William Faulkner's Ibero-American Novel Project: The Politics of Translation and the Cold War

Abstract

Faulkner’s presence in Spanish American literature has been felt both directly and indirectly over the years. Much has been written about his impact on the work of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others, since he was first read by Spanish American authors in the 1930s. Much less has been written about Faulkner’s efforts to influence the course of Latin American literature, or about the geopolitical context in which these interventions took place. This essay will begin by presenting an overview of the Ibero-American Novel Project that he set up in 1961 at the University of Virginia, and its origins. It will examine the Project’s goals and mechanisms, as well as assessing the extent to which these were influenced by contemporary Cold War politics. Finally, I will look to the contemporary literary context—the early years of the so-called “Boom,” when Spanish American literature hit the international mainstream—for possible explanations of the Project’s failure to accomplish its goals. In 1950, when Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize, he initially refused to travel to Stockholm to pick up the award. The U.S. ambassador to Sweden sent an urgent cable to John Foster Dulles expressing his concern at the situation; ultimately, Muna Lee, southern poet and State Department official, was recruited to convince Faulkner to go to Stockholm and thus avoid international embarrassment for the U.S. (Blotner 1347-1348). The result was, of course, a great success, and from this moment until his death, Faulkner was persuaded numerous times by