últimas corrientes teóricas en los estudios de traducción - Gredos ...

Mª JESÚS LORENZO MODIA–LATE 17TH- AND 18TH-CENTURY TRANSLATIONS BY ENGLISH WOMEN
which had been published in Paris two years before. It includes a “[…] Preface, by way of
Essay on Translated Prose: wherein the Arguments of Father Tacquet, and others, against
the System of Copernicus (as to the Motion of the Earth) are likewise considered, and
answered: Wholly new”. Aphra Behn’s opinions in this preface concerning the various
European languages seems to be due to her chauvinism and her criticism of French culture.
However, it is interesting to read the reasons why she has chosen this text for translation:
“The General Applause [to] this little Book on the Plurality of Worlds […] [t]he Reputation
of the Author […], and the Author’s introducing a Woman as one of the speakers in these
five Discourses, were further Motives for me to undertake this little work […]”. (Todd, vol.
4, 1993: 73). In other cases the name of the translator is not given in the first English
edition of the text, as occurs in The History of Oracles and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests. In Two
Parts. Made English (1688), which – in turn – was an adaptation fom Anthony Van Dale’s de
Oraculis Ethnicorum dissertationes duae: quarum prior de ipsorum duratione ac defectu, posterior de
earundem Auctoribus. Accedit et Schediasma de Consecrationibus Ethnicis (1683). However, Behn’s
translation is recognized as such in her collected works Histoires, Novels, and Translations,
Written by the most Ingenious Mrs. BEHN; The Second Volume (1700).
We concur with Elizabeth Spearing when she says that “[…] the range of activities
conducted under the general heading of translation was so wide that it can be difficult to
determine whether a particular text should be considered as a translation or as an ‘original’
work” (154). In the translations of Tallemant’s A Voyage to the Island of Love and Lycidus, or
The lover in fashion. […] Together with a Miscellany of New Poems (1688), Aphra Behn expands
the French texts and includes a much more prominent feminine voice and a seducing
atmosphere, non-existent in the source texts. It is difficult then to “[…] draw a sharp
distinction between translation and other types of literary activity […]” (Spearing 170),
since Behn enlarges most of her translations adding theatre-like scenes and explorations of
both masculinity and femininity. As a translator “[s]he takes on a literary equivalent of the
adaptability expected of any woman in seventeenth-century society; the politics of
translation intersect with sexual politics to produce a masquerade in which the translatress’s
power may be at its greatest when it is most completely dissembled” (Spearing 174).
As is well known, Behn also used her literary career as a political weapon,
translation was included in that. An example of this could be her revision of the text for
Francis Barlow’s edition of Aesop’s Fables in 1687, which had been published before in
1666. In it she contributed verses and introduced political propaganda against the Duke of
Monmouth, who had intended to succeed James II and had been executed for it two years
before (Crompton: 133-35). Behn may also have used translation as a complementary
enterprise in difficult times for the production of other literary genres. However, Janet
Todd indicated that she may well have chosen translation as an alternative professional
activity in order to deal with fields of knowledge otherwise forbidden for women, such as
religious, philosophical or scientific controversies (Todd, vol. 4, 1993: ix). A good example
for that could be the translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, where
Behn had the opportunity to deal with a text in which the new philosophical and scientific
ideas of Descartes were propagated.
Aphra Behn is a translator, then, who used this task as a bread-winning activity, but
who also tried to express her views on the role of women and on the world around her in
every possible field that appealed to her. Concerning translation, she did that in two
different ways, either translating, or writing another work based on the first. This is how
she put it in “The Translator’s Preface” to A Discovery of New Worlds: “And I resolv’d either
to give you the French Book into English, or to give you the subject quite changed and made
my own […]” (Todd, vol. 4, 1993: 86). There are also times, as in the two Voyages to the
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