Translating concepts from Latin American philosophy: Ontologies and aesthetics in the work of Rodolfo Kusch

In El pensamiento indígena y popular en América (1977), philosopher Rodolfo Kusch aims to recuperate a form of thinking he believes lies at the root of the American continent. Thinking in and from the Americas has an ontological dimension for him: being in the Americas is different from being in Europe, and Kusch ties this ontological distinction to a linguistic and grammatical distinction in Latin American Spanish that does not exist in English (ser vs. estar). These and other key concepts posed a challenge for my co-translator, the late Maria Lugones, and me as we set out to produce an English translation of Kusch’s book. The purpose of this article is to consider how translating challenging concepts of this type can bring worldviews and linguistic horizons into new relationships with one another and engender new intellectual narratives and traditions. Moreover, translating concepts can be a means of analyzing or interpreting those concepts (Gaddis Rose, 1998), and is hence a productive exercise in its own right. The article focuses on several concepts that are difficult to translate and that Kusch identifies in Latin American Spanish as his entry points to uncover the bases for an autochthonous Américan philosophical tradition. These concepts include América (which could be misleadingly translated as “America”); pulcritud (order or cleanliness) in contrast to hedor (stench) as a binary at the heart of Latin American modernity; and, most of all, the distinction in Spanish between estar and ser, on which Kusch bases a complex ontological theory informed by Quechua and Aymara thinking. A synopsis of this article can be found here.