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How Politics Affected Peruvian Spanish
The best writers are the ones that are most readable, being understandable.
When reading and writing became tools of power, concentrated in monasteries, symbols rose to the category of arcane and it took centuries before printing and education could defeat global illiteracy.
The easy to interpret symbols that helped to rule great empires were left behind: quipus, hieroglyphs and ideograms were gone. Only Chinese characters survived as universal symbols that conveyed abstract concepts within an immense culture.In 1991, Guillermo Gómez Peña a Mexican performance artist, wrote:
And Peruvian translators have learnt this, the hard way. We are supposed to convey messages from one culture to another and to do so in an understandable and correct way.English is for praxis, Spanish for theory,
English is for art, Spanish for literature.
However, the great problem we usually face is that Latin American and especially Peruvian Spanish, were mostly created to draft bureaucratic reports that had to impress a Royal Court—thousands of miles away from America—who would read them 3 or 4 months after they were written.
Besides, these reports had to "disguise" the truth and "adjust" themselves to their readers' optics.
They had to be flattering to the reader without deprecating the writer.
They had to point out —in a demure way— how brilliantly and successfully the reporter performed his duties. How many obstacles he had to overcome, how cultivated and learned he was, what an asset he was for the Spanish Crown!
Imagine yourself in the 17th. century, with stripped velvet bloomers and all, having appointed all your male relatives in key governmental positions, being very poorly paid but making a most handsome living on bribes, picking your own fifth from the King's Fifth of all Wealth generated in the Indies, owning huge estates with hundreds of Indians exploited and famished, some hunted for sport by you and your hunting dogs, and many more whipped to death...
And yet you had to calm the Church prelates by assuring them that the souls of your Indian "children" were paternalistically taken care of; you had to persuade the King that pirates, droughts, lazy slaves and dishonest miners caused the decrease in his royal revenues; and you had to try to remain holding your position as long as possible .....
You certainly needed the greatest ability to use monumental words in a senseless way without your reader ever realising this detour.
That's how our Peruvian Spanish was bred, and it did fulfil its role, even though practically all such viceroys and top rank bureaucrats ended their days in jail, in Spain.
So today we have to work with the child of this truculent language.
Politicians, academics, journalists and even scientists have now joined the ranks of those colonial bureaucrats and brandish the sword of the written language to impress the reader and to divert his/her attention from the truth.
Yet today it is not only Spanish that is brandished.
Guillermo Gómez Peña once wrote:
And beware, you find similar defaults in modern English. George Orwell analyses this situation in his book "Inside the Whale and Other Essays". He translates a well known verse of the Ecclesiastes, "from good English into modern English of the worst sort":"I remember things in English or in Spanish
English for politics, Spanish for love
English for survival, Spanish for laughter
English for time, Spanish for space"
'Good' English:
"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."'Modern' English:
"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."
Politics on Today's SpanishPolitics continue to impress its seal on language. I remember how the nationalistic policy of General Velasco was part of our Spanish in the 1970's. Before the 60's the poor, i.e., the vast majority of our population, was referred to as : el pueblo (the people), in lowercase letters. With Velasco that huge part of our nation became suddenly visible and overwhelming the media, turned into the masses. Reforms took place all over the country, peasants acquired a face when the agrarian reform took place in 1969 and workers became part owners of the industries. And here too language played a role. Forced to admit blue collar workers in the board of directors, entrepreneurs resorted to English or other foreign languages. The goal of the military government was to empower the great majorities and everything was conceived to incorporate the social foundation in the decision-making processes, every organisation had a wide (social) base.
But, the ephemeral vogue of socialism was then replaced by severe criticism to such policies and the people, the poor, started to be treated by sociologists and politicians as the Collectivity and, cornered, became a singular, the collective, in increasingly lower case letters.
When in the aftermath of the Apra government our country was falling into pieces, it was poor women who came to the forefront and saved their children from starvation and protected our country from the taking over of power by terrorism. That forced politicians, the media and the academics to cautiously acknowledge the existence of grass-root organisations. In the 90's, when market liberalisation policies filled the domestic scenario, that term acquired unpleasant connotations and was soberly replaced by the Civil Society.
The key role played by NGOs in support of these strong and self-empowered grass-root women also evolved.
The first projects submitted to raise funds from foreign foundations included well defined actions to meet social goals, but here too, reality forced changes in their language: after having stated firmly that goals will be reached, the nuance changed and became 'efforts will be deployed to reach', which then became 'the organisation will try to reach' and then became a mere 'will aim at targeting'.
However, as this still required a certain degree of skill or marksmanship, the objectives entered the territory of luck, and organisations started 'to bet on the possibility of reaching' the goals, then transited along the 'will go through efforts to reach' and finally ended up in an impersonal and distant 'reading of the facts'.But what really worries me is the increasingly strong separation between such aid agencies and their target populations (again in lower case), with which they at first fully identified themselves, then supported in their self-help efforts, but which today they only 'accompany'.
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