Critical Regionality and(Mis-)Translation: The Modernist Elision of Pueblo Source Material in Mary Austin’s Later Career

Abstract

Critical Regionality and(Mis-)TranslationThe Modernist Elision of Pueblo Source Material in Mary Austin’s Later Career D. Seth Horton (bio) Here is the standard précis of Mary Austin’s biography: Her mother was cold, her childhood in Illinois lonely, and later, after she moved to California, her family life remained troubled. She left her husband, who could not seem to find steady work, and subsequently placed her daughter in an institution because she could no longer solely care for her special needs. Originally a regional outsider, she relied on a sharp empirical eye to become a prolific and sympathetic interpreter of the Southwest’s cultural landscape. Although her presence in the desert was part of the nineteenth- century colonization of the American West, she nevertheless became a self-proclaimed activist in her day for Chicanx and Native Americans, even if contemporary scholars now recognize that her writing suffers from cultural appropriation. Her books, especially those published early in her career, employed sparse, cadenced prose to describe the specificities of desert life. Locating the cultural heart of the nation in the Southwest, she was one of the great regional writers of the early twentieth century. Always more than a field guide, she allowed herself to be changed by her new environment, and this transformation resulted in a new, hybridized identity serving as a feminist model for other women. It is a life story that has been told and retold in conference papers, articles, dissertations, critical books, and five different biographies: T. M. Pearce’s Mary Hunter Austin (1965), Augusta Fink’s I- Mary (1983), Esther Lanigan Stineman’s Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1989), Peggy Pond Church’s Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin (1990), [End Page 121] and most recently, Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson’s Mary Austin and the American West (2009). While Austin’s biographers are in agreement that she gradually came to see herself as someone who could translate Native American texts and belief systems to the rest of the country, the full ramifications of this interpretive position have not yet been adequately appreciated. To correct this critical blind spot, I will here trace out how Austin’s attempts to speak for the “other” resulted in increasingly radical translations. This will raise a series of problems to be explored in detail: what is her theory of translation; how did it change throughout the course of her career; and how might critical regionality reveal connections between her project and other modernist theories of translations? To answer these questions, I will provide a close reading of her first and most influential book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), supplementing it with a brief analysis of Lost Borders (1909). I will then discuss how her theory of translation changed with the publication of The American Rhythm: Studies and Reëxpressions of Amerindian Songs (1923), which I will then read in conjunction with Ezra Pound’s Cathay. Whenever necessary, I will also draw on Austin’s autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932). Octavio Paz noted that translations seemingly once illustrated the essential similarities within humanity—think here of how translated religious texts were once thought to perfectly replicate the originals—but this began to change in the modern, scientific era: “A plurality of languages and societies: each language is a view of the world, each civilization is a world. The sun praised in an Aztec poem is not the sun of the Egyptian hymn, although both speak of the same star” (153). Paz argued that by the eighteenth century individual languages came to be understood as a way of seeing and interpreting the world in entirely unique manners. Modern translation was subsequently concerned with differences, not similarities, and it was precisely this cultural and linguistic divergence that Austin would attempt to bridge throughout her career. Her legacy in the Southwest began when she found a language that could describe the desert like no other previous writer had managed to do. The Land of Little Rain blurred the boundaries between [End Page 122] music and prose. It was a precisely written text describing isolated places that few people in 1903 could access. The severity of the climate...