In contrast, in nineteenth-century Spain, translation and translators were afforded both visibility and respect. Spain’s best-known realist writer, Benito Pérez Galdós, both created and consumed translations of literary and other cultural works, as did his contemporaries. This panel will place translation at the center of our understanding of the transmission and migration of ideas, sensibilities, and ways of representing and visualizing the world during Galdós’s lifetime. At the same time, we will make visible the work of translators of works from Galdós’s period, as they navigate boundary-crossings between languages, cultures, and historical periods.
Rhi Johnson‘s “Bellas Artes in the Periodical Press: Translation as a Conceptual Tool in the Fin de Siglo” will begin the panel with an analysis of translation as a rhetorical tool, drawing on Benito Mas y Prat’s conceptualization of Arolas Bonet’s Romantic poetry as the “translation” of emotions into words. At the same time, Mas y Prat discusses how Bonet’s embedding of original translations in his own poetic creations might have influenced popular reception of the Romantic writer’s works. In examining rhetorical and literary uses of translation in nineteenth-century Spanish journalism, Johnson relates nineteenth-century concepts of legitimacy and authorship to current theories about translation and art.
Nicholas Wolters will draw our attention to how translation functioned as intercultural and translinguistic communication both within Iberia and between Iberia and other European nations. In “Translating and Translation in Narcís Oller (1846-1930),” Wolters will shift our focus from the Castilian literary landscape to the late-nineteenth-century revival of the earlier Catalan artistic “Renaixença” (“rebirth”). Considering the publishing program of both translations and original works that Narcís Oller created to stimulate the restoration of Catalan language and literature, Wolters will discuss the centrality of translation to the pan-European network of writers and translators formed by Oller and his contemporaries in their mission to restore visibility to Catalan literature. Then, shifting the focus to translation as a creative and scholarly practice, Wolters will address issues of “the translator’s [in]visibility” through the lens of his own current project, a translation to English of the author’s most popular novel, La papallona.
In “From Horace to Lo Gayter del Llobregat: Translation and/as Tradition in Restoration Spain” Leslie J. Harkema will expand on translation within the fin-de-siécle revival of Catalan literature as she analyzes the remarkable polyglot edition of Joaquim Rubió i Ors’ Lo Gayter del Llobregat, which was undertaken in 1888 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of this work. Comprising three volumes and containing translations to fifteen different languages, the polyglot Gayter internationalized the revival of the Catalan literary tradition. This multilingual project included translations by such major intellectuals as Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. Menéndez Pelayo had already marked the integral nature of translation and translations to the history of Spanish literature and thought in his massive Horacio en España [Horace in Spain] (1877, 2nd ed. 1885) and Biblioteca de traductores españoles [Library of Spanish Translators] (1874). In her consideration of all these projects, Harkema will highlight their common attention to Iberian linguistic diversity and discuss how each contributes to and defies dominant views of translation’s role in modern Spanish literature and culture.
So audience members can explore the many connections among the presentations, we’ll hold Q/A at the end of the session. Each participant will be asked prepare presentations of 16-18 minutes, rather than the standard 20.
Like Venuti’s Invisibility, like the 2019 Convention theme, these presentations and the discussion they will invite promise to mark a turning point in the Asociación Internacional de Galdosistas’ explorations and analysis of the world of Benito Pérez Galdós and his contemporaries. By “making translation visible (again),” we hope to further the MLA’s efforts to place translation and translators firmly within the field of vision of all scholars.