Foreign Debt and Literary Credit: Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman

The article draws in relief how translators carry with them cultural and ideological horizons that necessarily imbue their literary production with distinctly situated historical, political, and personal dimensions. It does so first by examining how The New York Times 's translation of Pablo Neruda's 1972 address to the PEN Club reframes (or distorts) his views on political and literary issues ranging from the negotiation of the Chilean national debt to his literary indebtedness to Walt Whitman, and then by examining how Neruda's 1955 translation of Whitman's 'Salut Au Monde!', refashions and relocates Whitman's work, imbuing it with a communist ethos consistent with Neruda's own.     

SOCIAL ALTRUISM AND CRIME*

Drawing on the theoretical statements of Braithwaite (1989), Cullen (1994), Messner and Rosenfeld (1994), this research examines the influence of social altruism on the level of crime for a sample of U.S. cities. The multivariate analyses clearly indicate that the ratio of contributions to the United Way to aggregate city income, a behavioral approximation of the cultural value of altruism, is inversely related to property and violent crime rates. The implications of these findings for the reduction of crime are discussed.     

PROTESTANT FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE RETRIBUTIVE DOCTRINE OF PUNISHMENT*

In Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that public opinion, including the public's presumed desire for retribution, can be a legitimate basis for penal policy. Subsequently, the retributive doctrine has guided sentencing reform across the nation. But variation among the public in support for retribution as the goal of punishment and the effects of religion in shaping public sentiments about punishment have received little attention from researchers. Drawing from recent work on attribution theory and religion, this paper proposes and reports evidence that public support for the retributive doctrine is closely linked to affiliation with fundamentalist Protestant denominations and fundamentalist religious beliefs. The normative implications of such a connection are addressed.