Translation, Gender and the Republic of Letters in José de Cadalso’s Los eruditos a la violeta and Its Suplemento
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[1] Yale University
Yale University
Town of New Haven, Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Bulletin of Spanish Studies, ISSN-e 1478-3428, ISSN 1475-3820, Vol. 96, Nº 3, 2019, págs. 399-424
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
In this article I study José de Cadalso’s satirical work Los eruditos a la violeta and its Suplemento (both published in 1772), in relation to the changing understanding of the ‘Republic of Letters’ in late eighteenth-century Spain. In doing this, I focus particularly on the discussion of translation initiated by a fictional female reader at the beginning of the supplementary text. Arguing that the Suplemento subverts the conception of the literary world presented in the original satire, I first analyse the construction of ideal and unacceptable versions of learned masculinity (that is, ‘originals’ and ‘copies’) in Los eruditos. I then show how the letter from the female reader that opens the Suplemento destabilizes this binary understanding of knowledge and forces a reconsideration of the reaches of the literary sphere. In discussing this woman’s intervention and her request for translations, I reflect on the historical association of translation with the feminine that casts it as a reproductive rather than a productive mode of writing. In the final section of the article I study the translations that Cadalso includes in the Suplemento, and demonstrate how this addendum offers some steps toward a ‘reframing of fidelity’ through its nuanced contribution to the debate surrounding translation in eighteenth-century Spain.
