Lost in Translation

For quite a while now, I’ve been irked by the lack of English language histories and media sources to which to refer friends and family when they wish to know more about the political, historical and social contexts of Argentina. On the one hand, it’s natural that, with all the countries in the world, there’s a lack of an English language market for histories and news sources of foreign countries. Most North Americans and Europeans are naturally concerned with news from their respective countries and foreign (and especially little known) places only appear when something of note –a natural disaster or major political upheaval, for instance—calls particular attention to said place.

Living here has prompted many friends and family to ask me about different aspects of this country. It’s also a moment of increased and ever increasing tourism for Argentina. With this in mind, I propose this blog as an experiment, a tentative translation across linguistic, geographical and political barriers of what Argentina looks like from within and how the rest of the world looks from here. As a foreigner myself, there are obviously aspects and subtleties that elude me. However, a great deal of time spent here, work on my thesis (tied to the country’s political past and present) and a thorough knowledge of the language means that I’ll be able to at least begin to communicate some of the richness and complexity of this place.

One of my concerns in seeing English speaking foreigners coming here are the invisible social, political and class implications of the language barrier. Argentina, as many Latin American countries, has a strong political division along class and economic lines; much more tangible here than in Canada or the United States. (In the latter, I’d say that the division is much more visible along racial lines –which isn’t to say that that doesn’t have its own implications in terms of social class—but my sense is that much is done to make class invisible or at least not a topic of discussion. Race seems to trump economic class in terms of discussions about how the US is divided.) In Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires, home to roughly a third of the country’s population, a surprising number of people speak a minimum of English. Those who have solid, conversational English, however, tend to belong to the upper or upper middle class; those who have been priviledged enough to attend schools with good English instruction (in many cases private schools), who have business contact with foreigners or who perhaps have had the means to spend time abroad. It is not surprising, then, that they also tend to be politically conservative and economically better off than the majority of their compatriots. English speaking foreigners who visit, therefore, often get a historical grounding or political explanations from friendly, English-speaking Argentines with a pronounced political bias.

Given that Argentina has had an incredibly divisive and politically polarized past, this can lead to some interesting situations. The most dramatic instance I saw of this was the case of a visiting high school teacher from Canada who related a conversation he’d had with a “respected” retired army general. He repeated for me (it seems almost verbatim) a strongly right-wing short history of what had happened here in the 1960s and 70s. (I’ll surely explain more about this period at some later point.) The high school teacher, knowing little else of Argentina’s past, and feeling that, as in Canada, an army general must be a reliable, respected source, was oblivious to the strong political bias of what he had learned. I can only imagine (and here, I’m entirely hypothesizing) that it might be similar to a white person traveling to apartheid South Africa, woefully unaware of race issues, being given a “history lesson” by a pro-apartheid South African. Or a rather clueless tourist in post-Holocaust Germany, getting a history lesson from a Nazi. Perhaps the examples are a little exaggerated or unrealistic, but I think on some level there are important similarities. And it’s this that prompts me to attempt to offer an alternative perspective to the few English language sources that currently offer political and historical information on Argentina. If nothing else, it may be a useful tool for my own articulation of these aspects of this country.