The General Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/je_prismatic_generalmap/ Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali; © OpenStreetMap contributors
The Spanish Covers Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/spanish_storymap/ Researched by Andrés Claro; created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali and Simone Landucci
5. Representation, Gender, Empire: Jane Eyre in Spanish
© 2023 Andrés Claro, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319.09
I cannot call them handsome — they were too pale and grave for the word […], like people consulting a dictionary to aid them in the task of translation. This scene was as silent as if all the figures had been shadows […], not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an unknown tongue […]; it was only like a stroke of sounding brass to me — conveying no meaning […].
‘Is there ony country where they talk i’ that way?’ […]
‘Yes […] — a far larger country than England; where they talk in no other way.’
‘Well, for sure case, I knawn’t how they can understand t’ one t’ other: and if either o’ ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?’
‘We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all’
C. Brontë, Jane Eyre1
Where meaning is many-faceted, language can become prismatic as easily as it can become crystal-clear — the meanings projected by one and the same form of words can splay into a spectrum of colour without loss of definition […]. The first question, then, would seem to be, not whether the poet can bring a prismatic splay of distinct meanings, but why he does it and why we like it.
W. Nowottny, The Language Poets Use2
Translations of Jane Eyre in Latin America and Spain: The Context of their First Widespread Impact in the 1940s
‘As far as I can see, it would be wiser and more judicious if you were to take to yourself the original at once’.3 Jane Eyre’s recommendation to St John could never have become the motto of Spanish and Latin American readers of British novels since the mid-nineteenth century. For them, for reasons that range from a constitutive relationship with the linguistic and cultural fabric making up the multiform literature and mestizo ethos of Latin America to what has been called modern Spain’s relative cultural dependency on its northern neighbours, translation has played and continues to play a decisive and inescapable role. Thus, it is not altogether surprising to find that an indirect Spanish version of Jane Eyre appeared in Santiago, Chile and Havana, Cuba, as early as 1850, i.e., only three years after the first edition of the English original, but also four decades before a first direct Spanish rendering appeared in New York (1889), and almost a century before several complete Spanish translations done directly from the English text began to have a widespread impact on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1940s onwards.4
Indeed, whereas translations of the novel up to the start of the Second World War can be counted on the fingers of one hand, from the early 1940s onwards there was a veritable burgeoning of versions and editions, both in Latin America, with particularly active centres in Buenos Aires (e.g., M. E. Antonini’s popular version for Acme Agency in 1941, marketed suggestively from 1944 onwards under a title that translates as Jane Eyre, Rebel Soul) and in Spain, with Barcelona clearly predominating over Madrid (e.g., J. G. de Luaces’ popular version for Iberia first published in 1943). Certainly, this proliferation of Jane Eyre translations can be explained in part by the renewed prestige acquired by English language and culture after the Second World War. But it started somewhat earlier, and can be put down as well, and especially, to differentiated local processes in the Latin American and Spanish contexts that led to the promotion of foreign literature generally and this English novel in particular. For whereas the translation boom that began in Spain in the early 1940s, in the face of censorship and abrupt stifling of local creative expression by the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), can be understood as a literary compensation and even an implicit alibi serving to avoid oppression and write between the lines, not least in relation to the Francoist National-Catholic programme and the domestic role for women that it promoted, the Jane Eyre translation boom in Latin America was part of an explicit programme of opening up to and interacting with foreign languages and literatures as a way of creating a local ethos and literature emancipated from Spanish colonialism, especially in the young republics of the Southern Cone, where the novel became widely known at the very time the female vote and other civil rights for women were being secured.
As regards the context of reception in Spain, then, it should be recalled that Franco’s dictatorship not only began by abolishing a number of progressive reforms implemented by the previous Republican constitution, such as freedom of worship, equal rights between the sexes, and thence universal suffrage, but also set up a powerful and energetic system of censorship that directly impacted literary work and books, with side effects for translation. First of all, in what can be seen as a kind of sui generis reissuing of the Index librorum prohibitorum et derogatorum of the old Spanish Inquisition, Francoist censorship banned all kinds of works and authors seen as criticising the National-Catholic movement or threatening its orthodox imaginary, including not only pacifist, anti-fascist, Marxist, and separatist writings, but also theosophical and Masonic works, together with any dealing openly with sexual matters (whether scientific or otherwise) or including explicitly sexual scenes; in short, a whole array of works that, if encountered, were to be destroyed. Then, unpublished works had to undergo prior censorship before they could be published and distributed, to evaluate them in terms of respect for and compatibility with the ideology of the regime and dogmas of the Church, with verdicts that could range from the removal of certain passages to prohibition of the entire work. Thus, in a country where many of the leading women and men of literature, the arts, and the sciences had disappeared, either killed during the Civil War or forced into exile, among those who remained in Spain translation became not just a means of economic survival in extremely hard times, but also a possible way of exercising literary activity despite censorship, and even of establishing an alibi of anonymity that made it possible to write between the lines, dividing readerships into accomplices and dupes, creating complicity in resistance, a negative freedom by way of subtle gestures that made it impossible for the censors and other guardians of the law to arrive at forthright rulings. This partly explains the seeming paradox of a proliferation of translations amid the acute crisis of Spanish post-war economy, culture and literary production, with most of them being made from the European languages that the literati of the time were familiar with, and most particularly English (to the relative detriment of French and German, which had been dominant before the War), a proliferation that unsettled the guardians of orthodoxy on more than one occasion.5
As regards Latin America, the political and literary context in which translations and editions of Jane Eyre began to be multiplied and widely circulated was quite different. Certainly, the new relative predominance of English can be seen here as well, being further associated with the growing political power, influence, and intervention of the United States. But from the late 1930s to the late 1960s (i.e., before the era of North American-backed military dictatorships), the young republics of Latin America, independent of Spain for just over a century, embarked upon a period of relative industrial progress and new political, cultural, and literary awareness, where translation was often encouraged and understood explicitly as a necessary process in view of what Latin America’s literature and culture had been and ought to be, including as regards its emancipation and differentiation from Spain itself. This explicit awareness of translation as constitutive to the Latin American ethos can be traced from period to period and from north to south: at least as early as the reflections on the mestizo constitution which appear in the ambiguity of malinchism in Mexico (where a symbol of foundational linguistic and political betrayal of the native metamorphoses into a symbol of formative heterogeneity and female liberation from oppression),6 through the romantic republican project of the mid-nineteenth century (which sought to break away from the Spanish substratum and transform the language and culture of the southern countries by grafting other languages and cultures onto them),7 to the more recent conceptions of an anthropophagic relationship inspired by Amazonian culture (where what is posited is a relationship of capture, digestion, and assimilation of European, Oriental, and more broadly universal cultural strength in pursuit of local prowess).8 Amid this multiplicity of scenes — all very different, of course, and all complex in themselves and not without violence, but also evincing this common denominator of a constitutive translation experience — if the focus is narrowed to the River Plate context whence Jane Eyre was disseminated in the 1940s, it is worth considering Borges’ well-known admonitions in ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ (1951), a good synecdoche for the simultaneously constitutive and emancipatory role explicitly assigned in the Southern Cone to the process of passing through the foreign. Activating his own sense of paradox, Borges reviews and rebuts three common claims about what literature and culture ought to be in Argentina and South America generally:
[1] The idea that Argentine poetry should abound in distinctive Argentine features and Argentine local colour seems to me a mistake […]. The Argentine cult of local colour is a recent European cult that nationalists should reject as foreign.
[2] It is said that there is a tradition to which we Argentine writers must adhere, and that tradition is Spanish literature […. But] Argentine history can be defined without inaccuracy as a desire for separation from Spain, as a voluntary distancing from Spain.
[3] This opinion is that we, the Argentines, are detached from the past […]. However […,] I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe that we have a right to this tradition, a greater right than the inhabitants of one or another Western nation may have […]. I believe that Argentines, South Americans in general, […] can deal with all European themes, deal with them without superstition, with an irreverence that may have, and is already having, happy consequences […]. And so I say again that we must be fearless and take the whole universe as our inheritance.9
Certainly, setting out from the paradoxical aesthetics of ‘originality as rewriting’ and ‘finis terrae cosmopolitanism’ that his particular vantage point on the River Plate allows him, Borges omits the dimension of conflict that has often been part of the translation experience in Latin America, ignoring the violence perpetrated on that which resists assimilation, as has often been the case with indigenous languages and cultures, while unilaterally emphasising the outlook of sceptical tolerance that a large-scale translation movement encourages. But Borges’ awareness of the extent to which South American literature and culture should be thought of as a journey through the foreign transcending any boundary between traditions and continents is characteristic of the women and men of letters of the Southern Cone, and particularly those of Buenos Aires (a city shaped by a succession of rapid and large-scale immigrations of Italians, Russians, Jews, Central Europeans, Asians, and others superadded to substrates of Spanish and indigenous descent), further resonating in this particular case on the cultural scene of the ‘translation machine’ that was Sur magazine, where Borges’ text was published.10 Since from the late 1930s onwards, everyone in South America who could translate did so; and everyone, whether they translated literature or not, understood each other through access to the foreign in translation, whether this meant intelligibility across the different languages that tend to be hastily grouped under the label of Latin American Spanish (themselves the product of different genealogies and translational emphases over the course of the particular history of each of their regions), or literary versions such as the ones from Jane Eyre that concern us here, which became accessible to a wide and varied readership extending far beyond the narrow circle of the polyglot elite to which someone like Borges himself belonged.
In this sense, as one moves from the general and differentiated outline of the contexts of reception in Spain and Latin America to the characteristics of the translations of Jane Eyre themselves in relation to their readerships, one can add that the more than thirty Spanish versions and hundreds of editions of the novel brought out since the 1940s on the two sides of the Atlantic reveal at least three different general approaches, manifested in decisions pertaining to both content and style, and driven by literary, commercial, and ideological constraints. That is, in what already constitutes a first, very general instance of literary and cultural prismatisation, one can distinguish between: (i) ‘relatively unabridged translations’, which preserve most of the literal surface of the novel, permitting a line-by-line comparison with the original; (ii) ‘edited compressed versions’, which often drop or merge sentences, cut passages and sometimes redistribute chapters, reducing the novel by up to half its length; and (iii) ‘highly condensed paraphrases’, which rewrite the novel as didactic material, reducing it to less than a third of its original length. While in each particular case it is possible to observe the extent to which excisions, as well as changes of style and content, are driven by considerations ranging from the ideological to the commercial, these three different, recurring approaches testify to a settled belief on the part of publishers that the novel could have just as much success as (i) a classic of world literature in the form of a female Bildungsroman, (ii) a romantic best-seller for the general public, or (iii) an edifying tale for the young.11
Finally, moving on from the foregoing introductory and contextual observations to the transcendental perspective on language that will determine many of the analyses to follow — i.e., to a point of view that interrogates linguistic and literary behaviour as the formal condition of possibility for the representation of reality and experience — it is worth clarifying that the aim in what follows is not to denounce the translative limits that the various modes of passage of Jane Eyre into Spanish reveal, but to evaluate the levels of refraction between the English and Spanish languages, literatures, and cultures arising in the process: the possibilities opened up or not by the formal insemination and the semantic afterlife involved in these different forms of translation, which, when strong and achieved, are capable both of changing modes of representation in the receiving language and of generating a backward effect on the original, unfolding its signification over time.
These formal inseminations and prismatisations can already be noticed to a certain degree at a stylistic micro-level, as can be seen in the next section (“The literary synthesis and representation of reality: evaluating the recreation of lexical, syntactic, musical, imagistic, and contextual forms of meaning”), while examining the variety of significant behaviours that the Spanish language takes on as it either echoes or, very often, departs from the English original lexicon, syntax, verbal music, verbal images or contextual forms of meaning, with the corresponding forms of experience and representation that they give rise to.
But it is above all while looking from a broader, contextual and cultural point of view on the impact of Jane Eyre in Latin America as compared to Spain (as we do in the subsequent two sections under the rubrics “Gender refractions: human individuality as feminist emancipation” and “Empire refractions: from savage slave to gothic ghost”), that one can see how the afterlife and refraction of the novel, starting with those of its crucial gender and colonial motifs, become particularly significant. Especially bearing in mind that Spanish-language versions of Jane Eyre became popular at a time when the women’s vote was being fought for and achieved in the newly independent Latin American republics, which had succeeded only a century earlier in shaking off the imperial yoke of Spain, where Franco’s National-Catholic programme was, during this same period, pursuing the restoration of so-called ‘traditional family values’.
The Literary Synthesis and Representation of Reality: Evaluating the Recreation of Lexical, Syntactic, Musical, Imagistic and Contextual Forms of Meaning
As one focuses on a comparative analysis of the ways the characteristic signifying behaviours of Charlotte Brontë’s English are rendered in the different Spanish translations — taking sample passages from the original that present distinctive organic textures to evaluate the difficulties encountered and the re-creations devised in the unabridged, compressed, and highly condensed versions — the aim is not to arrive at a value judgement of the quality of the translations or the translators, much the less to list blunders or significant losses relative to the original, but to evaluate prismatisation from a transcendental point of view, shedding light on the refractions arising out of these encounters between the English and Spanish languages, literatures, and cultures, and pointing to the possibilities of experience or literary representation they do or do not give rise to.
As a basis for the analyses that follow, we have selected seven of the most published and read translations of the last eighty years, produced for different readerships and purposes by translators situated differently in place, ideological stance, and time. To begin with, three unabridged translations (marked as ‘A’ alongside the translator’s name and date of publication in references below): (1) María Fernanda de Pereda’s 1947 Jane Eyre (Madrid: Aguilar, 780 pages, with at least fifteen editions since); (2) Carmen Martín Gaite’s 1999 Jane Eyre (Barcelona: Alba, 656 pages, with at least six editions since); and (3) Toni Hill’s 2009 Jane Eyre (Barcelona: Mondadori, 608 pages, with at least six editions since). Then, there are the two pioneering and most widely read compressed versions, published in Latin America and Spain just two years apart in the early forties (marked as ‘B’ alongside the translator’s name and date of publication in references below): (4) M. E. Antonini’s 1941 Jane Eyre (Buenos Aires: Acme Agency, 287 pages, with at least five editions in the next ten years as Jane Eyre, Alma Rebelde, and many more official editions and pirate versions since); and (5) Juan de Luaces’ 1943 Jane Eyre (Barcelona: Iberia-J. Gil, 518 pages, with at least thirty-five editions since). Lastly, the selection is completed by two highly condensed paraphrases for children, both of which rely heavily on Antonini’s earlier compressed version and have been published on both sides of the Atlantic over the years (marked as ‘C’ alongside the translator’s name and date of publication in references below): (6) Jesús Sánchez Díaz’s 1974 Jane Eyre (Santiago de Chile: Paulinas, 191 pages) and (7) Silvia Robles’ 1989 further condensed adaptation (Jane Eyre, Santiago de Chile: Zig Zag, 123 pages). Thus, while the selection concentrates on examples of the three different forms of passage into Spanish identified that have been repeatedly published and had large readerships, it also offers a broad spectrum as regards the individuality and positioning of the translators in the Spanish and Latin American contexts: from the Catalan Republican Juan de Luaces (tr. 1943), a promising writer and literary critic before the Civil War who, after a number of vicissitudes, including censorship and prison, became the most prolific of the post-war Spanish translators, to María Fernanda de Pereda (tr. 1947), who worked in close contact with the orthodox Madrid establishment; from M. E. Antonini (tr. 1941), who essentially translated adventure books for the young (Buffalo Bill, Robin Hood) for a popular collection issued by Acme Agency in Buenos Aires, to Jesús Sánchez Díaz (tr. 1974) in Spain, who translated mainly educational religious literature for the young for the Catholic publisher Ediciones Paulinas; from the very well-known prize-winning Spanish novelist Carmen Martín Gaite (tr. 1999), born in 1925 and associated with the Madrid literary world, to the psychologist and successful author of police novels Toni Hill (tr. 2009), born in Barcelona in 1966.12
In what concerns the sample passages highlighted below, the focus has been guided first and foremost by the characteristic elements of Brontë’s style in the English original, involving an examination of units of meaning from lexical networks and syntactic forms to the more sophisticated forms of verbal music, verbal imagery, and contextual effects (it being understood that many of these forms of representation overlap and work together), to analyse the way these have been re-created, dropped, or transformed in the different types of Spanish-language versions, with the corresponding impact on literary representation and experience.
