It is not customary in Spanish culture to recognize the work of the translator, and that is why the tribute that the Instituto Cervantes has just paid to an interpreter like Pepe Zamit is so unusual on the occasion of the reissue of his translation of Fijalkowsky's book The Ideological Components in Carl Schmitt's Political Philosophy by Tecnos. As much at least as paradoxical is also the oblivion with which the world of Spanish intelligence unscrupulously postpones those who pour into our league the knowledge of other cultures.
Two paradoxes in one that respond to the same underlying reason: modernity has made Spain a society that is strong in deeds and weak in thought. And in that society Pepe Zamit and everything he represented go unnoticed. They are considered as a trifle that should not be given too much importance.
Pepe Zamit was a State official (a Tac, a sui generis elite body in which writers such as Juan García Hortelano, the poet Ángel González or Antonio Martínez Menchen have served) who dedicated part of his life to importing culture through translations, sometimes ordered by his shift bosses –we owe the Zamit assigned to the Cortes the German legislative texts that were used in the Transition– and other times to decide according to his own criteria which gaps to fill in the school. chimized Spanish political culture of the Franco regime. Such is the case of the aforementioned book, a critical study on Carl Schmitt originally published in Spanish in 1966, when Schmitt was still a myth in Spain and which -as Professor Esteve Pardo pointed out- was imbued with teachers from the generation that prepared our Constitution, such as Pedro de Vega or Jordi Solé Turá.
Pepe Zamit did, then, during the long rocky night of the dictatorship, the same thing that Francisco Ayala did in another era in the very first Spanish constitutional law, translating the arch-famous Theory of the Constitution, namely: supplying intellectual material to a starving and inane doctrine. What Adolfo Posada had done before, or Fernando de los Ríos, whose work is reduced to the translation of Jellinek's General Theory of the State. Vicente Herrero, a talented translator of the legendary Historia de las Ideas by Sabine or Javier Pradera with the famous Touchard, did the same thing in the field of thought. Is there anyone who has studied thought in Spanish who doesn't know them? Can we talk about ideas among ourselves without resorting to these magnificent works that we have practically made our own? And it is that importing foreign knowledge allows placing the national culture at a global height that native authors are not in a position to reach by using their intellectual forces alone. There should be no shame in admitting it, says Richard Tuck, when he explains that before Bacon and, above all, Hobbes, there was no political thought in England. It will be the fabulous language skills of the wise man from Malmesbury, which will make it possible to overcome the gap and place English culture in the place of supremacy it occupies today, creating the intellectual paradigm of political modernity.
But the importation of culture does not end nor is it contained –for Spanish knowledge– in the walls of law and politics. It covers all fields and particularly literature. Not in vain, Felipe IV translated Gicciardini in moments of desolation. And much more recently, Graziel delighted us with the adventures of Defoe's Robinson – the book that marveled Rousseau, Adam Smit and Marx. Zenobia Camprubí introduced Tagore and, finally, very recently, Borges, Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar –professional translator– and many others wrote, meditated or argued about what it meant to translate. (Cortázar, of whom someone has said that his Spanish version of Memorias de Adriano is creatively superior to Yourcenar's French original).
And it is that the enormously rich Spanish literary culture becomes even richer by incorporating translations that give it a universal dimension, and surely make it the most universal of all. A language that expresses a creative culture in which almost all its speakers, 500 million, express themselves naturally in their native language. Something that does not happen in English, which, in addition to being fewer in number, less than 400 million, suffer the consequences of having become a free language that simplifies everything and that kills artistic creation to the extent that communication takes precedence over creation.
And it is that this contemporary Latin that is English, due to its expressive flexibility allows us to understand very simply the great messages of authors such as Friedrich, Hannah Arednt or Dita Shklar (I only dare to give my opinion of my own, the constitutional) at the cost of making them simpler, because what that frank English has of communicative use, it loses in expressive-creative richness. And it is that unlike the Spanish spoken as a native in 24 nations (some with a traditional basic education as good as Argentina, Mexico and Colombia) the English lingua franca is not creative and is limited to transmitting information, not creating language.
All these data act as proven facts in favor of a culture that, however, has not been able to generate great political ideas, which are those that serve to organize our common existence, coexistence. That which is now called the language of Politics. Why has it happened like this? There is no point in glossing it over. What matters is to record it at a key moment - postmodernity - in which the political culture created by the Anglo-Saxon world has been seriously threatened and demands to correct if not change the paradigm on which it is based. What could be the role of the culture that speaks our creative language in this regard. It has yet to be defined and it is even possible to dream that the Instituto Cervantes could play a higher role in this regard than the Moncloa Palace... But until this is clarified, we will have to content ourselves with the humble contributions of translators like Pepe Zamit to get by.
