Theories of translation and modernity's anguished counter points: José María Arguedas and Walter Benjamin

In order to illuminate some of the basic terms of translation theory, I explore two essays, José María Arguedas' "The Anguish of the Mestizo" and Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator." I argue that the terms of translation theory can be changed by paying attention to the ‘replies' to European modernity made from outside of Europe, especially those replies that come as theory from the colonized, in this case in the form of Arguedas' work. In the conclusion, I juxtapose Arguedas' work on Quechua and Spanish to explore aspects of translation and linguistic invention at another point of domination: in this case, African-American English as described by James Baldwin. Through that, we can measure the potential of a network of histories constructed from Europe's others.