Lexical Networks
To start with the most basic aspects, such as the taxonomy of reality produced by lexical networks, there are no drastic difficulties or prismatisations here, insofar as translation is facilitated by the partial overlap between the genealogies of the Spanish and English languages. Thus, most of the keywords that organise the world of the novel (passion, conscience, reason, feelings, resolve, nature, etc.) are translated in the unabridged editions by their usual Spanish synonyms or calques (pasión, consciencia, razón, sentimientos, resolución, naturaleza, etc.), with only some slight allusive refraction, mainly because of the differentiated impact of key concepts in Protestantism such as ‘conscience’, ‘reason’, and ‘resolve’ when it comes to describing female determination in the Latin American and Spanish contexts respectively.
Among the notable exceptions to this lexical straightforwardness are the twofold denotation and symbolism attached to the names that Brontë chooses for many of the characters and places in the novel: Burns, Reed, Temple, Rivers, Lowood, Thornfield. For, notwithstanding that the compressed versions and reduced paraphrases often adopt what was a common practice until the mid-twentieth century of Hispanicising names (as in Juana Eyre by Carlota Brontë), none of the Spanish versions sets out to account for this way in which Brontë charges the place-names with meaning. A partial exception in respect of Thornfield can be found in Luaces and Gaite, who resort to annotation. Thus, the latter, whose unabridged translation is the only one to provide systematic notes (more than a hundred in all), explains: ‘Thornfield significa “campo de espinos”. Con esta metáfora volverá a jugar más tarde’ [‘The name means ‘field of thorns’. The author will play on this metaphor again later’] (Gaite 1999A). Luaces, whose compressed edition provides only four footnotes, explains in the third of them: ‘Thornfield significa, literalmente, campo de espinos’ [‘The name literally means field of thorns’] (Luaces 1943B). Luaces will have nothing to say about the ‘fiery’ allusions of Burns or the ‘religious’ ones of Temple, however, which is perhaps already revealing of the kind of more-or-less automatic self-censorship that he applied under Franco’s dictatorship. For, as he tactically puts it in the prologue to his 1946 Spanish edition of The Canterbury Tales, dividing readerships into accomplices, innocents, and dupes: ‘I have resisted the itch to multiply footnotes. My contention is that the well-informed rarely need them and that they are of very limited value to the unlearned […]. In attempting to interpret and unpick all allusions and overtones, the annotator will often err and provide the reader in turn with a misleading picture.’13
Syntactic Forms
More dramatic are the transformations at a syntactic level, where forms characteristic of the novel, such as the direct presentation and detailed descriptions that reinforce testimonial and autobiographical experience, the syntactic repetitions and inversions that help to express altered states of mind and perception, and verbal time shifts used to convey emotion, are often simplified, creating a more straightforward texture and a more homogeneous, linear, logical, and distant representation of events.
In the first place, whereas the general style of the novel, although highly elaborate and reflexive, gives the impression of spontaneity — more precisely, whereas this fiction written as first person autobiography has a direct, almost epistolary style, often highly detailed in its descriptions, which allows things to be touched and felt — this is an aspect that is not only predictably curtailed in the compressed versions, and simply omitted in the condensed paraphrases, but also modified in the unabridged Spanish translations. Thus, a brief negative description such as ‘I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell’,14 can become anything from a relatively literal ‘No sé cómo era su traje: si vestido, o manto, o mortaja; sólo distinguí que era blanco’ (Pereda 1947A),15 to a condensed version like ‘No me fijé cómo iba vestida; sólo sé que llevaba un traje blanco’ (Luaces, 1943B: ‘I did not pay attention to how she was dressed; I only know she had a white garment on’), to complete omission in Sánchez’s and Robles’ condensed paraphrases.
Secondly, while the novel’s syntax tends to be direct and relatively straightforward, something that heightens the naturalness and spontaneity of the tale and its emotions, confusion and excitement are often staged through parataxis, repetitions, and inversions. These ways of disrupting linear movement are often softened or transformed even in the unabridged Spanish-language versions, which tend to clarify and simplify, transforming such passages of fragmented, heightened, or confused perception into a more straightforward presentation. Take for instance the dramatic tension achieved in a passage describing Bertha’s night visit to Jane, who is still unaware of her existence:
I had risen up in bed, I bent forward: first surprise, then bewilderment, came over me; and then my blood crept cold through my veins. Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie, it was not Leah, it was not Mrs. Fairfax: it was not — no, I was sure of it, and am still — it was not even that strange woman, Grace Poole.16
Confronted with these syntactic parataxes, inversions, and repetitions, even the unabridged versions, from Pereda (1947) to Gaite (1999), clarify the text, using resources such as logical connectives and explanation. Pereda gives:
Me incorporé en la cama y me incliné hacia adelante, sintiendo primero sorpresa, luego duda, y al darme cuenta de la realidad, la sangre se me heló en las venas. Señor Rochester, aquella mujer no era Sophie, ni Leah, ni la señora Fairfax, ni era, … de ello estoy absolutamente segura…, ni era siquiera esa mujer espeluznante que se llama Grace Poole.
(Pereda 1947A: ‘I sat up in the bed and [adds connective that avoids parataxis] leant forward, feeling [adds clarification and link that avoids parataxis] first surprise, then doubt, and as I became aware of the reality [interpolates a phrase to explain the confusion which in the original is staged by the behaviour of language], the blood froze in my veins. Mr. Rochester, that woman [introduces clarification] was not Sophie, nor Leah, nor Mrs. Fairfax, nor was it, … of this I am absolutely sure… [omits the time juxtaposition between past and present], it was not even that terrifying woman whose name is [introduces clarification] Grace Poole’.)17
The compressed versions provide similarly logic-oriented clarification; Antonini, for instance, while reducing the passage, explains: ‘y la sangre se heló en mis venas, porque la persona que estaba allí no era Sophia, ni la señora Fairfax, ni Lía, ni aun esa extraña Gracia Poole’ (Antonini 1941B: ‘and the blood froze in my veins, because the person who was there was not Sophie, nor Mrs Fairfax, nor Leah, nor even that strange Grace Poole’).18
Finally amid these syntactic characteristics, while Jane Eyre is narrated ex post facto by the protagonist, using the past tense to recount experiences which are over and done with and of which she knows the outcome, it often shifts to the present to express emotional tension, fading across from the point of view of Jane the narrator to the point of view of Jane the character to make us feel her emotions as they arise. Take for instance a passage that stages Jane’s tension when she sees Rochester flirting with Miss Ingram:
Miss Ingram placed herself at her leader’s right hand; the other diviners filled the chairs on each side of him and her. I did not now watch the actors; I no longer waited with interest for the curtain to rise; my attention was absorbed by the spectators; my eyes, erewhile fixed on the arch, were now irresistibly attracted to the semicircle of chairs… I see Mr. Rochester turn to Miss Ingram, and Miss Ingram to him; I see her incline her head towards him, till the jetty curls almost touch his shoulder and wave against his cheek; I hear their mutual whisperings; I recall their interchanged glances (my italics).19
These shifts of verbal tense into the present to express emotional tension in the current scene, as in the second half of the excerpt, are re-created by Pereda’s unabridged Spanish translation and especially by those of Gaite and Hill.20 Luaces’ condensed version, however, unifies the point of view by keeping all verbs in the past (Antonini and Sánchez cut the whole scene). Luaces renders it:
Miss Ingram se colocó al lado de Rochester. Los demás, en sillas inmediatas, a ambos lados de ellos. Yo dejé de mirar a los actores; había perdido todo interés por los acertijos y, en cambio, mis ojos se sentían irresistiblemente atraídos por el círculo de espectadores… Ví a Mr. Rochester inclinarse hacia Blanche para consultarla y a ella acercarse a él hasta que los rizos de la joven casi tocaban los hombros y las mejillas de sus compañeros. Yo escuchaba sus cuchicheos y notaba las miradas que cambiaban entre sí (Luaces 1943B; my italics).21
The original fade-out from the narration in the present to the intensity of the past emotion, produced by the change in verbal tense, is thus unified in a single viewpoint, a texture without time inflections, where what does stand out though is the vividness of Luaces’ onomatopoeias (‘escuchaba sus cuchicheos’), conveying a musicality which he is often more alert to and re-creates more effectively than the other Spanish translators being considered.
Verbal Music
Even as the Spanish renderings of Jane Eyre tend to simplify the syntax, they also, more often than not, do not recreate the verbal music, at least locally. There are some variously prominent exceptions in Pereda, Gaite, and Hill when the musicality of the original passages themselves is particularly significant; thus, ‘the west wind whispered in the ivy’22 becomes ‘El viento susurraba entre las hojas de hiedra’ (Pereda 1947A); similarly, and more sustainedly, ‘A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk […]: it wandered away — away to an indefinite distance — it died’23 is rendered in a way that re-creates the harder consonance: ‘El viento pasó deprisa por nuestro sendero […], y fue a extinguirse lejos, muy lejos […] a infinita distancia de donde estábamos’ (Pereda 1947A); or ‘Una racha imprevista de viento vino a barrer el camino de los laureles […]. Luego se alejó hasta morir lejos’ (Gaite 1999A); lastly, lines from songs such as ‘Like heather that, in the wilderness, / The wild wind whirls away’24 are rendered in a way that retains the consonance (but not the clear vowel sounds): ‘Como el brezo, arrancado del bosque / por una ráfaga de viento salvaje’ (Hill 2009A).25 But the sound iconicity of the original is usually disregarded, even in very noticeable instances similar to those quoted above, especially when it comes to the hard alliteration and the staccato effect that the predominance of monosyllables in the English language is able to create, and that can be very effective at staging extreme emotions, as in: ‘Up the blood rushed to his face; forth flashed the fire from his eyes […]. “Farewell, for ever!”’,26 a musicality that is hard to re-create given the general sonority of Spanish, with its predominance of polysyllables, its more spaced-out accentuation and its legato sounds.
In this sense, even concerning a unique sound effect of Brontë’s in Jane Eyre, namely her play on the ‘eir’ sound in words such as ‘dare’, ‘rare’, ‘err’, and many others to make the name of the protagonist resonate by homophony, the Spanish translators devise no way of re-creating it, with the partial exception of Luaces. Take a particularly emphatic use of the resource in Chapter 35: the dreamlike state in which Jane hears Rochester’s voice calling her, where the sound-play makes her name echo time and again from beyond the immediacy of the scene and the linearity of the prose:
I might have said, ‘Where is it?’ for it did not seem in the room — nor in the house — nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air — nor from under the earth — nor from overhead. I had heard it — where, or whence, forever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being — a known, loved, well-remembered voice — that of Edward Fairfax Rochester; and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently.27
The ghostly sounds of the homophonies and half-homophonies contributing to the sensuous feeling of the scene, with ‘where’, ‘air’, ‘earth’, ‘heard’, ‘eerily’, ‘urgently’, and other words making us hear how Jane ‘Eyre’ is being called by name even before the language of the novel literally tells us so, are not easy to re-create in Spanish. Thus, none of the translators even of the unabridged versions attempted to stage the effect locally, and it is possible that they were unaware of it. Luaces, though, who was certainly aware of the sound pattern, devised a partial and indirect way of conveying its import to the reader in his condensed version, writing:
En vez de qué, debía haber preguntado dónde, porque ciertamente no sonaba ni en el cuarto, ni encima de mí. Y sin embargo era una voz, una voz inconfundible, una voz adorada, la voz de Edward Fairfax Rochester, hablando con una expresión de agonía y dolor infinitos, penetrantes, urgentes.
(Luaces 1943B: ‘Instead of what, I should have asked where, for certainly it came neither from the bedroom, nor from above me. And yet it was a voice, an unmistakable voice, a beloved voice, Edward Fairfax Rochester’s voice, speaking with an expression of infinite, penetrating and urgent agony and pain’.)
By repeating the word ‘voice’ several times, Luaces takes what the homophonies of the original do between the lines and repeatedly and explicitly says it in the Spanish-language version, laying out in literal terms the fact that Jane is being called insistently.
Verbal Images
It is as one moves on to the translation of verbal images, which are usually easier to reproduce in another language than syntax, music, or contextual effects, that one finds a more sustained and massive re-creation in Spanish of Brontë’s idiosyncratic forms of representation and experience. This can be observed not only in the networks of metaphors and the corresponding analogical presentation of feelings, entities, and events, but also in the biblically inspired parallelistic forms promoting correlative presentation and, less frequently, in the perspectivism on reality activated by the paratactic superposition of points of view, all of which have a decisive impact on the way the representation of reality is topologically organized.
In general, as might be expected, metaphorical patterns and other classical tropes reappear in Spanish even when the translator is not being particularly re-creative, as does their effect of dualistic representation of the real, which analogically relates the dispersion of the sensible comparison to the ideal meaning that unifies it. Thus, for instance, the whole panoply of well-worn metaphors drawing on an imaginary of war or slavery to represent the ‘conquests’ and ‘submissions’ of love — ‘Jane: you please me, and you master me — you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced — conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph I can win’28 — are re-created relatively automatically, with few omissions or transformations in the unabridged Spanish translations, omnipresent as these metaphors are in the so-called Western tradition and European languages.29 Because of this largely shared background, even the symbols of the novel tend to remain quite stable (less so the personifications of faculties such as Reason, Memory, etc., which describe Jane’s inner conflict and growing spirituality in a Protestant ethos).
Among the composite figurations characteristic of the novel that are actively re-created by Spanish-language translators, mention must be made of biblically inspired semantic parallelism, a form of representation by repetition or correlation of complementary entities that Charlotte Brontë will have imbibed naturally from the Scriptures and from the sermons she heard from her minister father, projecting a correlative topology of the real.30 Such parallelisms often appear when biblical passages are quoted verbatim in the novel: ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, [/] than a stalled ox and hatred therewith’.31 But Brontë also uses parallelism as a literary device when she wants to express extreme emotion, changes of fortune suffered by the protagonist, and other tensions suited to a correlative or contrasted representation of reality. Thus, at the beginning of the novel, parallelism is activated in Jane’s emotional description of her confinement in the red room: ‘This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; [/] it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchens’.32 Again, later in the novel, it determines the way she describes the lonely pathway on which she first meets Rochester: ‘The ground was hard, [/] the air was still […]. [//] I walked fast till I got warm, [/] and then I walked slowly to enjoy […] [//] the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, [/] in the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun’.33 An even more emphatic example can be found towards the end of the novel, as she describes her definitive change of destiny after meeting Rochester again: ‘Sacrifice! [/] What do I sacrifice? [//] Famine for food, [/] expectation for content. [//] To be privileged to put my arms round what I value — [/] to press my lips to what I love’.34
Unquestionably, the passage most continuously shaped by these forms of biblically inspired parallelism, oscillating between the repetition and the complementation of an idea through its correlative, is found in the last pages of Chapter 26, where the stylistic device serves to express the contrasts in Jane’s change of fortune and the extreme emotion with which she contemplates the cancellation of her marriage with Rochester. This very long passage, written in parallel prose throughout, opens:
Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman — almost a bride —, [/] was a cold, solitary girl again: [//] her life was pale; [/] her prospects were desolate. [//] A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; [/] a white December storm had whirled over June; [//] ice glazed the ripe apples, [/] drifts crushed the blowing roses; [//] on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: [/] lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow.
