Cultural translation in gauchesca poetry

Abstract

This article investigates modes of transemiotic translation in a special literary genre, the gauchesca poetry, whose origins kept clear interchanges with orality, which were disappearing and getting transformed throughout its history. In addition, the genre also varied from humorous or rather challenging beginnings towards a mainly complaintive tone, such as the one observed in the last “Diálogos” from Bartolomé Hidalgo and which reappears half a century later in José Hernández. Estanislao Del Campo, in his turn, uses the genre – in a very particular historical circumstance – with the confidence that any culture legacy may be translated without the limits of geographical, political, and class boundaries, laying the foundations of a literary conception for the peripheral countries, one of whose heirs would be Jorge Luis Borges.

Keywords

• Cultural translation
• Gauchesca poetry
• Argentinean literature