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Walter Owen
Walter Owen (1884–1953) was a Scottish translator transplanted to the Argentine Pampas. His career is an excellent example of how the translator can open up a key aspect of a culture to readers in another language. Born in Glasgow, he spent much of his boyhood in Montevideo and as an adult returned to the River Plate area to work as a stockbroker. He thus had the opportunity to become bicultural as well as bilingual, and applied his skill to the translation into English of the major epic poems of the Southern part of South America. In so doing his objective was not simply esthetic, but cultural and even political in terms of bringing closer together the English-speaking peoples and those of Latin America. As he put it, he hoped that his work "in its modest way may advance between peoples of different speech, the friendly interchange of thought and feeling which is the foundation of mutual esteem and the surest establishment for good fellowship. To have done so is the best reward of the translator."
==Translations==
What Owen did was to "English" (his verb for translate) the principal epics of the part of Latin America he knew best: José Hernández's ''Martín Fierro'', Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga's ''La Araucana'', and Juan Zorrilla de San Martín's ''Tabaré'', among others. In so doing he made available to the English-speaking world these neglected masterpieces of the Southern Cone. But as a translator he felt obliged to tell his readers (in extensive introductions or prefaces) how he crafted his works of translation. Thus, his legacy is a double one, of considerable value to both the reader of epic Latin American poetry as well as to the student of translation.
Owen avoided excessively literal translations, realizing that they would be of little interest to the reader trying to understand the gaucho or Araucanian culture. He was willing to sacrifice what he called "verbal accuracy" (i.e., word for word rendition) in order to achieve clarity and ease of style. His ultimate goal was what we would call "equivalent impact": "it must produce upon the consciousness of the reader an equivalent total impression to that produced by the original work upon readers in whose vernacular it was written." He reiterates this philosophy in his preface to the translation of ''La Araucana'': "Translations of poems which adhere faithfully to the original text yield small pleasure to the reader, and what value they have is for the student of philology or semantics.... I consider the translation of poetry into poetry a liberal art and not an exact science .... To coin a portmanteau-term for this sort of translation, it might be called a psychological transvernacularisation."
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