Conclusion

Asturias's Cuculcán tells a story of conflictive interaction between two kinds of language: the autonomous and unisonant language of purity and universality and the discordant language of specific worlds, the languages of power and the languages that challenge power. If this story has a vernacular turn, if it speaks to a specifically Latin American experience, it would be the tale of the linguistic conflict itself, situated in the Mayan marketplace where aesthetic and social debates intersect. But what are we to make in this reading of the alluring figure of the Guacamayo, to which Asturias himself pointed as a cultural icon by naming him in the Nobel speech as the Latin American writer? Asturias intimated a possible answer when he later observed that the Guacamayo on Columbus's arm was America's first cultural ambassador. An ambassador by definition moves between cultural domains, and the ambassador in the linguistic realm is the translator. The translator, as

Benjamin tells us, walks that precarious fine line between what is universal in language—whatever can be said in all languages—and that which remains untranslatable. But the translator's objective is communication from one linguistic and cultural realm to another. The challenge is to work simultaneously with two languages, and so the translator invariably speaks with Bakhtinian quotation marks and, like the mimicking parrot, repeats the words of the original—the other—but inflected by the translator's own intentions and style.

In The Cuban Condition, appropriately subtitled Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Culture, Pérez Firmat portrays the contemporary Cuban writer's dilemma (epitomized in Carpentier's Los pesos perdidos ) as a trap of "linguistic antimony," that is, a "painful and productive indecision between the mother tongue and the other tongue." If the Cuban writer, communicating in alien lands, must "speak in other words," Pérez Firmat concludes that, even in translation, he "finds, and keeps, his word" (157). Although there is a connection between Pérez Firmat's idea and Asturias's Guacamayo as a linguistic and cultural translator, there are important differences of emphasis and kind. As a product of the vanguards, the Guacamayo's "linguistic antimony" does not harbor the painful indecisions ascribed by Pérez Firmat to more contemporary writers. Instead, Asturias's parrot is a more aggressive linguistic ambassador undertaking, in the avant-garde spirit, a specific and affirmative project: to communicate in "universal" contexts, that is, in Cuculcán's royal domain, but also to showcase the untranslatably alien and impure. Likc Guillén's Cuban boxer on Broadway and Macunaíma in São Paulo, the Guacamayo speaks aggressively with a will to discomfit his listeners with the difficulty of his words. Mário maps out a similar poetics of willful intractability in his small poetic manifesto "Lundu do escritor difícil," or "Lundu [a lascivious dance] of the difficult writer," published in the Revista de Antropofagia . Here with a deliberate "angú de caroço" (porridge or hodgepodge) of Brazilian colloquialisms, the speaker takes his reader to task for aping European culture and language but branding as difficult the poet's "Brazilian" language. The lundu 's speaker aggressively assaults the reader with alien words, admonishing that what is difficult is not the words themselves but for the reader to learn what they mean ("Lundu do escritor difícil" 3). In a similar modc, the Guacamayo would force others to hear him, to be aware of his words' alien quality, and, as Yaí complains of the parrot's verbal trickery, to become "infected" or contaminated from within by the strange words.

The Guacamayo's ability to infect the discourse of others is paramount. In his article "European Pedigrees/African Contagions" based on the work of the Nigerians Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe and the African-American Ishmael Reed, James Snead argues that writers in the African tradition seem inclined toward a "certain linguistic or cultural eclecticism or miscegenation " (232; emphasis in original). The linguistic approach in this writing, Snead concludes, presents a model of contagion in which "all cultures, colors, and nationalities are subject to the ubiquity of its 'pandemic'" (245). Most important, just as the Guacamayo confronts Cuculcán's universalizing language, the intent of these writers is to redefine the idea of "universal." As opposed to Samuel Johnson's concept of language as the "pedigree of nations" that sought to "discover lost but recoverable national differences, " Snead argues, "contagion represents the existence of recoverable affinities between disparate races of people" (245).

As a linguistic translator, the Guacamayo operates in a somewhat comparable fashion to embody the exercises in aggressive cultural and linguistic diplomacy undertaken by Latin America's vanguardist writers with a vernacular agenda. In recuperating an ancestral voice and linguistic essences, these writers appealed to romantic models of cultural nationalism that affirmed the unisonant differences of specific Latin American identities. But pursuing linguistic dissonance and incorrectness promoted a different kind of cultural translation. Drawing on a variety of alien languages and speaking always with quotation marks, these writers, like the Guacamayo, sought to shift the site of "universality" from Cuculcán's imperial palace of linguistic purity to the contentious and contagious Mayan marketplace of literary and linguistic exchange. Like the Guacamayo, furthermore, they sought not only to communicate among themselves but also to spread their alien words into a Cuculcán-like all-encompassing domain with its claims to a universal language and to needle and discomfit all participants in the literary marketplace. Their impure words demanded that listeners and readers take notice of the persistent foreignness of many languages and of the untamed and abiding cultural differences to and of which they speak.