Poetic Industry and Abominable Superstition: Southey on Lope de Vega (original) (raw)
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Translating the Enemy: Lope de Vega in France in the Long 18th Century
British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies BSECS 46th Annual Conference (St Hugh's College, Oxford, 2017)
In 1595 Lope de Vega writes the historical drama El casamiento en la muerte, where the French paladin Roland is killed by the Spanish hero Bernardo del Carpio in a bare-handed fight. The choice of the matter can be explained with the anti-French climate caused by the French king Henry IV's declaration of war against Spain in 1595: Roland and Bernardo are symbols of the two fighting monarchies. Lope de Vega Carpio boasted about a false lineage derived from Bernardo del Carpio for his second surname, «Carpio», taken from his uncle. Lope's identification with Bernardo del Carpio is part of a process of self-fashioning in which Lope promotes himself as the main national author, as his contemporaries consider him. As a consequence, the construction of Lope's literary figure in France identifies him as an anti-model, in terms of poetics and politics: Lope is the author of a famous anti-classicistic poetics (Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, 1609), but he is also the emblem of the Enemy, the Spanish author par excellence. In the long 18th century the Golden Age Spanish theatre dramatically decreases its importance in the European culture and the Fénix de los ingenios suffers a decline in popularity, but the first translations «for the page» of his theatre appear in France during this century. Differently from the stage-oriented adaptations, these reader-oriented translations are aimed to underline the aesthetical and ideological peculiarities of the source-text, intended as part of a foreign theatrical tradition. The ideas about the Lopian theatre reflect the 17th-century reception: for the French translators and audience, the Spanish theatrical tradition is still the theatre of the Enemy in political and literary terms, as it represents the «leyenda negra» and the anti-classicistic poetics. The Romantic revaluation of the Spanish theatrical tradition, intended as the genuine expression of a national identity, starts at the beginning of the 19th century and has an important role in the interest of editors and readers for the «Théâtre Espagnol». This paper intends to analyse the description of the Spanish theatre and especially of the theatre and of the literary figure of Lope the Vega transmitted by the long 18th century translations. These translations form part of the emerging market of the modern national classics and at the same time they are expression of the literary nationalism in its creation of transnational literary myths. In this case the French mediation fulfils a fundamental role in the European diffusion of the Spanish theatrical tradition. Keywords: Lope de Vega, Translation in the 18th century, France.
although his family's estate is in Crawford, TX. He has written numerous articles on a wide range of topics in Spanish literature, including pieces on Cervantes (Cervantes, 1999; Diacritics, 1999), modernist poetry (Romanic Review, 1994), the Renaissance lyric (MLN, 1994), the Poema de mio Cid (La cor6nica, 2000; Hispan6fila, forthcoming), the contemporary Latin American short story (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, forthcoming), and the eighteenth-century philosophical dialogue (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2001). His interests include the epistemology of Romanticism and the protofeminist ideology of the Counter Reformation novel. This essay is part of a larger comparative study of the aesthetic politics of Garcilaso, El Greco, and Cervantes.