FOREWORD

MARIO SANTANA
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO


The figure of the translator commonly occupies a marginal, if not non-existent, place in the definition of literary citizenship. By dwelling over the catalogue of the 'home-grown', critics and historians have tended to view the wealth of a cultural legacy as a census of authors and texts, a national product proclaiming independence regardless of linguistic, political or ethnic boundaries: the greater a culture’s autonomy and capacity for producing original works, the greater its apparent potency and exuberance. In such a clearly-drawn geography of impassable borders, translation is a merely accessory task, or even a counterproductive one. Thus, national literatures tend to look down on those accused by history of being imitators or followers of outlandish fads, all because they have toiled to import and appropriate the foreign, rather than nurture the 'authentically home-grown'.

The dream of endogamy brings forth monsters. Literatures do not take nourishment exclusively from themselves for the simple reason that the literary process is not only about creation but also, and to no less a degree, about reception: there is no writing without reading and, though true it is that in most cases a given literature is produced in a single language, it is equally true that, through the mechanism of translation, its readers’ horizons extend beyond the limits imposed by that language. It is thanks to translation that there are today numerous literatures which have their own Homer or Dante or Cervantes or Tirante or Sor Juana.

Translation is vital to the survival and viability of literary systems as clusters of production, circulation and reception of what a society deems to be literature. A system’s imaginary worlds and generic models do not derive nourishment exclusively from the contributions of its most immediate citizens (its fellow countrymen) but depend, too, on ideas and forms borrowed from other systems. To a great extent, this appropriation (we might even talk of a genuine ‘nationalization’) is performed by translation. More than a simple means of access to a far-removed reality (in terms of their relative influence on individual readers), translated works are real and active presences in literary life. A local lack of certain poetic models, for instance, has very often been compensated for by importing texts from other literatures. Translation does not only enrich a society’s cultural communication, but may even keep it in working order.

The new Translators´ Library seeks to publish in full some of the most outstanding Iberian and American translations from the Middle Ages to the present day. It is impossible here not to mention the name of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912), the multi-talented writer from Santander who pioneered research into the history of translation on the Iberian Peninsula and from one of whose three key works in the field (the Horacio en España, the Bibliografía hispano-latino clásica and the Biblioteca de traductores) it has been taken the title for this virtual library. His conservative thinking apart (and perhaps despite it), Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo brought out the inescapable connectedness of cultures and salvaged from obscurity the names of those who had contributed to the enrichment of Spanish literature. In his work as a philologist he was more aware than most in his century that speaking of national literatures (a favourite subject of his contemporaries) is necessarily tantamount to speaking of nationalized literatures, of fluxes and migrations. The new Translators' Library (though it may be more apt to call it a translations library) endeavours to recover and preserve the legacy that has made the work of other cultures accessible to speakers of Peninsular Spanish, American Spanish and Catalan, thus transforming and broadening the notion of citizenship.