After some thirty more lines in a similar vein, this extended passage in parallel prose ends by flowing into the actual words of Psalm 69:
The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, [/] my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, [/] swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen mass. [/] That bitter hour cannot be described: [/] in truth, ‘the waters came into my soul; I sank in deep mire: [/] I felt no standing; I came into deep waters; the floods overflowed me’.35
Of the unabridged Spanish translations, both Gaite’s and Hill’s re-create most of the parallelistic form of presentation, with the corresponding representation of reality as contrast and correlation of entities, events, and experiences.36 Pereda, for her part, somewhat relaxes the effect by using, as she tends to do, illative words and other particles that soften the predominantly binary parataxis, while preserving something of the parallel style of representation in the passage as a whole; she further ends with a dissolve, omitting the quotation marks around the biblical passage.37 As for the condensed literary versions, Antonini reduces the passage to little more than a quarter of its original length, dissolving most of the biblically-inspired parallelism, including the quotation at the end. Luaces, though, while condensing, maintains the parallelistic figuration of entities and feelings throughout the passage — ‘Mis esperanzas habían muerto de repente; [/] mis deseos, el día anterior rebosantes de vida, estaban convertidos en lívidos cadáveres… [//] Cerré los ojos. [/] La oscuridad me rodeó’ (Luaces 1943B) — highlighting the verbatim intrusion of the Psalms at the end by using quotation marks, just as the English original does: ‘La conciencia de mi vida rota, de mi amor perdido, de mi esperanza deshecha, me abrumó como una inmensa masa. Imposible describir la amargura de aquel momento. Bien puede decirse que “las olas inundaron mi alma, me sentí hundir en el légamo, [/] en el seno de las aguas profundas, y las ondas pasaron sobre mi cabeza”’ (Luaces 1943B).
Less re-creation and more simplification are to be found in the renderings of complex images formed by the paratactic juxtaposition of points of view, a perspectivism capable of providing a kaleidoscopic experience. Indeed, other than in quite limited instances, moments of kaleidoscopic perspectivism are dissolved into a more homogenous texture in the Spanish, even into a single point of view, with the resultant simplification of space-time representation.
A limited form of perspectivism is often constructed by the narrator’s voice addressing the reader of the novel — ‘oh, romantic reader, forgive me for telling the plain truth!’38 — juxtaposing the space-time of the fictitious Jane as a very self-conscious narrator, the space-time of the story itself with Jane as a character, and the space-time of the empirical reader, which is multiple and changeable over time. These forms of superposition, which can be used to create complicity and allow the narrator to impose her preferences and better control the reader’s reactions, offer no difficulty and are for the most part re-created in the unabridged Spanish-language translations — ‘perdona, lector romántico, que te diga la verdad escueta’ (Pereda 1947A), ‘oh, lector romántico, perdóname por contarte la verdad sin adornos’ (Hill, 2009A), less literally in ‘perdona, lector, si te parece poco romántico, pero la verdad es que…’ (Gaite 1999A) — as they are about two thirds of the time in Luaces’ condensed version, including as it happens in this particular instance: ‘perdona, lector romántico, que te diga la verdad desnuda’ (Luaces 1943B).39
The same can be said of the limited perspectivism obtained by the juxtaposition of linguistic planes, interrupting the unity of the English language. This can be seen very obviously in the intrusion of foreign tongues, such as Miss Temple’s Latin, Diana and Mary River’s German and Blanche Ingram’s Italian, with the most sustained instance being Adèle’s French — ‘having replied to her “Revenez bientôt, ma bonne amie, ma chère Mdlle. Jeannette,” with a kiss, I set out’40 — which serves to outline the girl’s character, but also to create complicity with the reader through the traditional nineteenth-century education shared by the ‘highly educated’ (thus, French is also used occasionally by Jane the character, who learned it at Lowood, as well as by Rochester and the friends he receives at Thornfield).41 Pereda and Hill’s un-abridged translations almost always re-create these juxtapositions of linguistic planes — ‘y contestando con un beso a sus frases cariñosas de Revenez bientôt, ma bonne amie, ma chère mademoiselle Jeannette, salí de casa y me puse en camino’ (Pereda 1947A), ‘respondí con un beso a su despedida, “Revenez bientôt ma bonne amie, ma chère mlle. Jeannette”, y salí de la casa’ (Hill 2009A) — while Gaite also adds notes giving the Spanish translation of the French in the text: ‘Revenez bientôt, ma bonne amie, ma chère mademoiselle Jeannette [Note: Vuelva pronto, mi buena amiga, mi querida señorita Jeannette].’ Le contesté con un beso, y salí’ (Gaite 1999A). Not so the condensed versions, however, where even Luaces, at least when it comes to Adèle’s French, homogenizes to a single Spanish perspective in all but a couple of cases, giving in this instance: ‘respondí con un beso a su “Vuelva pronto, mi buena amiga Miss Jane”, y emprendí la marcha’ (Luaces 1943B). They are likewise omitted from Antonini’s version and predictably in the reduced paraphrases, produced as they were with young readers in mind. This same unification of linguistic planes is also found in all the different kinds of Spanish versions when they come to deal with the linguistic perspectivisms produced by the juxtaposition of different English registers, such as John’s local form of speech — ‘You’re noan so far fro’ Thornfield now’42 — or Hannah’s — ‘Some does one thing, and some another. Poor folk mun get on as they can’43 — which are dissolved into the general texture in all the different kinds of Spanish versions.
Leaving aside these simple and limited cases of addresses to the reader and inclusion of foreign languages or local registers, a more frequent and complex form of perspectivism in the novel is created by the juxtaposition without transition of points of view such as direct and indirect address, present and past tense, narration, and dialogue, etc., creating an almost kaleidoscopic presentation of reality with great dramatic potential. Take Jane’s account of Bertha’s nocturnal visit before the cancelled wedding (in which Jane-the-character in the past is already taking the place of Jane-the-narrator in the present). It begins:
All the preface, sir; the tale is yet to come [a literary register — preface, tale — in the present which announces the future to narrate the past]. On waking, a gleam dazzled my eyes; I thought — Oh, it is daylight! [direct account of her thoughts in the past, staged in the present tense; but then back to the narration:] But I was mistaken; it was only candlelight. Sophie, I supposed, had come in. There was a light on the dressing-table, and the door of the closet, where, before going to bed, I had hung my wedding-dress and veil, stood open [introduction of pluperfect time, and then back to past:]; I heard a rustling there. I asked, ‘Sophie, what are you doing?’ [new change to her voice in the past staged in the present tense, and then back to the narration:] No one answered; but a form emerged from the closet.44
Even among the unabridged translations, only Gaite keeps the general juxtaposition of points of view,45 while Pereda and Hill reduce the perspectivism, dissolving some of the dramatic intensity by cutting out references in the future and pluperfect tense as well as some direct accounts of Jane’s thoughts in the past.46 Something similar can be observed in Luaces’ condensed version,47 while in Antonini and the two reduced paraphrases the passage is fused with Jane’s earlier dream as a continuation of it, omitting all reference to the prologue and unifying them into a single perspective.48 Most of the English perspectivism is thus transformed into a single point of view, a kind of counter-prismatisation that unifies the juxtaposition of time and narrative forms of indirect and direct presentation into a sort of omniscient narrative voice, no longer confronting us with the drama inside the protagonist as a kaleidoscopic consciousness.
Contextual Effects
Turning finally to contextual effects, to those forms of language that generate meaning and project representation by appealing to and playing with the reader’s expectations within a certain historical and literary context (such as allusion, connotation, irony, intertextuality, etc.), the enormous difficulties they impose on the re-creative task of a literary translator who wants to keep meaning under control are increased when the new text is to be read in more than one context, as was often the case with the Spanish versions of Jane Eyre in the second half of the twentieth century. In principle, confronted with the variously noticeable change of linguistic, literary, cultural, and epochal contexts between Victorian England and twentieth-century Spanish-speaking countries, preserving the effect of allusions, intertextuality, or other contextual forms of meaning (such as political preferences conveyed through literary allusion to the traditional canon or defiance of religious authority conveyed by intertextuality), would often involve creating new equivalent events capable of activating these effects by reference to the new context, including new representatives of the approved literary, political or religious law — an effort at re-creation that is not found in a sustained way in the Spanish-language versions of Jane Eyre (or in commercial literary translation of novels into Spanish generally in contemporary times). Moreover, one must be aware that, owing to the significant differences between the literary and political contexts of reception during most of the twentieth century in Latin America as compared to Spain, the same factual translation of Jane Eyre could generate different overtones on either side of the Atlantic, an added difficulty which resulted, not in strong re-creation, but in calculations and self-censorship of various kinds, especially among the translators working within the context of Franco’s dictatorship, and, in any case and often, in strong forms of refraction.
Certainly, most Spanish versions manage, more or less automatically, to activate some of the original meanings that depend on a relatively shared context, which existed for most of the twentieth century. This is the case with a significant number of the biblical allusions in the novel, for instance, which tend to preserve their effect when the translators maintain them as such. The same is true of the many proverbial expressions — ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, ‘All is not gold that glitters’, ‘To each villain his own vice’49 — often activated by naturally arising Spanish-language proverbial equivalents: ‘La belleza está en los ojos del que mira’ (Luaces 1943B); ‘La belleza está en los ojos de aquel que mira’ (Gaite 1999A); ‘No es oro todo lo que reluce’ (Luaces 1943B, Pereda 1947A, Gaite 1999A, Hill 2009A); ‘A cada vicioso con su vicio’ (Pereda 1947A), ‘Cada villano tiene su vicio’ (Gaite 1999A). Even some of the religious-political allusions in the context of the relationship and tension between the Anglican and Catholic churches can reappear more or less spontaneously, or when annotated and literalised; thus, a reference such as the one in Chapter 3 to Guy Fawkes — ‘Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantile Guy Fawkes’ — who was known as Guido Fawkes when he fought with the Spanish army, can be maintained and work as such, both in Luaces’ condensed version (1943) and Hill’s unabridged version (2009) (Gaite also keeps it, telling the reader in a note that he was a ‘conspirator in the time of James I in England, in the early seventeenth century’ (Gaite 1999A)). Pereda literalises the meaning of the reference by using the word ‘conspiradora’ (‘conspirator’) instead of the proper name, while Antonini is more creative, refracting the reference as: ‘Creo que para la Abbot era yo una especie de bruja infantil’ (Antonini 1941B: ‘I think that for Abbot I was a kind of child witch’)). The same re-creation can be found in the case of meaningful contrasts such as the one between ‘stylish’ and ‘puritanical’ in Chapter 20, with both erotic and religious harmonics — ‘The hue of her dress was black too; but its fashion was so different from her sister’s — so much more flowing and becoming — it looked as stylish as the other’s looked puritanical’ — which quite naturally maintains its effectiveness in the Spanish tradition, where these connotations of puritanism, including the use of the adjectival form of the word as a well-worn image in opposition to the sensual, are well established. Thus, Antonini’s condensed version published in Argentina gives: ‘Vestía también de negro como su hermana, pero no en estilo puritano sino elegante’ (Antonini 1941B); while an orthodox establishment figure such as Pereda can allow herself to render it: ‘Vestía también de negro, pero con un traje tan estilizado y tan a la moda como lo era el de su hermana sencillo y puritano’ (Pereda 1947A). But someone like Luaces, a Republican translating in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, avoids murky religious waters and omits all reference to puritanism, especially its contrast to the sensual, rendering the sentence: ‘Su vestido era negro también, pero absolutamente distinto al de su hermana. Una especie de luto estilizado’ (Luaces 1943B: ‘Her dress was black too, but completely different to her sister’s. A kind of stylised mourning.’) Gaite, lastly, translating half a century later, in post-Franco times, allows herself to unpack and strongly emphasise the implications of the strict parallelism in the original: ‘También iba de luto, pero su vestido, ceñido y a la moda, no llamaba la atención precisamente por su puritanismo como el de la hermana’ (Gaite 1999A: ‘She wore mourning too, but her dress, close-fitting and fashionable, was not exactly remarkable for its puritanism like her sister’s.’).50
Aside from these instances of more or less automatic reactivation when the references are not cut out, most of the contextual forms of meaning either dissolve or refract in more unpredictable directions in the Spanish-language versions, which do not establish new references to activate the same effects in the context of the new culture. Nor do they use sustained annotation, with the notable exception of Gaite’s translation, which has more than a hundred notes clarifying historical and geographical references, mythological, biblical, and literary allusions, and even some possible ironies; in sum, informing the modern Spanish reader of what the contextual literary forms of meaning of the original would make complicit English readers experience directly.51
Thus, where the linguistic-literary context is concerned, these forms of meaning can be seen predictably to disappear when they depend on intertextuality with earlier works of English literature, or with books fashionable at the time, since the prodigious web of textual allusion in the original, whether retained or not, does not activate easily in the Spanish context of reception (and the same probably holds true for most contemporary English readers, as the increasing annotation in current commercial editions suggests). These instances range from references to classics such as Bunyan, Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Swift, Burns, Richardson, Byron, Scott, Keats, and others, up to the works that Jane reads during her formative years: the childhood vision of exotic faraway sea coasts obtained from Bewick’s History of British Birds (Chapter 1), or even the exotic stories of the ‘Arabian Tales’ (Chapter 2) (which some of the translators do not seem to realise are The Arabian Nights, known in Spanish as Las mil y una noches — The Thousand and One Nights). Even when very obvious references crop up in the original English, such as an interpolation taken from one of Shakespeare’s best-known works in the conversation between Mrs Fairfax and Jane after her arrival at Thornfield, while they are touching with ominous humour the possible presence of ghosts in the house — ‘Yes — “after life’s fitful fever they sleep well [Macbeth 3.2.23],” I muttered’ — the effect is mostly lost.52 A partial exception is Gaite, who translates in high tone: ‘“Sí — murmuré yo — tras la fiebre caprichosa de la vida, duerme plácidamente”’ (‘“Yes, — I muttered —, after life’s fitful fever, he sleeps peacefully”’), and who adds a footnote explaining the reference, as she does for other contextual aspects: ‘Charlotte Brontë liked to display her knowledge of literature. This is a phrase from act III of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and refers to the King of Scotland, Duncan, whom he has recently murdered’ (Gaite 1999A).53 But in the other editions, whether the inverted commas and attendant superposition of planes are preserved as they stand, as in Hill’s unabridged version — ‘Sí. “Tras la intensa fiebre de la vida llega el reposo más plácido” — murmuré’ (Hill 2009A) — or are done away with, so that these appear to be Jane’s own words — ‘Sí, después de una vida borrascosa bueno es dormir — murmuré’ (Antonini 1941B), ‘Hartos de turbulencia, reposan tranquilos, ¿no? — comenté’ (Luaces 1943B), ‘Claro; duermen en paz después de una vida de emociones y de agitación — murmuré’ (Pereda 1947A) — the effect of intertextuality is diluted and the ominous parallelisms with Duncan’s death, or more broadly with the ghosts and events of Macbeth as a whole, are not activated.
Generally speaking, whether or not all the individual translators were familiar with these and other less well-known passages of English literature, they tended to submit to the current imperative in commercial editions of prioritising the plot of the story without ‘distractions’ for the Spanish-speaking reader, removing — or at least not re-creating via new references — the allusions and other effects of intertextual forms. Thus, whereas in the original context this whole web of literary allusion was able to divide readers between those who noticed it and extract its meaning and those who did not (starting with the significant fact that literary allusion is as important in Jane Eyre as biblical allusion, with both being placed at the same level of importance in the protagonist’s development and generating a potential complicity with the novel’s readership in this respect), in the Spanish translations, where they are not simply done away with — as they often are in the compressed versions and almost always are in the condensed paraphrases — their literal preservation, without any re-creative effort to reflect the difference in context and literary expectations, means they are left adrift like messages in a bottle.
Where the historical context is concerned, however, there is a much greater tendency towards refraction in the transition from Victorian England to post-Second World War Spain and Latin America. This can already be seen in the case of religious references and their moral and political overtones, which are capable of generating a renewed meaning when transposed from Protestant England to Catholic Spain, leading some translators to variously emphatic self-censure and writing between the lines, especially if they were working under Franco’s censorship and programme to restore traditional National-Catholic values (Spain remained a confessional state until 1978).
In general terms, Charlotte Brontë had no particular liking for the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, dominant in Spain and Latin America, or for rigid Pharisaic forms of Protestantism and Anglicanism. ‘I consider Methodism, Quakerism, and the extremes of High and Low Churchism foolish, but Roman Catholicism beats them all’,54 she wrote some time after publishing Jane Eyre, a statement that helps to unfold her true intentions behind some of the religious references and overtones in her novel. For the effect even of the English original in the context of the religious conventions of Victorian England was felt to be discordant and was attacked as anti-Christian, prompting Brontë to mount a tactical defence; as she summarises it in a well-known passage of her Prologue to the Second Edition (1848): ‘Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved me, I turn to another class […] I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as ‘Jane Eyre:’ in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry — that parent of crime — an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions […]. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.’
