| Summary: | The Carta de Jamaica (1815) is considered one of the most important testimonies of the South American liberator Simón Bolívar. When the manuscript vanished, historians were left with an English translation and assumed back-translations into Spanish, which heavily impacted the (Spanish) publication history for almost two centuries. This study of the versions of the Carta de Jamaica and the discourse surrounding the search for the original is carried out by applying Jan Assman’s text production process model. Assman’s model helps identify and understand the motives guiding translation endeavors and the different functions of these versions, which makes it a valuable tool for translation-historical research on key political, cultural, or religious texts. This paper also shows how paradoxical the usage and conception of translation is: it is conceived as a problem, used as a tool of analysis, and finally becomes the solution because through translation the version “closest” to the lost original is created.
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