In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

 Language  Manuel Peña Díaz Translated by Jason Dyck During the seventeenth century, as Rafael Lapesa has demonstrated, the Spanish language went through an evolutionary process. It evolved phonetically, orthographically, and syntactically , in ways that implied “a considerable obsession over the uses of the written word, and, to a lesser extent, the spoken word as well.” During the baroque period, treatises on language abounded, from historic and normative approaches to vocabulary guides. But all of these treatises were composed by authors who were taking into account the numerous languages spoken or read in the peninsular and Mediterranean territories of the monarchy.1 For this reason, Bernardo Aldrete ranked these different languages in importance in Del origen y principiode la lengua castellana o romance (1606). At the end of the first part of his book he transcribed the Pater Noster in Latin, Castilian, Italian, Catalan, and Portuguese. Sebastián Covarrubias did the same in the prologue to his Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611) by placing the classical languages in a set order: He who knows Latin will uncover a wide range of things, and those who have some notion of the Greek and Hebrew languages will judge this workwith greater understanding. In the Arabic language we all are almost the same [in our ignorance], outside of a few who understand it; and hence we should give credit to those who are experts in it.2 Already by the middle of the sixteenth century inquisitors had divided the reading public into two classes with respect to language. For the unlearned unable to read in Latin, they prohibited any reading in this language, because it might provide them with an unsupervised interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. The Index of 1559 and successive editions prohibited, for example, a good number of books of hours because they contained prayers taken from the Bible. For those educated in Latin, inquisitors permitted a more unrestricted access to sacred texts, although they were limited to a few select versions of the Bible, writings of the Church Fathers, and classical texts deemed free of any sort of commentary or annotation by a heretical author. The possibility of translation always existed. The problem with translation surfaced only when authors failed to translate certain passages in an orthodox and literal manner .Translations of Desiderius Erasmus and Giovanni Boccaccio or of classical writers like Ovid, Plutarch, or Statius were examples of individual and not institutional forms of censorship. After Felipe Mey translated the seven books of Metamorphoses by Ovid, he warned in his 1586 prologue that he had “silenced something of little importance out of respect for the decency of our religion.”3 One hundred years later such arguments were repeated. Francisco de la Torre Sevil explained his method of translation in the prologue to his version of the Agudezas by the satirical poet John Owen thus: I make useof three types of translation, employing each one where I can and whenever useful; whether: word for word; . . . paying attention to the sentence and not to the individual words in order to render the meaning more intelligible or decent; . . . [or] in some important cases, I silence the meaning of the word . . . to improve the sentence.4 This method of translating in a Christian manner was justified by the need to capture the goodwill of readers by pleasing them, according to the style of the age. In reality, as advocates of the “Manipulation School” have demonstrated , these translations were and continue to be a common practice of censorship: translators, sympathetic to those in power, manipulate texts to conceal those parts considered to be “dangerous.” The result is nothing other than an encratic translation, in keeping with doxa, and subjected to certain laws. Normally translations were far too literal, and on occasion they were crafted in the print shops themselves. Cervantes captured it in this way: “Good heavens—exclaimed Don Quixote—thou art so proficient in the Italian language ! I will bet a good wager that while in Italian they say piace, thou sayest in Castilian place; and where they say più, thou sayest más, and thou sayest su with arriba and giù with abajo.”5 Whether a coincidence or not, the speech that Cervantes put in the mouth of Don Quixote during his visit to a printing shop in Barcelona concerning the facility and speed with which numerous translations were completed Language (Spain) 187 in Italian implies that, far more than being a fashionable language, it was a social norm.TheTuscan...

Share