Walter Owen

Who was Walter Owen?

Walter Owen was a Scottish translator transplanted to the Argentine Pampas. His career is an excellent example of how the translator can open up a key aspect of a culture to readers in another language. Born in Glasgow, he spent much of his boyhood in Montevideo and as an adult returned to the River Plate area to work as a stockbroker. He thus had the opportunity to become bicultural as well as bilingual, and applied his skill to the translation into English of the major epic poems of the Southern part of South America. In so doing his objective was not simply esthetic, but cultural and even political in terms of bringing closer together the English-speaking peoples and those of Latin America. As he put it, he hoped that his work "in its modest way may advance between peoples of different speech, the friendly interchange of thought and feeling which is the foundation of mutual esteem and the surest establishment for good fellowship. To have done so is the best reward of the translator."