Rex, Satrap and Zamorin: Translating Titles in Early Modern Latin Texts of India
By Shruti Raigopal, University College Cork
In this paper, I will explore how Latin ethnographic descriptions of India from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries engage in linguistic and cultural translations. For this purpose, I will examine the terms ‘rex’, ‘dynastas’ and ‘satrapas’ as used in early modern Latin text written by Giovanni Pietro Maffei (Historiarum Indicarum Libri XVI, 1588) and compare similar passages from João de Barros’s Decadas da Asia (1552). Additionally, I will compare the use of this term in Ludovico Varthema’s Itinerario (1510, and the Latin translation published in 1511).
(Pseudo-)Classics in Translation–The Case of Antonio de Guevara
By Matthew Gorey, Wabash College
Within the field of early modern classical reception, Fray Antonio de Guevara occupies an unusual position. As the author of two wildly popular—and entirely fabricated—pseudo-biographical lives of Marcus Aurelius, the Libro áureo de Marco Aurelio (1528) and its revised and expanded version, the Relox de príncipes (1529), Guevara was arguably the best-selling author of “classical” literature in the 16th century (Redondo 1976).
Translating Empire and Race: Vergil, Velasco, and Spanish Humanist Epic
By Joseph Ortiz, University of Texas at El Paso
Although rarely mentioned in Anglo-American literary criticism, Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Eneyda de Virgilio traducida en verso castellano (Toledo, 1555) represents a pivotal moment in early modern Spanish humanism. As the first complete Spanish translation of the Aeneid, Velasco’s Eneyda claims for Castilian poetry the ability to carry classical epic, while establishing Spanish humanist practice as a worthy competitor to the work produced by Italian poets and scholars.
‘La Anónima’, vates amica: Latin Poetry as a Colonizing Weapon in 17th-Century Peru
By Brian Jorge Bizio, Whitman College
The anonymous poem Discurso en loor de la poesía (“Discourse in Praise of Poetry”) has cultural transference at its core. First, the work was published as the prologue to Diego Mexía de Fernangil’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides (Sevilla, 1608). Second, though it praises the Spanish translator and does not preface Ovid’s poem, it transfers the anonymous female lyric voice from the margins to the center: like an Atlas of sorts, the heroic task of praise is set on “a woman’s spider-like shoulders” (“ombros de muger que son d’araña”, 54; cf.