The agency of the poets and the impact of their translations: Sur, Poesía Buenos Aires, and Diario de Poesía as aesthetic arenas for twentieth-century Argentine letters

In an attempt to locate the role of poetry translation in the development of Argentine twentieth-century literature, this essay focuses on the work done by specific groups of poet/translators associated with three major literary magazines. An overview of the relationship between national production and translation in Argentina is first presented, and then, through a brief summary of the century’s political events, certain parallelisms with literary movements are established. This is followed by an analysis of the imported expressions, which are often found to be incongruent or de/recontextualized within the local repertoire. Notions of cultural agency (Bourdieu) and cultural poetics (Greenblatt) serve to reveal both how these groups maintain a tradition of discernable discourse practices in their translations and how the imported schools of poetry generally served to legitimize the poet/translators’ own poetic practices in forming a readership for their works by enforcing modes of reception through the inclusion of selected foreign poets.