Coda: Re-Creating a Classic

Summary

Translating New York: The City's Languages in Iberian Literatures was motivated by the need to go beyond discussions of New York that look at the city as a constant binary battle between love and hate, between attraction and disgust. Such readings contribute to the creation and persistence of stereotypes of the city. After all, Josep Pla indicates that, by definition, “Nova York—és necessari repetir-ho—és la ciutat dels contrastos continuats” [New York—it's necessary to say it again—is a city of continuous contrasts] (Week-end 117). As fascinating as it may be to address these tensions, critical conversations of the sort do not touch on how the actual city is more than a theme. This book has pursued the goal of examining how New York influences the language, and appears as a shaper, of literary writing.

The authors I have studied throughout this book traveled to New York for different reasons, circumstantial, personal, and professional; and they produced writing in several forms—novels, poetry, travel-centered sketches for a limited audience, and travel writing for a general audience. In every case, the actual city—or physical contact with it, experiencing its sights and sounds—figures significantly, either as a place from which to write or a place to write about. Many writers have written the city at some point, and in their New York texts, they are in dialogue with one another through their own New York. I postulate, therefore, that New York emerges as a classic text for Iberian writers. The writing New York corpus grows simultaneously with the city's expansion in the imagination. As a result, attention to travel, or to the physical encounter with New York, becomes distorted, neglected, or erased in more contemporary literary examples. British travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron has noted that halfway through the twentieth century, “‘the old sense of wonder has been deeply and forever diminished’, and therefore the traveler ‘must be conscious that almost always he has been preceded in his path by a host of others’, and his account ‘has been robbed of its old, empirical usefulness, and must look to other ways of excellence’” (qtd. in Polezzi 173).