Name: The importance of translation: Crash Course Latin American Literature #13
Uploaded: 2026-02-28T21:37:29.000Z
Duration: 10 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You're in a hallway lined with mirrors leading to a strange hexagonal room with books.

Adverbs of manner

You pass through another mirrored hallway leading to a room exactly like the first, and another and another.

All with the same number of shelves, same number of books, same number of pages, except every book is unique.

Somewhere in the stacks is Pedro Paramo and the Spice Girls memoirs.

Oh, and everyone poops, but a lot of the books just look like gibberish.

Hi, I'm Curly Velasquez, and this is Crash Course Latin American Literature.

There's so many people we engage with when we pick up a book.

So many little choices that shape our experiences as we read, and

so much that we bring to the act of reading.

If your interpretation isn't the same as mine, how do we know who's right?

That room of books is from a 1941 short story called La Biblioteca de the Library of Babel by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Remember that guy who said Latin American writers should believe the universe is their birthright?

In this story, he imagines the universe as a limitless library containing every possible combination of the Alphabet, the period, the comma, and

This universelibrary holds every book that ever has existed and ever could exist, but

mostly a lot of nonsense that looks like a cat walked on a keyboard.

When the people in the story figure out that the library holds every book possible, they're thrilled.

That means there's no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon.

Somewhere out there is how to Be More Shrek, an Ogre's Guide to Life.

But then they thought maybe one of the books could tell the future or hold the secret to all the other books.

And that very tantalizing idea made folks go wild in a bad way.

We're talking Walmart Black Friday, circa 2005.

Some thought the gibberish books up shut should be destroyed to help surface only the most important books.

If a book doesn't hold meaning for us, does that make it meaningless?

He says there is no combination of characters one can make that the divine library has not foreseen, and

that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance.

In other words, just because we don't understand it yet doesn't make it gibberish.

The story of an infinite library might confuse us, amaze us, or fill us with dread, much like the universe itself.

But this short story is really an example of meta literature writing that's reflecting on writing and all the possibilities of literature itself.

You see, literature isn't a stale, lifeless thing.

It's an encounter that can generate possibilities, and

those possibilities can keep going for as long as there are words on a page and people to read them.

And Borges isn't the only writer who explored these possibilities.

I've got to tell you about Los the Savage Detectives by Chilean author Roberto Bolano.

The 1998 novel is told through diary entries and interviews, and it's kind of a detective adventure story.

It follows some young poets on an international quest to find the extremely elusive founder of an obscure pure poetry movement called Visceral Realism.

But in this novel, the visceral realists have basically vanished.

Most of their poems were never published.

And so did the poet who started the movement, Cesarea Tinajero, last seen somewhere in the Sonoran Desert.

All that remains of her is one poem with no words, just squiggles on a page open to your interpretation.

And you might ask, we're supposed to do what with this?

I feel like I'm in the infinite library again.

It's enough to drive you wild or fill you with dread, or inspire a kind of freedom.

Sure, we can hold out hope that a work of literature will just tell us what it means.

Just give me the curly notes already, or maybe hear me out.

We can open ourselves to the possibility that literature isn't limited to just one meaning.

I mean, here we are, decades later, still talking about what Borges Infinite Library was all about.

A writer doesn't get the final word on their words.

Literature remains open to readers, interpretations, and we can bring different lenses to how we think about it.

Like what influences surrounded these words at the time they were written, and

what influences are we bringing to them now?

Maybe this mysterious visual poem at the end of the Savage Detectives is an invitation from Bourlagno to become a detective yourself.

Sadly, bolano died in 2003 when he was only 50, but his work lives on.

To the credit not only of Bolano, but also of his English translators, Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer.

And really, it's thanks to translators that this series exists at all and that people across the world are reading Latin American literature today.

Otherwise, if you didn't speak Spanish, these books would all be gibberish to you.

Translation's importance in the region stretches all the way back to the 15th century 1800s with the adaptation of religious texts into indigenous languages, although those translations were less about sharing the wonders of literature and more about converting indigenous folks to Catholicism, which has a different ring to it later.

During the 19th century, translations of French political thinkers sparked Latin American independence movements, and

during the 1960s translation helped introduce Latin American writers as to the rest of the world.

Plus, many Latin American authors have been translators themselves.

Julio Cortazar translated Edgar Allan Poe's work into Spanish, and

Borges was a super prolific translator who brought works by English writers like Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf to Spanish speaking readers.

A good translation takes way more thought and care than plugging Como Sedice into Google Translate.

A word can carry different connotations in one language versus another, and

often a little translation just doesn't work.

Like El mundo es un panuelo means roughly the same thing as when English speakers say it's a small world, but

it literally translates to the world is a handkerchief.

Now imagine taking a poem or novel that already plays with the meanings and rhythms of words in one language and finding a way to convey that spirit in another.

Take Edith Grossman, Garcia Marquez's longtime English translator.

She got started in the 1970s at a time when translation wasn't yet considered a serious career or academic field, especially for women.

But she was one of the first translators to demand credit on a book's cover alongside the author, which, by the way, is still an ongoing campaign.

She worked to dispel any idea that translation happens magically without a real human being involved.

She insisted translators everywhere deserve recognition and respect for their work as a creative act, and

she described them as a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and

two sets of readers, which is a polite way of saying, you'd be lost without me.