I am proud of my translation of “A Roosevelt”. However, listening to how Jorge Cafrune reads the poem “A Roosevelt” confirmed to me that my translation and the other translations I had read did not capture the tone of the poem. When Cafrune reads “A Roosevelt” I can feel the anger, the pain, the passion and the struggle of Latin American people. In contrast, when I read or listen to a native speaker read my translations of “A Roosevelt”, I do not feel the same degree of emotion. In order to compensate for this, I decided to create a drawing that could explain the duality that is so clear in the original poem but gets lost in translation. I decided to base my drawing on a poster of Star Wars. The drawing contains many characters that appear in the poem. On the left side I have a skull of the statue of liberty and on the right I have a lion representing the Spanish Lion. In the center, I decide to put Montezuma vs. Washington; Montezuma replaces Luke Sky Walker and Washington replaces Darth Vader. I chose to replace Luke Sky Walker by Montezuma because he was the last emperor of The Inca Empire and Luke is the last Jedi. In the original motion picture of Star Wars one can see an African man at the left. In Star Wars fiction this man is known as master Windu and he is the strongest of the Jedi. Therefore, I replace him with Netzahualcoyotl because Netzahualcoyotl was a famous Inca warrior and philosopher. In between Montezuma and Netzahualcoyotl, I placed El Gran Baco in representation of Chewbacca in Star Wars because they are both humanoids; and instead of Yoda, I placed Tolstoy because to me Tolstoy has always been a symbol of great wisdom and Dario claims that Roosevelt opposes Tolstoy. On the other side, I made a red demon and a muscular naked man to represent Mammon and Hercules because Dario attributes them to the U.S. The blue and grey military men are meant to symbolize Roosevelt’s generals who followed his murderous campaign against the people of the Philippines. In the left corner I replace Star Wars evil emperor with a KKK man because in my opinion the dark side in the U.S comes from the racist component in our otherwise beautiful society. In the background one can see the head of Roosevelt replacing the Death Star from the original picture. I made him a little like Hitler because Teddy Roosevelt was a racist. He said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth”. The only other place that I know where one can find such hateful words is in the Nazi archives.
Evolution of the Drawing.
Version 1
Version 2
Version 3
Version 4
Final Version