Symptomatically, of the seven versions being considered here, only Gaite’s translation, done in 1999 from the second English edition, reproduces Brontë’s Preface. More broadly, when confronted with religious references, especially with dissident overtones, one often finds either transformation or self-censorship according to the religious orthodoxy or the position of the translator relative to the political regime and apparatus of censorship in the new Spanish context.
Take the different ways of translating a passage such as Jane’s ‘innocent’ and ‘spontaneous’ words when she is faced with Helen’s imminent death: ‘How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of dying! This world is pleasant — it would be dreary to be called from it, and to have to go who knows where?’.55 Pereda, as one would expect, reconciles the anxiety about death with orthodox Catholic dogma, making Jane doubt the exact location but not the existence of the realm of the dead: ‘¡Qué triste debe de ser verse tendido en una cama y en peligro de muerte, con lo hermoso que es el mundo! ¡Será espantoso dejarlo para ir a un lugar desconocido que no se sabe en dónde está [go to a place whose whereabouts are unknown]!’ (Pereda, 1947A). Luaces, a Republican, accentuates between the lines, using a religious expression (God knows where) to subvert religion; stressing the subversion of consolation vis-à-vis death, he renders it: ‘¡Qué triste estar enfermo, en peligro de muerte! El mundo es hermoso. ¡Qué terrible debe ser que le arrebaten a uno de él para ir a parar Dios sabe dónde [to end up God knows where]!’, a passage whose rendering acquires further political overtones from the fact that it was published just a few years after the massacres of the Spanish Civil War.
Conversely, a revealing example of the removal of allusive references can be found in the treatment of the interpolation of Esther 5.3 in Chapter 24 — ‘Now, King Ahasuerus! What do I want with half your estate? Do you think I am a Jew-usurer, seeking good investment in land?’ — which takes on a particularly ominous meaning in the years after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Once again, the positions of these two Spanish translators working in the forties are symptomatic. Thus, whereas Pereda keeps this intact in her translation, just as she does other biblical allusions — ‘Bueno, rey Asuero. ¿Para qué necesito yo la mitad de su hacienda? ¿Es que se figura que soy un judío usurero que voy buscando la manera de sacar partido de unos caudales?’ (Pereda 1947A) — Luaces cuts out the entire reference (as does Antonini in Argentina at the same time, by contrast with the more recent versions, which are more literal here).56
Finally, in less conscious but no less revealing modes, one can consider the way the turn of phrase ‘my master’ is avoided by Luaces and the rest of the early Spanish translators when used by Jane for Rochester (while this same word ‘master’ is kept as ‘maestro’ when confined to its social and educational uses). That is, confronted with expressions such as ‘“It must have been one of them,” interrupted my master’,57 whereas Antonini in Argentina (1941) or Hill much later in Spain (2009) would often render the expression as ‘mi señor’, with clear erotic overtones, none of the early versions published in Spain offer this turn of phrase ‘mi señor’, using rather expressions such as ‘Rochester’ (Luaces 1943) or ‘el señor Rochester’ (‘mister Rochester’: Pereda 1947, as well as later in Sánchez 1974). For despite a possible literal reading (Jane was in fact employed by Rochester), the immediate literal equivalent of ‘my master’ as ‘mi señor’ would have had disruptive religious overtones in mid-century Spain, being normally reserved in the Spanish language and Catholic tradition for Christ who, according to his biographers in the Gospels, was already thus called by his disciples: master. In synthesis, it would be giving to a man what belongs to God.
One can realize how in two of the three instances just examined, as in other examples commented on before, Luaces takes advantage of the cover of anonymity provided by his position as translator to write episodically between the lines, shielded as he is by the canonical authority of Charlotte Brontë, whom he recalls in the brief introductory note to his Spanish edition is one of the greatest women writers of all time, concluding, no less surreptitiously in the context of the immediate situation in Spain, that ‘Jane Eyre is, in summary, a bright picture on a dark background’ (Luaces 1943B). But this is a way of dividing readerships between accomplices and dupes that Luaces only activates occasionally, when opportunity allows or the passage merits it, while he acts cautiously and censors himself in many other instances when it comes to translating religious or social references with local harmonics, since out of political considerations and the need to earn a living he could not risk his manuscripts being rejected by the censor (something he was familiar with, since his text Fuera de su sitio was banned in 1939, probably because of its open treatment of sexual matters).58 Luaces’ duplicity was effective, in any event, and the guardians of the law took the bait; in its prior censorship ruling, the Department of Propaganda decreed (13 October 1942) that Jane Eyre was ‘A good novel that tells the life story of an orphan girl, her sufferings and her struggle to attain to a decent living. It is completely moral, but because it is an English work, all its action takes place within the Protestant religion,’59 in view of which nothing was required to be removed or altered, it being considered that these dissonances characteristic of the Protestant religion had been duly toned down and transformed (which is indeed the case with other additional aspects, such as the harsh and punitive Calvinist God, or the evangelism of St John Rivers, which are played down, not to mention occasional allusions to non-Christian religions, which Luaces simply removes).
Nonetheless, despite Luaces’ self-censorship and transformations by other translators, dissident or otherwise, to avoid problems with the guardians of the law, the difference in cultural and historical horizon between Victorian England and post-war Spain and Latin America could not but produce a sharp refraction of the contextual effects in Jane Eyre. Leaving aside all explicit self-conscious censorship to dupe the guardians of the law, and to a more acute degree than with the recreations and refractions in lexical, grammatical, musical, and imagistic aspects reviewed earlier, it is mainly when these contextual effects come to be evaluated that one finds a sharp prismatisation of the work in the Spanish language. And of these refractions between the different cultural contexts, it is above all the prismatisations concerning gender and colonial motifs in the new differentiated contexts of the Latin American republics as compared to Spain under Franco’s dictatorship which become particularly significant, as will be examined in the two sections that follow.
Gender Refractions: Human Individuality as Feminist Emancipation
Among the cultural instances that refract most decisively in the passage of Jane Eyre from its original context of inscription in mid-nineteenth century Victorian England to the mid-twentieth century contexts in which its Spanish translations were popularized in Latin America and Spain, one finds first and foremost its potential as a feminist emancipation manifesto. For, even beyond the different levels of emphasis or self-censorship that can be found in the translations, whether emphasizing or downplaying the protagonist’s passion and sense of independence, the very sense of individuality congenial to Protestant English culture, key to the pathos and plot of this kind of Bildungsroman presentation of a female character’s development against adversity, is refracted in decisive and differentiated ways in the young republics of South America, on the one hand, where struggles for the women’s vote and other civil rights were in their critical stages, and in the Iberian Peninsula, on the other, where Franco’s National-Catholic programme sought to re-establish traditional family values that assigned women a domestic role.
Certainly, the force of the novel as a provocative statement about women’s emancipation can easily be lost on contemporary Spanish readers (or indeed English ones) — they might be confused, for instance, by the way Jane, despite her disdain for John Reed or for St John Rivers’ ambitions, seems to aspire to marriage as a woman’s ultimate fulfilment — so that contextual adjustments are required to take the full measure of its original impact and likewise its potential for refraction in mid-twentieth century translations in Latin America and Spain. Regarding the English text in its original context of inscription, the reader must be reminded that this mid-nineteenth century portrait of the desires and frustrations of an educated woman not enjoying all the privileges of class, written at a time when women had few civil rights, was experienced by its Victorian readership as depicting an impetuous, rebellious figure who broke the traditional moulds and was described as ‘unfeminine’ by her detractors (within and outside the novel itself),60 being seen as a direct assertion of women’s rights by complicit readers. As for the Spanish language versions done during the first large wave of translation of the novel in the 1940s, of which there were at least six issued in dozens of editions between 1941 and 1950, including the most re-printed ones by Antonini (1941), Luaces (1943), and Pereda (1947), the contemporary reader would have to be reminded of the differentiated social and cultural contexts in which the emancipatory potential of the novel was refracted during this first widespread reception in Latin America and Spain respectively.
For in the South American republics, on the one hand, this popularity of Jane Eyre was exactly contemporary with the explicit political and social struggle for women’s civil rights and achievement of suffrage (attained in 1946 in Venezuela, 1947 in Argentina, 1949 in Chile, 1955 in Peru, and 1957 in Colombia, and earlier in some countries: 1924 in Ecuador, 1932 in Uruguay, and 1938 in Bolivia), an event regarded as a fundamental advance in the long and as-yet unfinished movement towards equal rights. Thus, whereas the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (1848), usually identified as the founding moment of suffragism, is strictly contemporary with the publication of the original English version of Jane Eyre (1847), it was around the time of what is viewed as its final international recognition a hundred years later with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that the novel had its translation boom in Latin America, just as women were attaining equal civil rights in many of the young South American republics following a struggle that had begun in the early twentieth century. In Argentina itself, where this Jane Eyre translation boom began with Antonini’s pioneering 1941 version, Eva Duarte (Evita, 1919–1952) — whose own life story, from humble beginnings and a career as an actress to her work as a trade unionist, political leader and final explicit proclamation as ‘Spiritual Head of the Nation’ (Jefa espiritual de la nación) before she died at the age of thirty-three, offers a no-less sui generis formation narrative in this respect — spoke as follows on national radio about the enactment of the law on women’s suffrage, in which she had been actively involved: ‘My fellow countrywomen, I am even now being presented by the national government with the law that enshrines our civil rights. And I am being presented with it in your company, in the assurance that I do so on behalf and as the representative of all Argentine women, jubilantly feeling how my hands tremble as they touch the laurels that proclaim our victory. Here it is, my sisters, summed up in the cramped print of a few paragraphs — a long history of struggles, setbacks and hopes. And so it contains flares of indignation, the shadows of threatening eclipses, but also the joyous awakening of triumphant dawns, heralding the victory of women over the incomprehension, denials and vested interests of the castes repudiated by our national awakening.’61
Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, on the other hand, did not just abolish the female suffrage sanctioned by the 1931 constitution enacted under the Second Republic and repeal other civil rights won during the previous period, such as the equality of the sexes before the law and the ability to dissolve a marriage. More radically, as part of what was conceived as a struggle of Good against Evil projected on to the two sides that had confronted each other in the Civil War, Francoism applied an explicit National-Catholic programme to restore traditional family values, making canonical marriage the only valid kind and encouraging women to leave the workforce and devote themselves to domestic tasks (so that from 1944 Spain’s labour laws required married women to have their husband’s permission to work). The result was the establishment of a nationalist and religious traditionalism unequalled in the Europe of the day.
It is this contextual difference and relative separation of the cultural destinies of South America and Spain between the 1940s and 1970s, then, that substantially accounts for the different forms of emphasis or self-censorship regarding the potential for female emancipation that are observed in the various translations of Jane Eyre that came out at the time, starting with those of Antonini (1941) and Luaces (1943), two compressed versions that are to some extent equivalent, and that would enjoy great commercial success in their respective regions.
Thus, in South America, it is symptomatic that Antonini’s pioneering Argentine translation was sold, beginning in 1944 and for the three decades to come, in the series of editions published by Acme Agency in Buenos Aires, under the composite title of Jane Eyre: Rebel Soul (Juana Eyre: alma rebelde), with the iconography of its cover design emphasising the idea of the independent and educated woman (you can see the cover, together with the book’s place of publication, on the third screen of the Spanish Covers Map). While this addition to the title, ‘Rebel Soul’, matches that of the Spanish-language version of the 1943 film adaptation of Jane Eyre by Robert Stevenson, with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles in the roles of Jane and Rochester, it summarizes well the emphasis Antonini would give both to proclamations of gender equality and to the heroine’s erotic intensity.
In the way Jane Eyre translation was approached in Spain in those same years, conversely, starting with Luaces’ version, it is possible to see how the conditioning of the Francoist National-Catholic programme in relation to the social role of women led to varying degrees of self-censorship when it came to the novel’s potential for female emancipation, including its variously explicit eroticism. Insofar as Franco’s dictatorship prescribed the re-establishment of traditional patriarchal culture against the conquests made in the previous Republican period, promoting values and a role for women that did not actually differ greatly from those of the Victorian context in which Jane Eyre originally appeared, it was precisely those moments of the novel that created dissonance in its original context of inscription by deviating from expectations about the social role of women, starting with its claim to equality and its erotic passion, that activated the Spanish translator’s self-censorship in the new context a century later. In fact, Luaces also acted here in a very deliberate and often astute manner, decisively moderating the energy with which Jane asserts her emancipatory positions and experiences her passions, especially the erotic impetus, but also allowing a hidden agenda to show through for those prepared to understand, so that his translation divides readers into accomplices and dupes in more or less subtle and probably automatic ways within this context of censorship in which he was operating.
For this ability to divide readers into accomplices and dupes was something that Luaces exercised from early on, even before he was imprisoned or censored, as can be seen in his work as a writer under the previous dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–1930), and not least in relation to the civil oppression and erotic repression of women. Take his journalistic text ‘Feminismo y desvergüenza’ (‘Feminism and Shamelessness’), written when he was just 19 and published in the Heraldo Alavés (25 February 1925), not only because it can effectively divide readerships even now, but also because the picture it provides of the female oppression and tension in which his compressed version of Jane Eyre was to appear somewhat later could hardly be bettered. Luaces, the young Republican poet, thunders:
Not in fancy dress but in undress, their pink flesh covered only by the flimsiest of shifts, two graceful women, identity unknown, shielded behind never-raised masks, had the absurd — or shamelessly insolent — fancy of mingling with the colourful crowd of masked figures at the Press ball in the Theatre Royal. This public display of brazenness and unseemliness is yet another treacherous blow dealt us severe Spaniards of the old stock, enamoured of Christian modesty and southern mystery, by the foul, misshapen monster of feminism without femininity. Women voting, women writing, women in government and at the bar, women naked in public, open prostitution proliferating, sterility rampant, bestiality triumphant, spirituality groaning: ambiguity, destitution, decadence… This is the work of feminism. Where is this path leading us? Is there in Spain no morality, no conscience, no masculinity even? Must we forever indulge the repellent spectacle of pseudo-women alienated from the home, from motherhood and from Religion, the artist’s or lawyer’s cloak draped over the garb of harlotry? I know that these and worse outrages are common currency abroad, but are we to measure Spain, severe, virile, noble, conquering Spain, by the same yardstick as the frivolous French or the Yankee bacon mongers? […] Against the barefaced shamelessness of women unworthy to be called Spanish, against the increasing womanishness of men, against indifference, scepticism and denial of all that is good, beautiful and grand, we must raise a wall of sound tradition, of sincere austerity, of triumphant manhood. We must preach an ethical and aesthetic Crusade to restore all the old foundations of the true Spanish ways.62
By taking the attire of two women supposed to have attended a ball at the Theatre Royal as a pretext for a hyperbolic condemnation of both literary feminism (of which Charlotte Brontë was a pioneering and archetypal figure) and foreign influence on Spain (which he would devote the whole of his subsequent literary labour to furthering), Luaces not only subverts by reductio ad absurdum the traditionalist and nationalist programme pursued by the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, but also illustrates his ability to write between the lines and separate readerships, deployed here with a youthful assurance and effrontery less subtle than the approach he would take during the Francoist oppression two decades later. In all cases, while separating accomplices from dupes, he could not be accused by the duty censor of saying anything but what ‘his words in the text literally say’, making the guardians of the law take the bait (as they still do).63 But whatever attitude the reader of the day might have taken to Luaces’ text, and whatever today’s reader might choose to think his real intentions were, what it leaves in no doubt is the cultural outlook and traditional view of women officially promoted by the authorities in the 1920s, before the Second Republic (1931–1936) — the same traditional view that the National-Catholic programme implemented by Franco’s dictatorship after the Civil War would be seeking to restore at the time Luaces was undertaking and publishing his successful version of Jane Eyre.
As one thus returns from the Spanish and Latin American contexts to the text of the novel itself and its translations into Spanish, if Jane’s development in the face of adversity includes her repeated rebellions against oppression (not least oppression by a number of male characters, from her cousin John Reed’s physical abuse and Mr Brocklehurst’s psychological abuse to St John Rivers’s attempts at control), alternating with a series of explicit reflections about the need for women to be independent of and equal to men, and an explicit staging of her erotic passion for Rochester, a married man, one can notice how the versions produced by Antonini in Argentina and Luaces in Spain proceed quite differently in relation to this series of aspects with a common potential for female liberation, notwithstanding that both appear to be extremely alert to such a potential in their respective contexts.
