"Translating" the Origins of the Spanish Nation in Miguel de Luna's Verdadera historia del Rey don Rodrigo

From the late fourteenth until the early seventeenth century, late medieval and early modern Iberian writers, clerics, and translators embarked on the quest of creating and imagining the origins of the Spanish nation. Historical romances, chronicles, and a variety of different kinds of "histories" were produced at the end of the fourteenth century and during the fifteenth century in order to furnish an official Spanish history, one cemented in the belief in Spain's Gothic and early Christian origins for reasons that ranged from putative rights to the Castilian throne to social mobility. These histories served to define what was to be conceived as autochthonous to the Iberian Peninsula and what was to be perceived as foreign, thus excluding the Jews and Muslims as well as their descendants from the nation's hegemonic project. While the re-elaboration of these proto-national histories continued during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at a time when Spain had established itself as a global empire, a series of specific pseudohistories and/or pseudotranslations proliferated at the end of the sixteenth century.

These pseudohistories and pseudotranslations produced by official and ecclesiastic writers and translators of the period have shaken Spanish historiography from its early beginnings until the twentieth century. Echoes of their unsettling effect can be heard in the words of Spanish philologist and historian Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo:

Triste fama, aunque algo merecida, hemos logrado siempre los españoles de falsificadores en historias. Y aunque sea verdad que no nació en España, sino en Italia, el Fray Anio de Viterbo, autor de los fragmentos apócrifos de Manethón y Beroso, y que críticos como Vives y Juan de Vergara fueron los primeros en llamarse a engaño […] a la cabeza de todos, Román de la Higuera y Lupián Zapata, con los forjados Cronicones […] infestaron de malezas el campo de nuestra historia, llenando de mejor voluntad del mundo y la más ancha conciencia, todos los vacíos, dotando a todas nuestras ciudades de larga procesión de héroes y santos, confundiendo y trastocando de tal manera las especies, que aún hoy, después de abatido el monstruo de la fábula […] aún dura el contagio en historias locales.

(Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles 287-88)¹

Ménendez Pelayo's lament of Spain's infamous reputation for producing false histories and forgeries raises the question of what "gaps" these pseudohistories were intended to fill.

In 1592, Miguel de Luna, official translator to King Felipe II, published a translation of a long-lost history written by an Arab historian. According to one of the prefaces of his text, Luna discovered the manuscript of Abulcaçin Tarif Abentariq, fully titled La verdadera hystoria del Rey Rodrigo, en la qual se trata la causa principal de la perdida de España y la conquista que della hizo Miramamolin Almançor Rey que fue del Africa, y de las Arabias. Compuesta por el sabio Alcayde Abulcacim Tarif Abentarique, de la nación arabe, y natural de la Arabia Petrea,² in a hidden corner of King Felipe II's library in El Escorial. One of the first questions raised by Luna's account of his finding is why he is returning to the trope of discovery of a long-lost manuscript. Another is why he would present this work as his "translation" of an authentic historical text.

While Luna's work has been analyzed from a variety of angles,³ the trope of the "found manuscript" and its status as a pseudotranslation has not yet received critical attention. This article investigates the various types of artifices that Luna employed to frame Verdadera historia as an authentic translation and to inscribe himself in the text as a reliable translator. More particularly, I will analyze the position of (pseudo) translation in the work, and the ways in which it becomes a vehicle through which Luna, as a morisco, could present a counter-history of the proto-national legend of King Rodrigo. Furthermore, I will argue...