Spain. 17th century

In the seventeenth century there is a clash between two types of state organization in Europe, the multicultural approach of the Hispanic, or Catholic, monarchy, fostering a variety of languages, and the French Bourbon monarchy, imposing its centralized state in Europe as a national and monolingual culture. The latter model was finally successful in Spain in the eighteenth century, with a new Bourbon dynasty and French as the pivot/intermediary language for translation, in increasing competition with other monolingual cultures, such as Great Britain and Germany, all of them with a great shortage of translations in seventeenth-century Spain. When dealing with translation in Spain in this century, only translations into Castilian are usually considered and not into the other languages in that time and space, such as Portuguese or Catalan. However, some attention must be paid to the fact that some translations are not made from these other languages, or from Italian, due to their proximity to Castilian, and that some other translations are made but not published, as is the case with Vicent Mariner’s. Factors continuing to influence translation, or its lack, in 17th-century Spain include bilingualism, censorship, the predominance of Latin in jesuit education, the linguistic proximity and prestige of Italian, the circulation of the original text, allophone creation -that which is done in another language than the author’s-, self-translation and allograph translation -when it is done with the author’s collaboration. The treatment of translation in Don Quixote (I, 6 and II, 62) can be used to summarize the translation issue in seventeenth-century Spain: Translations of the classical languages –especially now from the texts of Tacitus edited by Justus Lipsius- continue to exert their previous predominancy, alongside with poetical translations, mainly from Italian. In a secondary position, we have the less appreciated translations from Italian or other Romance languages which could be exemplified by the ficticious Italian book which don Quixote finds in a printing house of Barcelona: Le bagatelle (II, 62); further on, the presence of Hebrew and Arabic (I, 9) as remains in the background, and the echo of the Basque spoken, not yet a translation language (I, 8). Almost all this is present in Quevedo, an eminent example of authorship, poetical imitation and several types of translation in different languages, with a preponderance of paraphrastical versions