A Golden Age of Translation (1540-1570)

Abstract

The central decades of the 16th century played a foundational role in the historical process of literature in the Spanish language. Between 1543 and 1559 appeared, for example, the first printing of the works of Boscán and Garcilaso, the Cancionero de romances by the Flemish printer Martín Nucio, the Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, and La Diana by Jorge de Montemayor. These publications initiated literary practices of material significance in Early Modern Spain: Italianized poetry and the omnipresent romance, the picaresque and the pastoral novel. These very different works have in common a fertilization of the Castilian background by a foreign contribution: Catalan and Italian, Flemish, Portuguese, Latin or Greek. They are the fruits of a multilingual culture favoured by the mobility of the court and the political and religious instability. It is therefore not surprising that they coincide with a flourishing of translation that can be measured not only in the large number of translations (from Greek, Latin, Italian and even French) but also in their quality. In many cases, these were first translations of works of the highest rank in the literary canon, both ancient and modern. All of them had the ambition of achieving a version that does not impoverish the original and yet that seems to be written directly in Spanish, with a determined will of appropriation and naturalization. The translators, who act on their own initiative, argue that by giving access to authors of incomparable value in the language shared by everybody, they serve their homeland and honor their nation. There are personal ties or circumstantial coincidences between the translators, their printers and dedicatees. The group formed by these translations can be seen as a stylistic and rhetorical macro-experiment that prepares and accompanies the emergence of genres whose germination occurs then: notably, the epic and the novel.