of the multilingual city as Julio Cortázar, Juan Goytisolo, or Juan Marsé. There is only one chapter on an Iberian city—Catalan-speaking Barcelona—and no reference at all to the Lusophone world. The best justification for the perhaps disproportionate emphasis on New York in this context emerges from Esther Allen’s chapter, in [End Page 869] which she argues that it is not just an exuberantly multilingual city in which English predominates (as Sherry Simon claims), but rather a dual city in which both English and Spanish “have deep, historical roots” (127–28). Allen’s incorporation of New York into the Spanish-speaking world via the figure of José Martí, combined with Hugh Hazelton’s fascinating account of how “Latin America has come to Quebec” (109), help to explain how a volume concerned with Iberian and Latin American cities and writing comes to be so preoccupied with North America.

There is also perhaps a difficulty with the...