The text is focused on Alfonso Reyes’s statement on the race question and racial prejuidice. In Hispanic America, people from different worlds, with habits and traditions that diverge, coexist. This fact does not consitute an obstacle, on the contrary, the multicultural society is considered by Alfonso Reyes to be fundamental for the cultural identity of the area. Hispanic America, in comparison with other parts of the world, adopted a more tolerant approach to the diverseness. Their knowledge based on hundreds of years of experience with cultural diversity can be a valuable source of inspiration for the European culture that felt into crisis in the twentieth century.
“Cultural translation” consists not only in the awareness of the cultural context of the work translated, but in the understanding of the regional and the universal in a work of literature. The very fact of translation, of linguistic and cultural mediation, creates “universality in diversity” on the cultural and poetic levels. This approach formed in the works of Zdeněk Šmíd, the founding figure of Spanish-American studies in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, in the dialogue with the Mexican thinker Alfonso Reyes.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.