Translating Ruins: An American Parable

Abstract

In 1839, John Lloyd Stephens, a New Jersey lawyer and businessman, toured Central America and the Yucatán peninsula on what was to be the first of two voyages. Stephens was, at that point, a seasoned traveler and dabbler in exotica. He was the author, too, of travelogues: Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1937) and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1938), which had gone through multiple printings and earned him the quite tidy sum of twenty-five thousand dollars in two years. Stephens’s companion on the trip to Yucatán was Frederick Catherwood, the well-known English architect and draughtsman, himself a seasoned traveler and dabbler in exotica, already famous for his drawings of Middle Eastern ruins and for his painted panoramas. It was rumored that Catherwood was the first Westerner to make a detailed survey of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock. He and Stephens met in London in 1834 and Catherwood moved to the United States two years later.¹

In all our journey through this country there were no associations. Day after day we rode into places unknown beyond the boundaries of Yucatán, with no history attached to them, and touching no chord of feeling.

—John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán