Literature of Latin America and the Caribbean

OCTAVIO PAZ "TRANSPLANTED LANGUAGES"

Octavio Paz's 1990 Nobel Lecture accentuated the issue of transplanted languages and the literature that emerged in a transplanted culture. Latin-American and Caribbean literature is good example of the use of transplanted languages since the influence of European and American cultures is quite pronounced. When people migrate from one place to another or are forced to endure foreign rule, the impact on the language is usually the most marked. Words and concepts are borrowed from other languages and cultures, incorporated in native languages and from this fusion, emerges a language which lacks the beauty and grandeur of the original but is well-understood and even widely accepted by the natives influenced by transplantation. This is what Octavio Paz was referring to when he spoke of transplanted languages and its use in Latin American literature.

Languages are born and grow from the native soil, nourished by a common history. The European languages were rooted out from their native soil and their own tradition, and then planted in an unknown and unnamed world: they took root in the new lands and, as they grew within the societies of America, they were transformed. They are the same plant yet also a different plant. Our literatures did not passively accept the changing fortunes of the transplanted languages: they participated in the process and even accelerated it. They very soon ceased to be mere transatlantic reflections: at times they have been the negation of the literatures of Europe; more often, they have been a reply. (Nobel Lecture, 1)

Transplanted languages thus refer to languages which were uprooted from their own area of origin and planted in some new land. The foreign land changed the language because of the cultural and social differences that existed in the new region and thus the language which emerged was different from the original but was nevertheless equally effective for younger generations.

When northern Mexico was seized by the U.S. through the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty (1848), the local population found itself under the powerful cultural and social forces of United States which later transformed the generations of Mexicans born in America. This encounter and similar encounters in the Caribbean regions by Spanish and other imperial powers resulted in broad cultural interaction. The influence on Europeans on Latin American and Caribbean region was far more profound than American impact, the reason being that various conquests in South American region completely changed the culture of that country and gave birth to languages which were highly influenced by Europe. On the other hand, the generation of Mexicans that were influenced directly by American cultures was the one that grew up in America while those in the native country have more or less retained the European cultural influence. But South Americans residing in America have accepted American influence and this reflects in literary representations.

'The similarity, between the evolution of Anglo-American and Spanish American literature, results from the fact that both are written in transplanted languages. Between ourselves and the American soil a void opened up which we had to fill with strange words. Indians and mestizos included, our language is European. The history of our literatures is the history of our relations with the place that is America, and also with the place where the words we speak were born and came of age. In the beginning our letters were a reflection of European ones. However, in the seventeenth century a singular variety of baroque poetry was born in Spanish America that was not only the exaggeration but at times the transgression of the Spanish model." (Paz, Children, 138)

If we go beyond Paz's lecture and his views expressed elsewhere, we notice that there are other critics, writers and poets as well who acknowledged transplantation of languages and found it embedded in Latin American literature. Some feel that the European influence was not restricted to language alone but was could also been seen in themes and plots: "All too often the nineteenth century Spanish-American novel is clumsy and inept, with a plot derived at second hand from the contemporary European Romantic novel' (Franco, p. 56) Other felt that old Latin American works mostly reflected a strong and marked European influence even on character development, dreams and aspirations of those characters and almost everything else: 'If heroes and heroines in mid-nineteenth century Latin American novels were passionately desiring one another across traditional lines . . . those passions might not have prospered a generation earlier. In fact, modernizing lovers were learning how to dream their erotic fantasies by reading the European romances they hoped to realize.' (Sommer, pp.31-2)

This influence has more or less endured and withstood the test of time. European languages and cultures left an indelible mark on Latin American literature so much so that some critics feel that this influence renders local writers incapable of producing original work. Candido (1980) argued: "We [Latin American writers] never create original expressive forms or basic expressive techniques, in the sense that we mean by romanticism, on the level of literary movements; the psychological novel, on the level of genres; free indirect style, on that of writing . . . The various nativisms never rejected the use of the imported literary forms . . . what was demanded was the choice of new themes, of different sentiments. (pp. 272 -- 3)