The reception of Romantic travel books. Comparative analysis of the retranslation of Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne

Abstract

The number of international travelers who came to Spain in search of the country’s idiosyncrasies during the nineteenth century is certainly abundant. To be more specific, we are referring to the period between 1830 and 1850. Clear evidence of this fact is the great number of literary works which were devoted to these journeys. Among the Théophile Gautier, one of the most relevant authors in France during the nineteenth century, occupies a privileged position among the many Romantic travelers who visited Spain. This paper is based on the research on the phenomenon of retranslation through the analysis of two Spanish translations of Gautier’s travel book Voyage en Espagne, which was published in 1843: Enrique Mesa’s (1920) and Jesús Cantera’s (1998). The comparison of these two works has circumscribed to Chapter XII, one of the most idiosyncratic of this book, since it includes all the topics inherent to Romantic travel.