DePauw University Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University Student research Student Work 4-2017 Translating the Histories: The pS anish accounts of the New World conquests adapted into English Josh Hanselman DePauw University Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.depauw.edu/studentresearch Part of the Spanish Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hanselman, Josh, "Translating the Histories: The pS anish accounts of the New World conquests adapted into English" (2017). Student research. 68. http://scholarship.depauw.edu/studentresearch/68 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student research by an authorized administrator of Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Translating the Histories: The Spanish accounts of the New World conquests adapted into English Josh Hanselman Honor Scholar Program 4/10/17 The motivation for this project Something that has driven me to complete this project as my Honor Scholar thesis has been my love for the Spanish language. I began studying it at the start of high school, where I excelled in the largely unchallenging coursework and decided to continue studying in college. When I arrived at DePauw I realized how little I knew of the language, but also how much I could do with it. In my four years at DePauw University I’ve had the opportunity to learn from fantastic professors here, many of whom have helped me in my current project, and all of whom have given me the skills and confidence to work with the language. And of course, the primary motivation for this project has been my interest in translation. As much as I’ve developed academically and in my abilities with the Spanish language, I have not been given many opportunities through coursework in the university to attempt translation. During the spare time that I had during my junior year, I tried translating as a minor hobby, always carrying with me a copy of Cuanto sé de mi by José Hierro and a notebook with stanzas I had scrawled in poor handwriting. Having this brief taste of this showed me some of the challenges of translating, the joy of engaging in something so mentally stimulating and demanding, and the satisfaction of reading the finished product. Each line that I put to English was a way of vindicating my decision to stay dedicated to studying Spanish and taking it seriously. I had the beginnings of a skill that I wanted to develop more. And so I decided upon my capstone project for the Honor Scholar program while abroad in Quito: I wanted to translate much larger, more complicated works, writings that were interesting and significant while perhaps overlooked by most people. I initially considered looking for works of poetry, but couldn’t think of a way to tie together pieces that I found worthwhile; I later settled on major historical writings on the Spanish colonization of America after encountering in a bookstore what would be one of my translated works: Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia General de las Indias. Following this I immediately knew that I also wanted to translate works from Bartholome de las Casas- a figure that I had written on before and whose life and ideals were inspirational to me. I found a collection of his works compiled by Juan Antonio Llorente, which contained a missive to his liege that I had not previously heard of and could not find much information about online: Remedio contra la despoblacion de las Indias-Occidentales. I had also considered translating passages from Alonso de Ercilla’s poetic epic La Araucana and letters from Christopher Columbus, but later turned these down as it came to be overly ambitious; I do not regret working with just two works however, as I came to find them very rich in their content and worth the additional time spent on analysis. And so, I have here two texts translated from Spanish into English: chapters from Gómara’s Historia General that detail the early events and culture of the New World following its discovery, and Las Casas’ missive on how to reform Spain’s colonization scheme and dominion over the Native Americans. I’ve also included an overview of the translation process, the time period in which both of these works deal, and the authors and their respective works. Why translation matters An issue that has been noted in publishing circles is that a very small share of works in English are works originally from other languages. While only 2-3% of published works in the United States and Great Britain are translations of foreign works, over a quarter of published works in France and Spain are translations, and 70% of works in Slovenia have origins in foreign languages.1 This disparity means that, while other countries have some exposure to different cultures and ideas, native English readers may tend to be more isolated and unfamiliar with them. Literary translators bridge the gap created by language barriers, and can offer readers an opportunity to connect to other cultures and their points of view. It is particularly important to reanalyze texts that serve as historical sources, and to make them presentable for modern audiences. A good translator of historical works can make the antiquated language of old texts easier to understand, provide historical background and annotations necessary for a reader to use the translation, and note the nuances in tone and word choice to expose an author’s viewpoints or biases- an important part of analyzing Spanish writers’ attitudes towards Native Americans. Retranslating history also provides another perspective through which to examine the past. Different translators can produce numerous finished products given their interpretation of the original text, which can use words and phrases with various possible translations, or simply unclear or ambiguous language. The translation process In the introductory sections to his work, Lopez de Gómara asks the future translators of his writings the following requests: “that they guard carefully their wording… that they do not leave out nor add to this work.” This is an important reminder to the translator that their job is to portray the words and thoughts of the selected author, and not their own. This means examining the intent of the author, and portraying this intent and voice in the target language. Along with this obligation to the original author, the translator has the obligation of making the work legible and understood to the target audience. For instance, Spanish and English often follow different rules regarding 1 Anderson, Hephzibah. Why won’t English speakers read books in translation? BBC Culture. 21 October 2014. Web. word order (particularly in the works which I have translated), and preserving the syntax of a sentence translated from Spanish into English can often produce sentences that are either difficult to understand or different in meaning. Another example is that Spanish adjectives can often be used alone with the assumption that it refers to a type of person or a previously mentioned thing; it could make more sense to translate these with that assumed noun explicitly stated in English. These two rules are among the most important in translating a work, though they can often conflict with each other, and I frequently questioned whether my decisions in how to write a sentence into English required some change to make its intent clearer, or whether a decision that I had made constituted over-clarification or the addition of unnecessary parts. Physically, translating requires a great deal of time and effort. Among modern professional translators, computer assisted translation is widely used, in which help translators use specialized programs that can offer dictionaries, grammar checkers, document-specific word banks, and other useful functions; some programs automatically translate works and leave the translator to merely edit what the program has produced. For this project, no such programs were used; I utilized my own understanding of the Spanish language, Spanish dictionaries including the Diccionario de Autoridades for words whose meaning might have changed over time, reference materials to identify certain places, people, and things of the era, and assistance from DePauw’s Spanish faculty when I encountered phrases that were difficult to translate, particularly from my advisor Paul Johnson. In my first run-through of a section, I would translate what I could easily identify, and bracketed more difficult portions to revisit- typically confusing or idiomatic phrases, and words that could not be identified in my dictionaries- adding any relevant notes for consideration. In a second run-through, these bracketed portions would be reviewed, problematic terms and phrases would be more thoroughly reviewed, any background information that I thought was necessary for the reader would be researched (eg. the value of certain currencies, the location of certain places mentioned, etc), and my advisor was consulted if any terms and phrases could not be resolved using my own knowledge or specialized sources. In later run-throughs, the portions translated into English would be reviewed and edited, with changes made to punctuation and phrasing for a clearer reading. In this project, the age of the texts presented several additional challenges when translating, as several differences exist between modern Spanish and 16th century Spanish. Even significant differences appeared between the two works, as the result of the writers’ personal preferences for words and phrases, and the lack of a standard Spanish in this time period (the Real Academia Espanola was formed later during the 18th century to create standard rules for the language). One notable element in these works is the presence of spellings that are different from standard modern Spanish; Las Casas’ writing perhaps featured the most examples of this, with changes between the letters “b” and “v”, “g” and “j”, and “i” and “y”, frequently appearing in the text (all of which sound similar in certain contexts).