WINNER OF THE PROSE AWARD FOR LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND LINGUISTICS

The two principal questions that "The City of Translation" sets out to answer are: how did poetry, philology, catechesis, and literary translation legitimate a coterie of right-wing literati's rise to power in Colombia? And how did these men proceed to dismantle a long-standing liberal-democratic state without derogating basic constitutional freedoms? To answer those questions, Jose Maria Rodriguez Garcia investigates the emergence, development, and decline of what he calls "the reactionary city of translation"--a variation on, and a correction to, Angel Rama's understanding of the nineteenth-century "lettered city" as a primarily liberal and modernizing project. "The City of Translation" makes the tropes of ""translatio"" the conceptual nucleus of a comprehensive analysis that cuts across academic disciplines, ranging from political philosophy and the history of concepts to the relationship of literature to religious doctrine and the law.

A sweeping intellectual history of the relationship between literary translation, authoritarian politics, linguistic ideologies, juristic philology, religion, and poetry in late nineteenth-century Colombia.