Thus, bearing in mind that Antonini’s version is far more compressed than Luaces’ (having 287 pages as compared to 518, in a similar format), whereas the Argentine translator cuts substantially more than the Spaniard at all other times, when it comes to declarations about female liberation or Jane’s erotic passion he translates emphatically, stressing the novel’s impact as a romantic bestseller at a time of female emancipation. Luaces, on the other hand, acting just as consciously, cuts much more in those passages than he does elsewhere, obscuring Jane’s demand for emancipation and particularly her erotic passion, portraying her as a more resigned and restrained woman; as one who is less passionate and more demure and chaste. This is so, at least, in the literal façade his Spanish version presents to the censor; since some of what he does, often no doubt spontaneously, gives grounds for suspecting second intentions here as well.
To recommence the analyses, let us take a passage of the novel where a proclamation of equality is made in a context of eroticism, like the one Jane makes during her conversation with Rochester in the garden at Thornfield, when she confesses her love to him although believing him to be engaged to another woman. The original reads:
‘I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; — it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, — as we are!’
‘As we are!’ repeated Mr. Rochester — ‘so,’ he added, enclosing me in his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: ‘so, Jane!’64
Amid this explicit opposition to ‘conventionalities and custom’, apparently diminished by the contraposition between body and spirit, life and death, which in fact ultimately makes it even more suggestive (i.e., ‘men and women may be physically different, but our minds are alike and have the same rights’), an initial moment of emphasis comes at the end of the first paragraph of the excerpt, where it is proclaimed in the present tense and with a final exclamation mark: ‘“equal, — as we are!”’ This is what Rochester apparently assents to (‘“As we are!” repeated Mr Rochester’), even if the conclusions he draws from this primarily concern sexual freedom (centring on the body, not the spirit): ‘“so,” he added, enclosing me in his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips: “so, Jane!”’
Antonini, whose quite compressed version translates less than half the original overall, departs from his usual procedure on this occasion and, instead of condensing, emphasises throughout:
No le estoy hablando como se acostumbra, ni aun habla mi cuerpo; es mi espíritu que se dirige a su espíritu…, como si ya estuvieran más allá de la tumba, y estuviésemos a los pies de Dios, iguales, como somos.
–¡Cómo somos! repitió el señor Rochester –. ¡Así! –y me estrechó entre sus brazos, apartándome contra su pecho y oprimiendo mis labios con los suyos–. ‘¡Así, así!’ (Antonini 1941B).
Besides the suggestive ellipsis that Antonini adds after the idea of the two minds being on equal terms — ‘es mi espíritu que se dirige a su espíritu…,’ — his use of the present tense in the Spanish — ‘iguales, como somos’ — as in the English makes it clear that the spiritual equality proclaimed by Jane exists in the present. His translation of ‘So’ as ‘Así’ (‘Like this’), privileging the physical over the logical aspect of the expression, and likewise the literalness of the passionate kiss — ‘oprimiendo mis labios con los suyos’ — serve to emphasise the physical eroticism of the scene.
But see now what happens in Luaces’ version, which, far less compressed overall, on this occasion not only cuts out much more than usual but includes additional precautions so that this proclamation of gender equality in an eroticised context does not draw the attention of the guardians of the law. He renders it:
Le hablo prescindiendo de convencionalismos, como si estuviésemos más allá de la tumba, ante Dios, y nos hallásemos en un plano de igualdad, ya que en espíritu lo somos.
¡Lo somos! — repitió Rochester. Y tomándome en sus brazos me oprimió contra su pecho y unió sus labios a los míos —. ¡Sí, Jane! (Luaces 1943B).
Luaces’ self-censorship is not unskilful, for he is able to allow different meanings to activate depending on how complicit and suspicious the reader is. On the face of it, his translation does not explicitly stage Jane’s manifesto of equality in the present, saying literally: ‘as though… we were on a footing of equality, since in spirit we are’ (‘como si… nos hallásemos en un plano de igualdad, ya que en espíritu lo somos’); in other words, although men and women cannot be regarded as equal on earth, we are equal as sinners before God on the Day of Judgement. This is all beautifully orthodox. And the same can be said of the way the lovers’ lips barely touch — ‘unió sus labios a los míos’ (‘he joined his lips to mine’) — without the passion entailed by the ‘pressing’ of the English original. Implicitly, though, what Brontë is really saying can also be understood: that while men and women are not equal in their bodies, they are as minds, which gives them equal rights, breaking with social ‘conventionalities’, including sexual oppression. However Luaces’ version is read, though, his self-censorship is as apparent as it is revealing.
These levels of emphasis and self-censorship tend to be even more obvious at times when Antonini and Luaces translate scenes where the protagonists’ amorous passion is manifested, especially when there are erotic overtones present in the original or liable to appear when it is translated into Spanish. We may take what is on the face of it a fairly innocent scene in Chapter 16, where Jane becomes aware that she ‘desires’ to meet Rochester while she is looking after Adèle:
‘Qu’avez-vous, mademoiselle?’ said she. ‘Vos doigts tremblent comme la feuille, et vos joues sont rouges: mais, rouges comme des cerises!’
‘I am hot, Adèle, with stooping!’ She went on sketching; I went on thinking.
I hastened to drive from my mind the hateful notion I had been conceiving respecting Grace Poole; it disgusted me. I compared myself with her, and found we were different. Bessie Leaven had said I was quite a lady; and she spoke truth — I was a lady. And now I looked much better than I did when Bessie saw me; I had more colour and more flesh, more life, more vivacity, because I had brighter hopes and keener enjoyments.
‘Evening approaches,’ said I, as I looked towards the window. ‘I have never heard Mr. Rochester’s voice or step in the house to-day; but surely I shall see him before night: I feared the meeting in the morning; now I desire it, because expectation has been so long baffled that it is grown impatient.’
Brontë operates subtly here. Besides veiling the question about what is really happening to Jane in Adèle’s French — ‘Qu’avez-vous, mademoiselle? …’ — she establishes a parallel between the explicit reality that is briefly outlined and the implicit thought — ‘I am hot, Adèle, with stooping!’ [:] She went on sketching; [/] I went on thinking’ — something that gives rise to a new contrast between Jane’s wishful thinking in the third paragraph of the excerpt — ‘Bessie Leaven had said I was quite a lady; and she spoke truth — I was a lady’ — and what is implied in the final paragraph: ‘now I desire it, because expectation has been so long baffled that it is grown impatient’.
Antonini, who does cut this time, following his normal practice in his compressed version, does so only to construct a suggestive montage that emphasises what is only implicit in the original passage, enhancing the eroticism of the scene; he reduces the whole to:
— ¿Qué tiene, señorita? Sus dedos tiemblan como las hojas y sus mejillas están rojas como cerezas…
— Tengo calor, Adela.
Yo esperaba, con desconocida impaciencia, la hora de ver al señor Rochester. Pensaba interrogarlo sobre Grace Poole, y aun hacerle rabiar un poco, para después contentarlo… (Antonini 1941B)
Retranslated into English it gives:
‘What is the matter, Miss? Your fingers are trembling like leaves and your cheeks are as red as cherries…’
‘I am hot, Adèle.’
I was waiting, with unwonted impatience, until I could see Mr. Rochester. I planned to question him about Grace Poole, and even anger him a little, and then make him content…
Antonini’s swingeing cuts are placed at the service of an emphatic refraction. First of all, Adèle’s words are in Spanish (not veiled by the French), and he adds a final ellipsis (…) which indicates to the reader that there is ‘something else’, something unsaid about Jane’s appearance. Thus, Antonini replaces the original’s parallelism between the explicit physical description and the implied thoughts — ‘“I am hot, Adèle, with stooping!” She went on sketching; I went on thinking’ — with a unilateral emphasis in ‘I am hot, Adela’, an isolated expression that, cutting out the whole of the reflection about being ‘quite a lady’ which follows in the next paragraph of the original, he juxtaposes directly with the desire to ‘see Mr. Rochester’, her aim being, we are suggestively told, to ‘anger him a little, and then make him content…’, with the new ellipsis added by Antonini at the end suggesting to the complicit reader something considerably more physical than spiritual, and in any event something unsaid implicit in this desire to ‘make him content…’.
As might be expected by now, Luaces operates quite differently, taking the opposite direction at each of the crossroads that occur in the original. Thus, while he cuts much less than Antonini, he presents, at least for the literal reader, a Jane who is far more demure, with the implied eroticism concealed. His rendering is:
— ¿Qué tiene usted, señorita? — dijo —. Sus dedos tiemblan y sus mejillas están encarnadas como las cerezas…
— Es que al inclinarme estoy en una posición incómoda, Adèle.
Ella continuó dibujando y yo me sumí otra vez en mis pensamientos.
Me apresuré a eliminar de mi mente la desagradable idea que había formado a propósito de Grace Poole. Comparándome con ella, concluí que éramos muy diferentes. Bessie Leaven decía que yo era una señora, y tenía razón: lo era. Y ahora yo estaba mucho mejor que cuando me viera Bessie: más gruesa, con mejor color, más viva, más animada, porque tenía más esperanzas y más satisfacciones.
«Ya está oscureciendo –medité, acercándome a la ventana —, y en todo el día no he visto ni oído a Mr. Rochester. Seguramente le veré antes de la noche. Por la mañana lo temía, pero ahora estoy impaciente por reunirme con él.» (Luaces 1943B)
Luaces’ translation conceals all the overtones that reveal erotic passion in the original or could be understood as having a double meaning in the Spanish context. To start with the most obvious, his rendering of ‘I am hot, Adèle, with stooping!’, cuts out the reference to the temperature and unilaterally emphasizes Jane’s position, to give ‘Es que al inclinarme estoy en una posición incómoda’ (‘I am uncomfortable from stooping’), a phrase that turns away from the implications created by Brontë (it is also a phrase that describes Luaces’ position as a translator under the Francoist regime quite well!) Similarly, Jane is made into a mature ‘señora’ not a young ‘señorita’, and her impatient desire to see Rochester is unilaterally turned into ‘impatience’, removing any erotic implication. The result is a passage in which there is nothing to alarm the guardians of orthodoxy in the Spanish context, with both the expression of female desire and the very intensity of Jane’s emotions being attenuated.
Similar decisions about emphasis and self-censorship are observed when Antonini and Luaces deal with other erotic situations, such as the possibility of becoming the lover of a married man. This happens, for example, when Jane, after discovering Rochester’s deception, struggles with her conflicting feelings. Rochester notices and says to her:
‘You intend to make yourself a complete stranger to me: to live under this roof only as Adèle’s governess; if ever I say a friendly word to you, if ever a friendly feeling inclines you again to me, you will say, — ‘That man had nearly made me his mistress: I must be ice and rock to him;’ and ice and rock you will accordingly become.’65
Confronted with this passage, Antonini decides to preserve more than usual; consistently with his version, which makes Jane Eyre a romantic bestseller and female emancipation novel (paradoxical as these two aspects might seem now), he gives:
— Piensa en el medio de volver a ser para mí una extraña: vivir aquí como la institutriz de Adela solamente; y si le digo alguna vez una palabra amistosa, se dirá: ‘Este hombre piensa hacerme su amante; ¿necesito ser roca y hielo para él?’; hielo y roca llegaría usted a ser (Antonini 1941B).
It will be noted that Antonini not only makes the possibility of her becoming Rochester’s mistress a firm decision — ‘piensa hacerme su amante’ (‘intends to make me his lover’) — but also adds a question mark of his own to Jane’s thought — ‘¿necesito ser roca y hielo para él?’ (‘must I be rock and ice to him?’) — thus emphatically spelling out the doubts she actually has about whether or not to give herself to him, whether or not to become his lover. Luaces, on the other hand, who once again cuts more than usual here, and removes all double meanings, gives:
‘Te propones convertirte para mí en una extraña, vivir bajo mi mismo techo exclusivamente como institutriz de Adèle, rechazando mis palabras y mis aproximaciones como si fueras de piedra y de hielo’ (Luaces 1943B).
The Spanish translator not only cuts out the word ‘mistress’ but, by removing the perspectivism of the protagonist’s inner thoughts, makes the state of ‘rock and ice’ a simile of Rochester’s for the distance Jane may take from him, not a staging of the inner doubt in Jane’s own passionate consciousness, as she struggles in the double bind between her amorous passion and social convention.
In fact, even when the erotic passion is attributed to Rochester himself, with the description of his physical movements often providing the necessary suggestion, there is a radical difference in the ways Antonini and Luaces translate for their respective Latin American and Spanish contexts. Take one last scene, from Chapter 23: Rochester has now proposed to Jane and for the first time we are given a description of physical contact between the lovers, in which she by no means rejects his advances. The original reads:
‘Come to me — come to me entirely now,’ said he; and added, in his deepest tone, speaking in my ear as his cheek was laid on mine, ‘Make my happiness — I will make yours.’
‘God pardon me!’ he subjoined ere long; ‘and man meddle not with me: I have her, and will hold her.’
‘There is no one to meddle, sir. I have no kindred to interfere.’
‘No — that is the best of it,’ he said.
Several of the highlighted expressions of Rochester’s are racy for the period, revealing literally the intensity of his amorous passion and implicitly the desire for sexual intercourse. His ‘God pardon me!’ thus refracts in other directions apart from the secret he still keeps. Likewise with what follows, the suggestion that for this passion to be realised it is desirable to be free of the pressures brought by traditional family ties, something that is expressed with seeming innocence by Jane, for whom this absence is consubstantial with her development as an independent woman against adversity — ‘There is no one to meddle, sir. I have no kindred to interfere’ — but which Rochester reformulates into a kind of aside with various underlying implications: ‘No — that is the best of it.’
Antonini not only preserves the whole passage but, as we would now expect, employs his usual resources to emphasise the passion and some of the double meanings:
— Ven a mis brazos, ven ahora… dijo, y estrechándome la cabeza mururó a mi oído: — Haz mi felicidad que yo haré la tuya. ¡Dios me perdone! — añadió — ; y que los hombres no se me traviesen. Te poseo y te poseeré.
— No hay nadie que se resista — dije — ; yo no tengo parientes que puedan pretenderlo.
— Sí, y eso es lo mejor — dijo. (Antonini 1941B).
Although Antonini leaves out ‘entirely’ at the beginning of the passage as a whole — ‘Come to me — come to me entirely now’ — he adds one of his usual ellipses — ‘Ven a mis brazos, ven ahora…’ (‘Come to my arms, come now…’) — highlighting what is left unsaid, what the surrender implies. This is reinforced by his emphatic translation of Rochester’s ‘I have her, and will hold her’ as ‘Te poseo y te poseeré’ (‘I possess you and will possess you’), just as Jane’s ‘There is no one to meddle, sir’ becomes ‘No hay nadie que se resista’ (‘There is no-one to resist’), giving it a bolder tone than the original.
Luaces, whose version, it should be recalled, is at least fifty percent longer than Antonini’s, cuts out most of the scene here, removing the idea of total surrender and the other sexual overtones. He leaves just:
— Ven, ven conmigo — y rozando mis mejillas con las suyas y hablándome al oído, murmuró — : Hazme feliz y yo te haré feliz a ti. (Luaces 1943B).
Besides playing down the initial request for total surrender with his rendering ‘Ven, ven conmigo’ (‘Come, come with me’), Luaces symptomatically excises both the idea of divine forgiveness associated with the extramarital relation with Jane and the idea that the absence of traditional family ties creates the opportunity for amorous union, aspects that would undoubtedly have been subject to censorship by the guardians of the family values and female chastity promoted in Franco’s National-Catholic programme. (One can see in fact how Luaces cuts throughout the novel the references to or justification of Jane’s development away from family and social ties; expressions such as ‘I am absolutely destitute’ and ‘Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment’, or, more emphatically, ‘Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am’,66 are all symptomatically cut by Luaces — who does translate the passages where these sentences appear, though — an omission that can also be explained in terms of their allusive refraction as a more general description of the situation of opposers to Franco’s regime).
