Abstract
IN 1851 POPE PIUS IX, AS PART OF THE PROJECT OF CANONIZing Columbus, asked the official historian of the Vatican, Court Roselly de Lorges, to write a “pious” history of the admiral. He did so with such pompous style, with such grandiose spirit, that the hero ended up in his 1856 work larger than life, a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Although de Lorges was successful in literarily transforming the admiral into a redeemer, in the end Columbus’s sainthood was not granted by the Church.
A symbolic man is a man’s name without a self.
—Zdenek Saul Wohryzeky, An Improbable Life (1986)
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Notes and References
Léon Bloy, Le Révélateur du globe (The Revealer of the Globe). 3 vols. (Paris: Médecins Bibliophiles, 1889), quoted in Carpentier (140).
Derived from the Greek verb symballien, the term symbol means “to put together” when used as an adjective; as a noun it connotes “sign” “token,” or “mark.” Understood as a metaphor in the sense that it replaces a certain object by analogy, a symbol is a figure of speech that substitutes a representation for the real item, thus calling attention to some of the item’s qualities. Its aesthetic beauty depends on the reader finding its connection to what it represents; if the transition is too mechanical, the symbol can be simplistic and superficial. See Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged edition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 833–36.
Barlow is one of those obscure U.S. writers about whom not much has been written; John Dos Passos praises his democratic spirit in The Ground We Stand On (1941), but most of his compatriots have ignored him. Nevertheless, there are valuable biographies and commentaries on his writing, among them: Charles B. Todd, Life and Letters of Joel Barlow (New York: [G. P. Puttman’s,] 1886); Theodore Zunder, The Early Days of Joel Barlow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934); and Arthur L. Ford, Joel Barlow (New York: Twayne, 1971, especially 46–67 on The Vision of Columbus), hereafter cited in the text.
James Woodress, A Yankee’s Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1958), 85–86.
Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus. 5th ed. (Paris: English Press, 1793), 121, hereafter cited in the text as Vision.
Ford (48–62) offers a coherent, organized synthesis.
Joel Barlow, The Columbiad, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad & Co., 1809), 1:xiii, hereafter cited in the text as Columbiad.
See chapter 3, note 4.
Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 59–61.
In Ibáñez’s In Search of the Grand Khan most of these defects are still stubbornly present. The plot revolves around the first voyage, and the subtext is a glorification of Spain for having produced such an outstanding personality. See Barrientos, “Colón, personaje novelesco.”
On the vicissitudes of romanticism in Spain and Hispanic America, see Octavio Paz’s illuminating essay, “Translation and Metaphor,” in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures published as Children of the Mire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 115–41. My introduction to the bilingual edition of Felipe Alfau’s La poesía cursi/Sentimental Songs (Naperville, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1992) elaborates on the use of Spanish romantic poetry by twentieth-century authors.
“Si la tierra no halláis, loco profundo: / Si halláis la Tierra, redentor del mundo” (If you don’t find land, you’ll be a profound lunatic:/If you do find land, you’ll be a redeemer) (Colón, 47).
The Spanish original reads: “Unos dicen que es un sabio, otro que un loco.”
Seen Masquerade, Note 11.
See William Carlos Williams, Yes, Mrs. Williams (New York: New Directions, 1973). An interesting essay on Williams’s linguisitic education and his mother’s role in his childhood is Julio Marzán’s “Mrs. Williams’s William Carlos,” Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America, edited by Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 106–21.
For a valuable study, see Thomas R. Whitaker William Carlos Williams [1968] (Boston: Twayne, 1989), hereafter cited in the text.
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain [1925] (New York: New Directions, 1956), 7, hereafter cited in the text as Grain.
The attitude of major critics toward Williams’s oeuvre is complex. Edmund Wilson, after an extensive discussion of H. D., Carl Sandburg, and E. E. cummings in The Shores of Light (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1985), claims, “W. C. Williams and Maxwell Bodenheim I have tried my best to admire, but I have not been able to believe in them” (240). And in On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modem American Prose Literature (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942) and An American Procession, Alfred Kazin ignores him completely.
For another facet of Jean Chariot as influential experimentalist close friend of Mexicans like Diego Rivera, see my essay, “José Guadalupe Posada, Lampooner,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 16 (Summer 1990): 54–71.
See Patrick Lobert, “Spectatorhood and Transaction in Claudel’s Livre de Christophe Colomb,” Claudel Studies 15, no. 2 (1988):49–57.
The Yale English-language edition does not credit the translator.
See Moses M. Nagy, “The Concept of History in The Book of Christopher Columbus by Paul Claudel,” Claudel Studies 15, no. 2 (1988):23–36.
For a study of how The Book of Christopher Columbus influenced Carpenter’s The Harp and the Shadow. See Klaus Muller-Berg, “The Perception of the Marvelous: Paul Claudel and Carpentier’s El arpa y la sombra”, Comparative Literature Studies 24, no. 2 (1987): 165–91.
See Jacques Houriez, “Inspiration scripturaire et écriture dramatique dans Le Livre de Christophe Colomb” (Biblical Inspiratior and Dramatic Writing in The Book of Christopher Columbus), Claudel Studies 15, no. 2 (1988): 37–48.
Nikos Kazantzakis, Christopher Columbus, translated by Athena Gianakas Dallas, in Three Plays (also includes Melissa and Kouros) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 92. The subtide, The Golden Apple, was lost in translation.
Helen Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on His Letters [1965], translanted by Amy Mims (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 66–67, hereafter cited in the text.
Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn [1987], translated by Alfred Mac-Adam, in collaboration with the author (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 6, hereafter cited in the text as Unborn.
Although well done, the English translation does reshape the original Cristóbal nonato. Both versions are extravaganzas written for the academic reader. An in-depth analysis comparing them has yet to be written, but a superficial look at their tables of contents reveals some of their differences: the English version is shorter, more versatile, and dynamic; it eliminates some chapters and some tangential passages.
Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, translated by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 87.
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© 1993 Ilan Stavans
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Stavans, I. (1993). The Symbol. In: Imagining Columbus. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63347-0_7
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