Wuthering heights in the post civil-war period: analysis and evaluation of the translation by El Bachiller Canseco (1947)

Abstract

Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë, has been translated into Spanish on more than one hundred ocassions1from an early date, although, prior to the academic and institutional development of translation studies around the mid-seventies, the translators faced aseries of problems mainly due to lack of proper instruction and resources. The translation by El Bachiller Canseco (1947) is a paradigmatic example of these kinds of translations published during the Post Civil-war Period in which the translator did not have any specific training or access to specialised monographs. This lack of training had an impact on the resulting target text, since his translation did not succeed at transferring Brontë’s cultural implications. To transfer them correctly, the historical-social context of the work would need to have been studied in great detail. In the text, we are witness to the translator’s intervention, something that we can observe in the omissions, errors and examples of interpretative translation. El Bachiller Canseco appears not to have known the sources of the original text, nor was he able to draw a line between his facetsas a writer and translator. It is particularly regrettable that a modern retranslation of translations of the aforesaid period has not been conveniently revised and updated, as Canseco’s recent retranslation (Edimat 2009) clearly exemplifies.

Wuthering Heights (1847), de Emily Brontë, ha sido traducida al español en más de un centenar de ocasiones. La traducción de El Bachiller Canseco (1947) se publicó por primera vez tras el periodo de la guerra civil en el que el traductor no contaba con una formación específica ni tampoco tenía acceso a monografías especializadas. Esta falta de formación repercute en el texto meta, puesto que el traductor no consigue trasladar las implicaciones culturales de Brontë. Para trasladarlo correctamente habría sido imprescindible estudiar detenidamente el contexto histórico-social de la obra. En el texto somos testigos de la intervención del traductor, algo que podemos constatar por las omisiones, errores y ejemplos de traducción interpretativa. El Bachiller Canseco no parece conocer las fuentes del texto original ni encuentra tampoco el límite entre su faceta de escritor y traductor. En concreto, es lamentable que una retraducción moderna de las traducciones de la citada época no se haya revisado ni actualizado pertinentemente, como ejemplifica notoriamente la reciente retraducción de El Bachiller Canseco (Edimat 2009).