In the light of this, the obvious differences between Antonini’s and Luaces’ pioneering versions when it comes to refracting the potential of Jane Eyre for female emancipation, both in the book’s proclamations of women’s rights and in the scenes where Jane’s amorous passion and the sexual freedom it can potentially give rise to are manifested, show the extent to which they were aware of the role the novel could play in this respect for a contemporary readership, on both sides of the Atlantic. On the one hand, certainly, in no area so much as that of female emancipation do we find such radical, systematic differences between the versions produced by Antonini (1941) and Luaces (1943), for while the South American version betrays obvious efforts to emphasise the novel’s emancipatory and erotic potential, consistently with the way it was marketed as a romantic bestseller (Jane Eyre) and a Bildungsroman depicting a woman struggling against social convention (Rebel Soul), it is in this very area that the Peninsular Spanish version evinces the greatest self-censorship, with Luaces moving carefully so as not to attract the attention of the guardians of Francoist orthodoxy. On the other hand, however, whether the erotic passion and potential for female emancipation in Jane Eyre were played up or concealed in the Spanish translations, its liberating effect would be strongly felt by readers who were able to understand, on both sides of the Atlantic. For them, it would be enough to consider the work’s authorship and engage with its plot as a novel of a woman’s development in the face of social adversity to extract its transformative potential.
For, ultimately, it is not only the protagonist’s more explicitly rebellious attitudes towards female submission, which the translators could transform at will as has been seen, but also the female individualism characteristic of the Protestant tradition, which defines its authorship, pathos, and plot in ways that could not be changed by the translators, that would refract Jane Eyre as a manifesto of female liberation in the new Hispano-American context. Before even opening the translated volume, it was enough to be presented with a work by one of the ‘Brontë sisters’, who by the mid-twentieth century had acquired a symbolic aura directly associated with their status as ‘women writers’, to feel an emancipatory potential (redoubled among informed readers by the awareness that, from Jane Austen to the Brontë sisters and George Eliot, women writers had made the decisive contribution to the English novel in the Victorian era). Then, focusing on Jane Eyre in particular, the emancipatory refraction intensifies when one considers its plot as a kind of Bildungsroman of female liberation, its presentation of woman’s individual triumph over social adversity, which would have produced its own differentiated harmonics for those living in Francoist Spain, with its regressive female policies, and those living through the earliest conquests of civil rights in Latin America.
Indeed, the very Protestant idea of an individual directly responsible for her acts, embodied in this case in an emphasis on a woman’s will as a path to gradual spiritual growth — ‘seized against your will’, Rochester recognises, ‘you will elude the grasp like an essence’67 — will have been regarded in the mainly Catholic contexts of South America and Spain as a model for female emancipation. In other words, the way a female orphan becomes a mature and responsible woman through a combination of rebellion and learning experiences comes through in the Spanish translations as a model of individual behaviour and responsibility that not only subverts traditional male domination and traditional ideas about the family space as the exclusive realm for female growth and fulfilment, but also the Catholic emphasis on hierarchy, whereby priests impose control, penance, and absolution. If one of Brontë’s bêtes noires was the priestly control of women’s education — ‘given up independence of thought and action into the hands of some despotic confessor’, ‘conjured by Romish wizard-craft’ (The Professor, Chapter 12) — it was precisely this liberation of women from the Catholic hierarchy, Catholic tutelage, and Catholic education that was explicitly and repeatedly identified in twentieth-century Hispano-America as a prerequisite for obtaining and sanctioning full civic rights for women.68
It is this significant change of context, then, in which the Protestant individualism staged by the novel is refracted as a relative emancipation from religious male authority and education as such, associated with the influence of Castilian-style Catholicism, that explains how a novel written a hundred years earlier (and in which a clear sexual hierarchy and sexist prejudices doubtless persist) could become a manifesto for women’s liberation, the Bildungsroman of the ‘rebel soul’ fighting against the prejudices of tradition and the oppressiveness of society. If the traditional religious menace was most clearly recognisable in the formalism of St John — who, in the face of Jane’s resistance, exclaims ‘Your words are such as ought not to be used: violent, unfeminine, and untrue. They betray an unfortunate state of mind: they merit severe reproof: they would seem inexcusable’ — Jane’s imaginary of individual liberation when faced with the pressures of her context could only be read as an explicit manifesto for women’s emancipation: ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will’.69 It is symptomatic that Luaces’ compressed version leaves only the first metaphor here — ‘No soy un ave’ (‘I am not a bird’) — which is somewhat obscure by itself, whereas the other translation done in Spain in the period, the unabridged one by the orthodox Pereda, reads ‘nest’ instead of ‘net’ — ‘No soy ningún pájaro y no hay nido que me retenga’ (Pereda 1947A: ‘I am no bird and no nest holds me back’) — replacing the image of oppression with a metaphor of family belonging.
For there is perhaps no aspect of the novel that produces a stronger refraction in Spanish than these liberation metaphors presented by the protagonist throughout, which rise to something of a climax in the imaginary of rebellion against slavery, the passages comparing the situation of women to that of slaves in need of freedom. Not least because, as might be expected, this comparison was omnipresent from the outset of the struggle for equal rights in Hispano-America; as Gabriela Mistral would put it in the early twentieth century: ‘As minds are illuminated, her mission and value are beginning to be understood and she is becoming a companion, an equal, instead of the slave of yesterday. Compared with her old humiliation, she has already won significant ground, but there is still much to explore before she can declare victory.’70 Thus, the refraction of new meaning can be envisioned even in passages such as the following from Chapter 24, where Jane compares the situation of a woman regaled with all kinds of unwanted luxuries to that of prisoners in an oriental harem who should be liberated:
The Eastern allusion bit me again. ‘I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio,’ I said; ‘so don’t consider me an equivalent for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazaars of Stamboul without delay, and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here.’
‘And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of flesh and such an assortment of black eyes?’
‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved — your harem inmates amongst the rest. I’ll get admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny; and you, three-tailed bashaw as you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself fettered amongst our hands: nor will I, for one, consent to cut your bonds till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that despot ever yet conferred.’
‘I would consent to be at your mercy, Jane.’
‘I would have no mercy, Mr. Rochester, if you supplicated for it with an eye like that. While you looked so, I should be certain that whatever charter you might grant under coercion, your first act, when released, would be to violate its conditions.’
Jane’s refusal to accept the presents Rochester wants to give her, which for many of Brontë’s English contemporaries would have constituted a scene not devoid of flirtation, could be (and increasingly was) construed in the new twentieth-century Spanish-speaking contexts as a scene of resistance to the traditional image of the woman dependent on the will, praise, and respect of a man, valued for her beauty as an adornment to him. In fact, several of the motifs making up this quasi-allegory of the slave in need of liberation take on clear and immediate cultural and political overtones, including the mention of a ‘liberal charter’, which Luaces capitalises as ‘Constitución’ in a suggestive rendering of the phrase — ‘una Constitución tan liberal como jamás déspota alguno haya concedido’ (Luaces 1943B: ‘a Constitution more liberal than any despot has yet granted’) — writing once more between the lines for his local readership, while there are further echoes with the struggle for equal civil rights in the South American republics, liberated barely a century earlier from European imperialism.
Empire Refractions: From Savage Slave to Gothic Ghost
The imaginary of slavery staged in Jane Eyre had a strong refraction not only due to its significance for female emancipation, but also in terms of the criticism it activated of European colonialism and the racial prejudices that fed it, towards which there was a particularly acute sensibility in Latin America, leading the translators into Spanish to make variously drastic and deliberate transformations. Certainly, as one focuses on the original Victorian British context, when there were colonies from the Americas to India, all further applications of this slave imaginary to Chartism and industrial capitalism would have been lost on the twentieth-century Spanish-speaking reader, including the echoes and condemnation of ‘white slavery’, which would have given the original English novel, appearing only a year before the 1848 Revolution, certain subversive overtones, however far its author was from seeming to be a revolutionary in this respect. But Jane’s episodic denunciation of slavery throughout the novel takes on a new meaning when read either from the perspective of the former colonial territories of Latin America, now emancipated republics, or from the perspective of the old colonial power, Spain, where Franco’s National-Catholic programme had renewed its universalist imaginary of imperial evangelisation. (As Luaces parodically summed it up in the article ‘Feminism and Shamelessness’ quoted earlier, when confronted in his youth with a similar renewal of imperial evangelism during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera: ‘Spain is a nation upon which God has conferred the highest governing and civilising mission that a people ever received. But if we Spaniards are to be worthy once again to wear the crown of dominion on our brows, it is indispensably necessary for us to extirpate from the fertile garden of our land the weeds of foreign influences, feminisms, and all other pernicious isms’).71
Already a scene such as the childhood episode in which John Reed’s cruelty and violence are likened to those of slave drivers and Roman emperors — ‘“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer — you are like a slave-driver — you are like the Roman emperors!”’72 — refracts in a symptomatic manner, superimposing as it does slavery on to the quintessential model of imperialism, while the historical parallels with the contemporary situation are explicitly brought forward by the introspective commentary that Brontë adds immediately afterwards, with Jane as her mouthpiece: ‘I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud’. Suggestive parallels of precisely this kind were activated in the early translations published in Spain through the rendering of ‘slave-drivers’ as ‘negreros’ — ‘¡Malvado! — le dije —. Eres peor que un asesino, que un negrero, que un emperador romano’ (Luaces 1943B); ‘¡Empecatado, cruel! — dije —. ¡Eres como los asesinos, como los negreros, como los emperadores romanos!’ (Pereda 1947A) — which not only anchors the image unequivocally in the context of modern authoritarian rule and imperialism, modelled on Rome, but also in the trade in humans from Africa, and which finally resonates critically with the situation of the working class, since the word ‘negrero’ is a well-worn Spanish metaphor commonly used to denote somebody who is exploitative in his treatment of those working under him.73
This same type of refraction, where imperial exploitation overlaps with the exploitation of workers, is activated when Brontë next returns to the analogy between childhood violence and slavery at the start of the second chapter, where we find Jane confined to the red room:
I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
‘Hold her arms, Miss Abbot: she’s like a mad cat.’
‘For shame! for shame!’ cried the lady’s-maid. ‘What shocking conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress’s son! Your young master.’
‘Master! How is he my master? Am I a servant?’74
Of the early versions in Spanish, Antonini’s in Argentina, which symptomatically cuts nothing here, is the most emphatic, strongly refracting this overlap between the imperial imaginary and that of social subjection:
Tenía el convencimiento de que un momento de rebeldía me haría merecedora de severos castigos y, como una verdadera esclava rebelde, resolví, en mi desesperación, arrostrar hasta el fin las consecuencias.
— ¡Agárrela por los brazos, señorita Abbot; mire, parece un gato montés!
— ¡Qué vergüenza!, ¡qué vergüenza! — exclamaba la doncella —. ¡Qué conducta tan escandalosa la suya, señorita Eyre! Golpear a un joven caballero, hijo de su benefactora! ¡Su joven amo!
— ¡Amo! ¿Quién es mi amo? ¿Soy acaso una sirvienta? (Antonini 1941B).
Besides the retention of the reference to the rebellious slave, Antonini’s decision to translate ‘master’ by ‘amo’ (which brings in the senses of ‘owner’ and ‘boss’) reactivates the parallelism between the childhood scene and social exploitation. This is not done in the two translations produced in Spain at about this time, however, which render ‘master’ as ‘señorito’ (‘young master’ in the sense of ‘young gentleman’), limiting the reference to the childhood scene in a domestic context. Thus, Luaces gives:
Comprendía, además, las consecuencias que iba a aparejar mi rebeldía y, como un esclavo insurrecto, estaba firmemente decidida, en mi desesperación, a llegar a todos los extremos.
— Cuidado con los brazos, Miss Abbot: la pequeña araña como una gata.
— ¡Qué vergüenza! — decía la criada —. ¡Qué vergüenza, señorita Eyre! ¡Pegar al hijo de su bienhechora, a su señorito!
— ¿Mi señorito? ¿Acaso soy una criada? (Luaces 1943B).
While Luaces preserves the imaginary of a slave in rebellion at the beginning, his rendering of ‘amo’ by ‘señorito’ at the end dissipates somewhat the strength of the parallel between the domestic childhood realm and the social and employment realm. As for the other version published in Spain during the period, Pereda cuts out some expressions: this is rather surprising, on the face of it, given that hers is an unabridged translation, though less so when her relative orthodoxy is considered. She gives:
Comprendía que aquellos instantes de rebeldía me traerían consecuencias funestas, y en mi desesperación, estaba decida a llegar al final.
— ¡Sujétale los brazos, Abbot! ¡Parece un gato rabioso!
— ¡Señorita, qué vergüenza, qué vergüenza haberse atrevido a pegar al hijo de su bienhechora, que es todo un caballero, a su señorito!
— ¿Por qué va a ser mi señorito? ¿Es que soy una criada? (Pereda 1947).
Repressing any imperial and social refraction that might take us away from the childhood scene as such, Pereda not only translates ‘master’ as ‘señorito’, but excises the imaginary of the rebel slave. In Spain, only the post-Franco translations by Gaite and Hill convey the passage with a completeness equivalent to that provided by Antonini in Argentina in 1941, in circumstances where the refraction would connect more to the situation of ‘maidservants’ than to liberation in a colonial context.75
More broadly, although Jane Eyre betrays many of the middle-class social and racial prejudices which lay at the heart of both the exploitation of the working class and the slavery that upheld nineteenth-century British imperialism (and European colonialism more generally), these refract in a quite different manner and direction through the transformations wrought in the Spanish versions over time, a refraction that becomes once again particularly significant when the decisions taken in Latin America and Spain, respectively, are compared.
Thus, the early translations published in Spain, unlike Antonini’s in Argentina, make no difficulty about reproducing clichés concerning the relations between European nations, as when Jane chauvinistically contrasts the supposed constancy of the English to the supposed fickleness of the French. Prejudices such as ‘a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects’,76 summarising at the end of the novel the way in which Adèle has apparently been transformed from a frivolous and capricious young girl into a docile, good-tempered and well-principled woman, are fully reproduced in the mid-twentieth-century versions published in Spain by both Luaces — ‘una sana educación inglesa corrigió en gran parte sus defectos franceses’ (Luaces 1943B) — and Pereda — ‘una sólida educación inglesa, que corrigió, en todo lo posible, los defectos propios de la educación francesa’ (Pereda 1947) — a passage that would certainly have chimed with the animosity towards France of Francoism (onomastic paradoxes aside): ‘Are we to measure Spain, severe, virile, noble, conquering Spain, by the same yardstick as the frivolous French?’, as we read in Luaces’ own parody. In Argentina, conversely, where the journey through the French language and French culture (and, more broadly, through the languages and cultures of a number of other European nations) had since the Romantic period been part of an explicit programme of liberation from Spanish literary and cultural colonialism, Antonini completely omitted this contemptuous prejudice against the French, vaguely attributing Adèle’s faults to her personal ‘inheritance’ (i.e., it is hinted, to the habits of her dancer mother): ‘la perfecta educación inglesa que había recibido le corrigió los defectos heredados’ (Antonini 1941B: ‘the perfect English education she had received corrected her inherited defects’). This kind of transformation is also found in the translations published in Spain much later, in the post-Franco period, with both Gaite and Hill watering down the anti-French prejudice by attributing the defects once again to Adèle’s personal constitution: ‘La sólida educación inglesa corrigió en gran medida sus defectos de origen [her defects of origin]’ (Gaite 1999A); ‘los sólidos principios de la educación inglesa fueron corrigiendo los defectos de su naturaleza [the defects of her nature]’ (Hill 2009A).
