Traducción, cultura y política en el mundo hispánico del siglo XVIII: reescribir las «Lettres d’une péruvienne» de Françoise de Graffigny

Abstract

This article tells the story of how a crucial work of the French Enlightenment, Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une péruvienne, was rewritten in peninsular Spain, in a process full of cultural and personal connections –of friendship, patronage, intellectual and literary affinity or rivalry– across the Hispanic world. It combines textual analysis of the Spanish translation by María Rosario Romero (1792), by reconstructing the biographical profile of the translator and the political and intellectual context in which this version was conceived and inserted. In this way, a pattern of relations with certain central figures (M. Rosario Romero, the Countess of Gálvez) and others appearing in the shadows becomes visible. Throughout this story, translation emerges as a cultural practice associated with others –discussion, sociability– which share with it a certain collective dimension and takes its full meaning in precise biographical trajectories which contribute to a more complex analysis of texts themselves.