From Miracle to Montage: The Interpreter Figure in the Narratives of Latin American Travelers to the New China

Abstract

This article analyses the role of the figure of the language interpreter in Latin American travel writing on the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s and 1960s, early decades of cultural diplomacy efforts between these regions. Through an examination of the crónica China 6 a.m. (1954), by Colombian anthropologist and writer Manuel Zapata Olivella, and the novel Los ojos de bambú (1964), by Chilean novelist Mercedes Valdivieso, this article argues that the interpreter figure, far from an invisible conduit of information, played a significant role in how Latin American travelers experienced the Chinese Revolution and negotiated their ideals of individual and collective transformation. Through the analysis of the interpretation act as an embodied, affective experience, beyond a sole cognitive transfer of meaning, Zapata and Valdivieso’s texts shed light both on the PRC’s mechanisms of soft power in Cold War geopolitical struggles, as well as the travelers’ aesthetic and political pursuits in a global context of revolution.