Where racial prejudices towards non-European peoples are concerned, meanwhile, all the early Spanish-language translations curtail or omit them, even when the word ‘race’ was used to mean (as the Spanish word ‘raza’ also commonly was during the first half of the twentieth century) ‘feature’, ‘family’, ‘nation’, or ‘humanity’. Thus, an expression of Rochester’s such as ‘Her family wished to secure me because I was of a good race’, used to explain why the Mason family wished him to marry Bertha, is stripped of all its racial overtones when translated into Spanish.77 The most extreme suppression, as we have learned to expect, comes from Antonini in Argentina, who does translate this whole passage containing Rochester’s explanation to Jane, but cuts out precisely this sentence about Bertha’s Jamaican family being pleased by his ‘English race’. The early Spanish translators, for their part, although they did not cut out the sentence, restricted the implications of ‘race’ to social genealogy: ‘Su familia deseaba asegurarme, porque yo pertenecía a una casta ilustre [illustrious caste, heritage]’ (Luaces 1943B); ‘Su familia quería engatusarme, ya que pertenecía a una ilustre casa [illustrious household, heritage]’ (Pereda 1947A). Even when used as a synonym for humanity, in a way that ‘race’ often was by extension in both English and Spanish until the 1940s, the word tended to be avoided in the translations published in Spain; thus, a phrase such as ‘he labours for his race’,78 summarising St John’s missionary task at the very end of the novel, becomes in the translations ‘labora por sus semejantes [his kind]’ (Luaces, 1943B), ‘trabajar a favor de sus prójimos [his fellow men]’ (Pereda, 1947A), unequivocally emphasising the Christian universalist imaginary (the same holds for Gaite’s ‘se desvive por sus semejantes’ (1999) and for Hill’s ‘mejorar la raza humana’ (2009)). Antonini, however, in what is a less favourable presentation of the Christian missionary destiny associated with British imperialism, translates literally this time — ‘él trabaja para su raza’ (Antonini 1941B [‘he works for his race’]) — which refracts differently, also suggesting that St John works in the interests of his own colonizing nation.
These imperial refractions and associated transformations in the Spanish translations of Jane Eyre reach something of a climax when it comes to the colonial conception of the ‘savage’, that European anthropological invention of the nineteenth century used to describe a sort of proto-man, characterised by both his cultural backwardness and his position in a teleology leading towards the civilised European man, which finds its paradigmatic embodiment in the figure of Bertha. For when ‘the madwoman in the attic’ is presented as a dangerous being, a monstrous savage endowed with an enormous sexual passion, her aura of mystery and characterisation as an absolute alterity, likened at times to either the animal imaginary or the ghostlike, vampiric gothic imaginary, are defined first and foremost by her mestizo genealogy (she is the daughter of an English merchant, Jonas Mason, and a Jamaican Creole, Antoinetta). In other words, she is defined by the absence of a pure identity, culturally and historically speaking, by a sort of degeneracy — ‘she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations!’ — that contrasts with Jane’s stable identity and healthy constitution as an unquestionably white European woman (at least literally speaking, leaving aside for the moment psychoanalytical interpretations of Bertha as an alter ego of the protagonist).79 Thus, it is not fortuitous, and it becomes significant in the translations, that Rochester should have married Bertha in ‘Spanish Town, Jamaica’, just as it is significant that, bringing together a number of these imaginaries, Bertha’s ‘savage’ cry should be determined by comparison with that of the largest bird which flies over the highest South American peaks: ‘Good God! What a cry!… not the widest-winged condor on the Andes could, twice in succession, send out such a yell from the cloud shrouding his eyrie’.80
Faced with this particular conception of the ‘savage’, which had been applied across the board to the indigenous peoples of America — and which, more broadly, Europeans had used in their discourse to characterise the exotic cultures they came into contact with on their colonial campaigns, incorporating them into a supposedly inevitable evolution running from primitive savagery through gothic-medieval barbarism to modern civilisation — it is once again symptomatic that, while the orthodox editions published in Spain tended to stage at least some of these imperial and racial prejudices, likening Bertha to an animal, the more dissident ones, as well as those translated in Latin America, tend to emphasise a more gothic imaginary, the well-known ghost motifs of British culture that are also present in Brontë’s novel, likening Bertha to a night spectre.
Take one of the standout moments of the novel in this respect, the scene where Bertha’s nocturnal visit is described by Jane to Rochester. Amid the long portrayal in the original, one reads:
‘Fearful and ghastly to me — oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face — it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!’
‘Ghosts are usually pale, Jane.’
‘This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?’
‘You may.’
‘Of the foul German spectre — the Vampyre.’81
Confronted with this amalgam of racial prejudice and gothic imaginary, which the reader of the original would divide automatically between the actual facts — Bertha’s ‘savage’ face (red eyes, blackened lineaments, broad dark lips), suggesting a mulatto constitution — and Jane’s fanciful comparison of her to a spectre, the different Spanish versions react not only by omitting details, but also by modifying the words of the description that present Bertha in the light of a primitive savage, promoting the animal and the gothic rather than the colonial imaginary. Even Pereda, while generally remaining literal and orthodox, so that most of the implications of the original come out, does not allow herself to reproduce the reference to the ‘savage’ as such, but gives:
— ¡Espantosa y como un fantasma, señor! No puede concebirse nada parecido: la cara, sin color humano; la expresión, de fiera [her expression that of a wild beast]. ¡Qué daría por olvidar la mirada de aquellos ojos sanguinolentos y aquellas facciones ennegrecidas y abultadas!
— Los fantasmas suelen ser muy pálidos, Jane.
— Pues este no lo era; tenía un color amoratado, los labios cárdenos y como hinchados, el ceño de furia y una espesas y negras cejas. ¿Sabe lo que me recordaba señor?
— ¿A qué?
— Al inmundo espectro de las leyendas alemanas, al vampiro. (Peredá 1947A)82
Pereda’s unabridged translation reproduces the whole portrait of Bertha’s features (black face, red eyes, broad purple lips, etc.), adding explicitly that its colour was ‘not human’ (‘la cara, sin color humano’). But instead of summarising the whole as a ‘savage face’ (which would be cara salvaje or cara de salvaje in Spanish), she speaks about the expression of a wild beast (expresión de fiera), pushing the translation of the word savage towards its original meaning of an undomesticated animal or plant before it became a conventional anthropological metaphor to designate ‘uncultivated’ human beings. Thus, instead of emphasising the image of the lustful, promiscuous and supposedly inferior inhabitant of the colonized regions — ‘her vices sprang up fast and rank […] What a pigmy intellect she had, and what giant propensities!’,83 in Rochester’s words this time — Pereda emphasises the bestial side, matching the frequent animalisation of Bertha in other passages of the novel — ‘whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell’,84 as Brontë puts it when Jane confronts Bertha in the knowledge of who she is. Luaces, meanwhile, is more emphatic in his transformations, giving:
— Me pareció horrible. Nunca he visto cara como aquella: una cara descolorida, espantosa. Quisiera poder olvidar aquel desorbitado movimiento de sus ojos inyectados en sangre, y sus facciones hinchadas como si fuesen a estallar.
— Los fantasmas son pálidos, por regla general.
— Pues éste no lo era. Tenía los labios protuberantes y amoratados, arrugado el entrecejo, los párpados muy abiertos sobre sus ojos enrojecidos. ¿Sabe lo que me recordaba?
— ¿El qué?
— La aparición de las leyendas germanas: el vampiro… (Luaces 1943B)85
Luaces, who tried to escape to South America during the Spanish Civil War, cut out most of the key details that would make the reader construe the figure as a native of Africa or some other southern or colonized region, starting with the words ‘savage’ and ‘black’. For, as regards the way the scene had been received and translated in South America itself a couple of years earlier, Antonini’s version not only omits the ‘savage’ reference but cuts even more emphatically to tilt the scales towards the gothic imaginary and away from the colonial, giving:
— Me pareció espantoso: nunca he visto una cara como aquélla. ¡No puedo olvidar esos sanguinolentos ojos y esas inflamadas facciones!
— Los espíritus ordinariamente son pálidos.
— El color de éste era púrpura, los labios renegridos y las cejas espesas y levantadas. Me pareció un espectro, un vampiro. (Antonini 1941B)86
As one goes back to Antonini’s pioneering version in Buenos Aires, then, Bertha’s apparition is no longer simply likened by Jane to a vampire — ‘Shall I tell you of what it reminded me? […] Of the foul German spectre — the Vampyre’ — but actually seems to her to be one — ‘It seemed to me a spectre, a vampire’ — more unilaterally emphasising the English imaginary of ghosts and spectres that is deployed at other points in the novel to present the threat of Bertha at Thornfield: ‘This accursed place, […] this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky — this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine. […] I was wrong ever to bring you to Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted’.87 In the refraction of Antonini’s South American version, then, the threat enclosed in the attic is no longer that of an anthropological creation, the savage emerging from the southern seas, but rather that of a mythological creation, the vampire or spectre inhabiting the misty northern climes.88
Some Final Remarks on Literary Simplification and Cultural Refraction
The refraction of Jane Eyre in the Spanish language was as limited at a literary micro level, in stylistic terms, as it was strong at a contextual level, in cultural terms. On the one hand, if editorial policies influencing the translation of novels into Spanish often promote various forms of literary simplification and domestication — especially when a book is recognised as having potential not only as a literary classic for an instructed audience, but also as a bestseller and youth story, as has been the case with Jane Eyre — the resulting only partial re-creation of the characteristic forms of meaning of the English original, eschewing any stronger poetic insemination of language and corresponding ways of representing reality, does not preclude an important prismatisation in Spanish at such an intratextual level. On the other hand, though, one observes a quite strong refraction resulting from the contextual differences between the English culture of the mid-nineteenth century and the respective Spanish and Latin American cultures of the twentieth, unfolding the potential signification of gender and colonial motifs in Brontë’s novel in an effective and often differentiated afterlife in both sides of the Atlantic.
On the face of it, the interrogation of linguistic behaviours as formal conditions of possibility of representation in the various kinds of Spanish-language renderings (the relatively unabridged translations, the edited compressed versions, and the highly condensed paraphrases), paying attention to the wide spectrum of forms that the Spanish language enacts or not in response to the lexical, syntactic, imagistic and musical behaviours of the English novel, reveals at least three interrelated simplifying tendencies that are relatively common in mainstream translation, namely (i) a realistic and intentional semantics, (ii) a literary hypertextualism, and (iii), to a lesser extent, a relative ideological domestication.
From a semantic point of view, the Spanish translations operate with an inherited horizon of realism and intentionality. In objective terms, the meaning is more often than not understood as an ideality that transcends the linguistic and formal behaviour of the text. In subjective terms, it is assumed that the apprehension and translation of this meaning does not depend on a poetic receptiveness towards the unpredictable effects of grafting the foreign literary forms onto the Spanish language, but rather on an intentional act that involves grasping this ideality and then presenting it once again with all the resources of the new language. This procedure works relatively well at the basic level of the taxonomy of experience produced by the lexical networks of Spanish and English (given the partial overlap between the genealogies of these languages), and likewise in the transmission of metaphorical imaginaries, parallelisms, and other forms of verbal imagery that translate more or less effortlessly when it is ideas that are privileged; but it becomes more problematic when it comes to syntactic and musical forms, for instance, with the array of stylistic peculiarities that Charlotte Brontë deploys in the context of the English language (parataxis, time perspectivism, sound iconisms, etc.) being disregarded by translators, with some exceptions in Luaces and Gaite.
This is why the general approach can be summarized as ‘hypertextual’. Far from privileging the materiality and behaviour of Brontë’s idiosyncratic forms of representation, most translators deploy either a general imitatio, prevalent in the longer unabridged translations, or an adaptive inventio, prevalent in the more compressed versions. Whereas the former already involve all kinds of rationalisations, clarifications and simplifications — very obviously so in the case of Pereda (1947) and still in evidence with Hill (2009) — that generate a more straightforward, logical texture and a more distant representation of the facts, the latter clearly drop the signifying system of the original. In fact, the only common form of hypertextualism not observed in a systematic way in the Spanish-language versions examined here is ‘embellishment’, an absence which tells us something about the power relations, in literary and cultural terms, between the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking countries in the second half of the twentieth century, when British and Anglo-American traditions had acquired enormous influence and prestige.
For the same reason, within the typically interrelated domesticating tendencies, one can observe a certain degree of cultural-ideological adaptation, a process that may include anything from acts of omission to stronger transformation of aspects that are dissonant or difficult to understand for the new readership. As might be expected, the largest cuts are to be found in the highly condensed paraphrases aimed at a young readership, whose translators or editors seek to turn the novel into an edifying story, transforming any content that might be potentially dissonant and any phrases that could break the spell of fiction, even Hispanicising some of the names to make them more familiar and immediate to the reader. But a slightly different process of adaptation is also evident in the unabridged translations and compressed versions, with the difference in ideological-cultural context between the first inscription of the English original and the later inscriptions of the Spanish-language versions leading translators to remove aspects that could offend Spanish or Latin American sensibilities, such as the characterisation of Bertha as a savage from colonised regions, while exploiting the novel’s potential for the new place and time, including its important impact as a manifesto for female emancipation.
In this sense, having recognised the semantic realism and intentionality, the literary hyper-textualism and the relative cultural adaptation in the Spanish renderings of Jane Eyre, one can end by insisting that the change of the ideological-cultural context activated a decisive refracting of the work, a Spanish-language after-life to the English novel that detonated new signification, as has been seen especially concerning the motifs of empire and gender in their differentiated reception in Latin America and Spain. It is above all the effect produced by these gender and imperial motifs that differentiates the refraction of meaning between the first large-scale reception of Jane Eyre in Spain and in Latin America in the aftermath of the Second World War. That is, the differences are to be found not only in the divergent choices made in the Spanish-language texts, but also in the significations these texts activate in the different contexts.
Thus, firstly, one can witness the different significance of the motifs of female liberation. In the context of the struggle for women’s civil rights in the Latin American republics — where there existed a separation between Church and State, and where the vote for women was fought for and obtained in one country after another from the late 1930s to the late 1950s — one finds that not only the explicitly emancipatory aspects of the novel, but also a large part of the individualism characteristic of the English Protestant tradition, are refracted spontaneously as a manifesto of female liberation. On the other hand, in the Francoist context of promotion of traditional Catholic values in a confessional state, translators had to censor themselves or write between the lines to varying degrees.
Then, there is the refracted meaning of the imperial motifs — with symptomatic cases in the treatment of the imaginary of ‘slavery’ and the racial representations of the ‘savage’, instances where European power and knowledge had come together to justify the hierarchy between human beings and territories that are at the root of colonial conquest — with a certain contrast between the versions produced in the Latin American countries, liberated from colonialism a century earlier, and those coming out of Spain, which was redefining itself at the time as a somewhat backward post-colonial nation among the European countries, although in both cases effecting significant transformations when they come to deal with racial prejudices.
Lastly, within Spain itself, there are noticeable differences in the translations and promotion of the text between Castile and Catalonia. For among the reasons that the publishing of Jane Eyre in Madrid during Franco’s dictatorship was quite backward relative to publishing in Barcelona were not only the death, imprisonment, and exile of many literary figures during the Civil War, but also the fact that translating and commenting on foreign works, including one with the kind of potential for female and colonial liberation offered by Jane Eyre, can be a very effective way of writing between the lines in dissident regions under pressure, of projecting one’s own voice onto others’ at times of political persecution or intellectual repression, as was the case for literary resistance through translation in Barcelona.
Works Cited
Translations of Jane Eyre
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre ou mémoires d’une gouvernante, trans. By Old Nick (P. É Daurand Forgues (Paris: Le National, 1849).
——, Juana Eyre. Memorias de un aya (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta del Progreso, 1850).
——, Juana Eyre: Memorias de una aya, 2 vols (Havana: Diario de la Marina, 1850–1851).
——, Juana Eyre (New York: Appleton & Co., 1889).
——, Juana Eyre, trans. By José Fernández Z (Barcelona: Juventud, 1928).
Brontë, Carlota, Juana Eyre (Barcelona: Mentora, 1928).
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, trans. By M. E. Antonini (Buenos Aires: Acme Agency, 1941).
——, Jane Eyre, trans. By J. de Luaces (Barcelona: Iberia-J. Gil, 1943).
Brontë, Carlota, Juana Eyre. Una obra maestra rebosante de ternura y bondad, cuya emoción sabe llegar al alma. Creación que labró la reputación de su autora, popularizándola en todos los países (Madrid: Revista Literaria, 1945).
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, trans. by M. F. Pereda (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947).
——, Jane Eyre, trans. by J. Sánchez Díaz (Santiago de Chile: Paulinas, 1974).
——, Jane Eyre, trans. by S. Robles (Santiago de Chile: Zig Zag, 1989).
——, Jane Eyre, trans. By C. M. Gaite (Barcelona: Alba, 1999).
