02 - Translating Empire and Race: Vergil, Velasco, and Spanish Humanist Epic

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. Velasco's explanatory glosses and expansions of Virgilian passages incorporate a humanist interpretation of the Aeneid into the Spanish translation itself (Rupp 2018). At the same time, at moments in the Eneyda Velasco employs key terms and phrases that delineate a specifically Spanish reception of classical epic. In doing so he helps to construct a lexicon of Spanish epic that is especially suited to Spain's humanistic and imperial ambitions in the sixteenth century. This paper examines a number of passages in Velasco's Eneyda to show how they incorporate the language of translatio studii and translatio imperii.

The success of Velasco in translating Latin classical epic to an early modern Spanish context is registered in two Spanish epics that followed shortly after the publication of the Eneyda: Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana (1569) and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México (1610). Both poems are generally recognized as New World epics that attempt to use the classical epic form to ennoble and naturalize an imperial ideology (Quint 1993, Rodríguez 2009, López-Chavez 2016). However, critics have not noticed the extent to which Ercilla and Villagrá borrow from Velasco's Eneyda, at times using specific phrases from the Spanish translation. On the one hand, Ercilla and Villagrá's imitation of Velasco is a deliberate attempt to secure the status of their New World epics as solidly humanist works. On the other hand, both poets make use of Velasco's lexicon to represent the Spanish imperial campaign as an intellectual enterprise as much as a military one. Villagrá in particular uses Velasco's language of linguistic and ethnic difference to draw distinctions between Spanish colonialists and indigenous New World peoples. Accordingly, this paper ultimately suggests the significance of Velasco's translation of the Aeneid in the early modern constructions of race.

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Presenters

Joseph Ortiz, University of Texas at El Paso

  SCS-12