Iberian Multilingualism, Gender, and Translation as Collaboration

• Autores: Leslie J. Harkema
• Localización: The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to twentieth and twenty-first century Spain: ideas, practices, imaginings / coord. por Eduardo Ledesma, Luisa Elena Delgado, 2025, ISBN 978-1-032-96468-3, págs. 634-645
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter offers a series of reflections on the discursive treatment of translation in early twentieth-century Spain and the significance of this discourse for Spain’s officially plurilingual state today. Theorists of translation have often pointed to the marginalization and invisibilization of this activity within literary history. Feminist translation theory has demonstrated, moreover, that translation’s invisibility is linked to gendered hierarchy that associates original creation with an authoritative, generative masculinity and translation with a derivative and suspect femininity. Several canonical, Castilian-language texts from early twentieth-century Spain affirm this view of translation. After analyzing examples of this phenomenon in José Ortega y Gasset’s “Miseria y esplendor de la traducción” (“The Misery and Splendor of Translation”; 1937) and Pío Baroja’s El árbol de la ciencia (The Tree of Knowledge; 1911), the author turns to a range of examples from the work of female writers and Catalan, Basque, and Galician literatures to argue that the tragic image of translation presented by Ortega and Baroja is not representative of actual practices in translation throughout the Spanish state during the period. As the author shows through a discussion of the case of early twentieth-century translator and feminist thinker, María Lejárraga (María Martínez Sierra), attending to the role of translation in the multilingual cultural context of modern and contemporary Spain requires exchanging Ortega’s view of the activity as miserable in its limitations and capable only of a conditional splendor for an understanding of translation as a collaborative act in which translators and authors share agency.