——, Jane Eyre, trans. By Toni Hill (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2009).
Other Sources
Alberdi, Juan Bautista, Las bases (Buenos Aires: La Facultad, 1915).
Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’, in Obras completas, 4 vols (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974–96), I (1989), pp. 267–74.
Costa, Horácio, Mar abierto: ensayos sobre literatura brasileña, portuguesa e hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998).
De Andrade, Osvaldo, ‘Manifiesto Antropofágico’, in Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programáticos y críticos, ed. by Jorge Schwartz (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 173–80.
——, Escritos antropofágicos (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2001)
De Campos, Haroldo, De la razón antropofágica y otros ensayos (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2000).
Glantz, Margo, ed., La Malinche, sus padres y sus hijos (Mexico City: Taurus, 2001).
Gutiérrez, Juan María, ‘Discurso Inaugural del Salón Literario’ (1837), in El tabaco que fumaba Plinio. Escenas de la traducción en España y América: relatos, leyes y reflexiones sobre los otros, ed. by Marieta Gargatagli and Nora Catelli (Barcelona: Serbal, 1998), pp. 360–86.
Llorente, Ángel, Arte e ideología en el franquismo, 1936–1951 (Madrid: Visor, 1995).
Maura, Juan Francisco, Women in the Conquest of the Americas (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
Messinger Cypress, Sandra, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).
Mistral, Gabriela, ‘La instrucción de la mujer’, in Mujeres Chilenas: Fragmentos de una historia, ed. by Sonia Montecinos (Santiago: Catalonia, 2008).
Morena y Vals, F., Juana Eyre: Drama en cuatro actos y un prólogo (Barcelona: Manero, 1869).
Nowottny, Winifred, The Language Poets Use (London: Athlone Press, 1996).
Ortega Sáez, Marta, ‘Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo: el caso de Jane Eyre de Juan G. de Luaces’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Barcelona, 2013).
Paz, Octavio, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989).
Perón, Eva, Dicursos (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, 2012).
Rabadán, Rosa, ed., Traducción y censura inglés-español: 1939–1985 (León: Universidad de León, 2000).
Sarlo, Beatriz, ‘Oralidad y lenguas extranjeras: el conflicto en la literatura argentina durante el primer tercio del siglo XX’, in Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano, Ensayos argentinos: de Sarmiento a la vanguardia (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2006), pp. 253–69.
——, Borges, un escritor en las orillas (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2007).
——, La máquina cultural: Maestras, traductores y vanguardistas (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1998).
Strauss, Leo, Persecution and the Art of Writing (London: Chicago University Press, 1998).
1 JE, Ch. 28.
2 Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (London: Athlone Press, 1996), p. 147.
3 JE, Ch. 32.
4 The first translation of Jane Eyre in Spanish, published without naming the translator as Juana Eyre. Memorias de una aya [Jane Eyre: Memoirs of a governess], was initially printed in Paris and then serialised in newspapers in Santiago and Havana. It was an indirect version based on the French adaptation produced a year earlier by Old Nick (P. É. Daurand Forgues): see Chapter I above for discussion, and the List of Translations below for publication details. Two decades later, an even freer version was published in Spain in the form of a play by F. Morena y Vals, Juana Eyre. Drama en cuatro actos y un prólogo [Jane Eyre: A drama in four acts and a prologue] (Barcelona: Manero, 1869). Another two decades would pass before the first direct and fairly complete version of the novel was brought out in Spanish, published in the United States as Juana Eyre (New York: Appleton & Co., 1889). Since then, at least twenty versions have been published in Latin America and as many in Spain, starting with Juana Eyre (Barcelona: Mentora, 1928) and Juana Eyre (Barcelona: Juventud, 1928). Most of these versions have been reprinted numerous times by different publishers as the rights have been transferred or lapsed, so that there have been more than a hundred editions to date.
5 For the context of translation in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship, see Traducción y censura inglés-español: 1939–1985, ed. by Rosa Rabadán (León: Universidad de León, 2000). A broader context is provided by Ángel Llorente, Arte e ideología en el franquismo, 1936–1951 (Madrid: Visor, 1995). For a particular emphasis on the Spanish translation of Jane Eyre by J. G. de Luaces (1943) in this context, see Marta Ortega Sáez’s ‘Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo: el caso de Jane Eyre de Juan G. de Luaces’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Barcelona, 2013).
6 Regarding malinchism, see for example Octavio Paz’s well-known interpretation, ‘Los hijos de la Malinche’, in El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), pp. 59–80. For its repercussions and interpretations, see La Malinche, sus padres y sus hijos, ed. by Margo Glantz (Mexico City: Taurus, 2001). For a historical overview, see also Juan Francisco Maura, Women in the Conquest of the Americas (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), and Sandra Messinger Cypress, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).
7 See Juan María Gutiérrez, ‘Discurso Inaugural del Salón Literario’ (1837), in Marieta Gargatagli and Nora Catelli (eds.), El tabaco que fumaba Plinio. Escenas de la traducción en España y América: relatos, leyes y reflexiones sobre los otros (Barcelona: Serbal, 1998), pp. 360–86. Thus, Gutiérrez summarizes: ‘Spanish science and literature being negligible, then, we need to divorce ourselves from them completely and emancipate ourselves in this respect from peninsular traditions, as we succeeded in doing in politics, when we proclaimed our freedom. We are still joined by the close, strong tie of the language; but this should loosen day by day as we enter into the intellectual movement of the advanced peoples of Europe. For this it is necessary for us to familiarize ourselves with foreign languages and make it our constant study to acclimatize ours to anything good, intelligent and beautiful that might arise in these’. Juan Bautista Alberdi would likewise write: ‘Have no fear of mingling races and languages. Out of Babel, out of chaos, the South American nationality will arise some clear, bright day’ (Las bases, Buenos Aires: La Facultad, 1915, p. 94). For an evaluation of this stance on emancipation from Spain by way of other European languages and cultures, including its violence towards the indigenous substratum, see Beatriz Sarlo, ‘Oralidad y lenguas extranjeras: el conflicto en la literatura argentina durante el primer tercio del siglo XX’, in Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano, Ensayos argentinos: de Sarmiento a la vanguardia (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2006), pp. 253–69.
8 Among the anthropophagous manifestos, see especially Haroldo De Campos, De la razón antropofágica y otros ensayos (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2000), esp. ‘De la razón antropofágica: diálogo y diferencia en la cultura brasilera’, pp. 1–23; and ‘De la traducción como creación y como crítica’, pp. 185–203. The background to this position on translation can be found in Osvaldo de Andrade, ‘Manifiesto Antropofágico’, in Jorge Schwartz (ed.), Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programáticos y críticos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), pp. 173–80. More broadly, see Osvaldo De Andrade, Escritos antropofágicos (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2001). Lastly, for a wide-ranging study of this complex opening via translation in Brazilian and Spanish American literature, see Horácio Costa, Mar abierto: ensayos sobre literatura brasileña, portuguesa e hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), esp. ‘El centro está en todas partes’, pp. 437–46.
9 Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 4 vols (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974–96), I (1989), pp. 267–74. My emphases.
10 ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’, a lecture originally given by Borges at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores in 1951, following an earlier version in Cursos y conferencias (1953), was published in Sur magazine in 1955, after which Borges incorporated it into his work Discusión (originally published in 1932 and reissued in 1957), where the essay would find its final place. For this immediate context of Sur as a ‘translation machine’, see especially Beatriz Sarlo, La máquina cultural. Maestras, traductores y vanguardistas (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1998). Additionally see Beatriz Sarlo, Borges, un escritor en las orillas (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2007).
11 This general prismatisation is also made clear by an examination of some of the paratextual elements, starting with the changes to the title in the post-war years, which range from Juana Eyre: alma rebelde [Jane Eyre: Rebel Soul] (Buenos Aires: Acme Agency, 1944) in Latin America to Juana Eyre. Una obra maestra rebosante de ternura y bondad, cuya emoción sabe llegar al alma. Creación que labró la reputación de su autora, popularizándola en todos los países [Jane Eyre. A masterpiece overflowing with tenderness and goodness that can move the very soul. A creation that established the author’s reputation, making her popular in all countries] (Madrid: Revista Literaria, 1945) in Spain. No less significant are the cover designs, which run the gamut from classical Victorian portraits of an educated lady to portrayals of female determination in situations of adversity and romance, right up to the gothic imaginary associated with adventure. In fact, while the same main emphases and broad changes recur in cover styles time and again, it can be seen that the covers of the post-war editions (1940s and 1950s) tend to stress gothic mystery/aesthetics, a Victorian female ethos and values, determination in adversity, and some romance. Those of the 1960s and 1970s add pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and a clear emphasis on adventure and romance in contemporary terms, with the iconography for Jane shifting from virtue to eros. Those of the 1980s and 1990s add at least three new iconographies, tailored to the readership targeted: (1) classical portrayal (making it clear that this is a classic of world literature, serious writing), (2) film imagery (especially scenes from Zeffirelli’s adaptation, promoting the idea of an entertainment classic), and (3) a didactic approach, when children are the intended readership (abridged versions). Those from the 2000s and 2010s show a new relative emphasis on solitude and suffering (Jane portrayed alone, meditative). As a final contrast, it is worth noticing that in the last half century the novel has not only been frequently published in the ‘classic’ collections of the large publishing houses — including Colección Obras Maestras (Iberia), Clásicos Universales (Planeta), Letras Universales (Cátedra), Colección Centenario (Espasa), Grandes Clásicos (Mondadori) and Clásicos (Ediciones B) — but has also been adapted as English-language teaching material, in ‘English Graded Readers. Simplified Fiction Series, Grade 4’ (Pearson Educación) and ‘Richmond Readers’ (Santillana).
12 For more details on these translators, see the appendix ‘Lives of Some Translators’ below.
13 ‘He huido del prurito de prodigar notas. Sostengo que el informado pocas veces las necesita, y que al indocto le son de muy parco valor […]. Interpretar y desmenuzar todas las alusiones y sobrentendidos, llevan al anotador a errar con frecuencia, y subsiguientemente a dar al lector una visión falaz de las cosas’, Ortega Sáez, ‘Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo’, p. 123.
14 JE, Ch. 25.
15 In the other unabridged translations, the passage reads: ‘No sé qué clase de vestimenta llevaba, aunque sí que le caía en pliegues rectos y blancos, pero no puedo decirle si era un camisón, una sábana o una mortaja’ (Gaite 1999A); ‘Ignoro que vestido llevaba: era blanco y recto, pero no puedo decir si era un camisón, una sábana o una mortaja’ (Hill 2009A). Antonini’s condensed version does not cut much here, although it generalises at the end of the passage: ‘No puedo decir cómo iba vestida, sólo sé que llevaba una túnica blanca y estrecha; pero no sé si era un batón u otra forma de vestido’ (Antonini 1941B).
16 JE, Ch. 25.
17 In a similar vein, Gaite gives: ‘Me había incorporado en la cama y me incliné a mirar en aquella dirección. Primero me quedé estupefacta, pero enseguida el pasmo se convirtió en una perturbación que hizo presa en mí y me heló la sangre. No era Sophie, señor Rochester, ni tampoco Leah, ni la señora Fairfax, no, no lo eran, estoy segura, y ni siquiera esa misteriosa Grace Poole, tampoco ella’ (Gaite 1999A).
18 Sánchez uses Antonini’s solution with very minor adaptations: ‘y la sangre se heló en mis venas, porque la persona que estaba allí no era Sofía, ni la señora Fairfax, ni Lía, ni aun la extraña Gracia Poole’ (Sánchez, 1974C).
19 JE, Ch. 18. Emphases my own.
20 The second part of the excerpt becomes: ‘Veo al señor Rochester inclinado hacia su compañera, y a ella inclinada hacia él. Veo los rizos de azabache rozar su espalda y sus mejillas, y sigo escuchando los murmullos de su conversación y recordando sus miradas’ (Pereda 1947A). ‘Veo al señor Rochester volviéndose hacia la señorita Ingram, y ella lo mismo; la veo inclinar la cabeza hacia él hasta que sus rizos negros casi le rozan el hombre y acarician su mejilla, oigo sus cuchicheos, recuerdo las miradas que se intercambiaron’ (Gaite 1999A); ‘Veo al señor Rochester volviéndose hacia la señorita Ingram, y a esta mirándolo; la veo inclinar la cabeza hacia él hasta rozar su hombro con los rizos o acariciar con ellos su mejilla; oigo sus murmullos de complicidad y recuerdo las miradas’ (Hill 2009A).
21 Retranslated into English: ‘Miss Ingram placed herself at Rochester’s side. The others, in adjoining chairs, on either side of them. I ceased to watch the actors; I had lost all interest in the riddles, and instead my eyes felt irresistibly attracted to the circle of spectators […]. I saw Mr. Rochester lean towards Blanche to consult her, and her draw nearer to him until the young woman’s curls almost touched her companion’s shoulders and cheeks […]. I heard their whisperings and observed their interchanged glances.’
22 JE, Ch. 20.
23 JE, Ch. 23.
24 JE, Ch. 12.
25 See also the versions by Luaces and Hill of Rochester’s song ‘The truest love that ever heart […]’ in Chapter 24, for instance, where, while they are able to shape a rhymed version, they fall short of the abundant alliteration of the original. Thus, ‘I dangers dared; I hind’rance scorned; I omens did defy’ becomes, in the mainly octo- and heptasyllabic reduction in Luaces: ‘obstáculos venceré/ desafiaré peligros’ (Luaces, 1943B), while Hill’s version in alternate rhymes gives: ‘Desafié peligros, desoí advertencias / todo lo ignoraba por tenerla cerca, / ni las amenazas de los peores llantos / pudieron quebrar mi decisión terca’ (Hill 2009A).
26 JE, Ch. 27.
27 JE, Ch. 35.
28 JE, Ch. 24.
29 The unabridged Spanish versions give: ‘Jane; tú me atraes, me dominas, pareces someterte y me gusta esa impresión que sabes dar de sumisa y dócil; y mientras devano la madeja fina y sedosa, ella misma se enrolla en mis dedos; y a través de mi cuerpo, hasta llegar al corazón, me sacude un estremecimiento que me domina y que me envuelve. Me sometes tú y me influyes tú, y esta sensación que experimento tiene para mí el encanto del hechizo y de la brujería que hay en tu persona’ (Pereda 1947A). ‘Nunca he conocido a nadie como tú, Jane, a nadie. Me gustas y me dominas. Da la impresión de que te doblegas y me complace esa aparente sumisión, pero de repente, cuando estoy enroscando en mis dedos un suave y sedoso mechón de tu pelo, éste despide una corriente eléctrica que me recorre el brazo y me llega al corazón. Me has conquistado, estoy entregado a tu influjo, tan dulce que no puede expresarse con palabras. Me rindo porque tu conquista entraña un hechizo muy superior a cualquier hazaña en la que yo saliera victorioso’ (Gaite 1999A). ‘Jane: me complaces y a la vez me dominas; pareces someterte y me gusta la sensación de docilidad que emana de ti, pero cuando acaricio un mechón sedoso de tus cabellos, siento un escalofrío que me sube por el brazo directamente hasta el corazón. Me has conquistado, me has dominado, y ejerces sobre mí un poder más dulce del que soy capaz de expresar. Me dejo llevar por tu hechizo, la muestra de una brujería a la que no sé resistirme’ (Hill 2009A). Luaces’ condensed version, however, replaces part of the metaphorical hyperbolic imaginary by literally asserting the implicit significance of this tropological multiplication, namely, that the feelings are ‘inexpressible’ (‘Nadie me ha sometido, nadie ha influido tan dulcemente como tú los has hecho. Esta influencia que ejerces sobre mí es mucho más encantadora de cuanto se pueda expresar’ (Luaces 1943B)), a decision due most probably to self-censorship, since he usually plays down the erotic intensity of the imaginary. Antonini reduces more, cutting out the sustained metaphorics of the passage in their entirety, as also happens, more predictably, in the condensed paraphrases.
30 Charlotte Brontë quotes profusely from the Bible in her writings, often using for her own purposes passages from Genesis, Samuel, Job, the Psalms, Isaiah, Matthew, and Revelation (to the point where orthodox Anglican reviewers complained of her profanity in quoting texts of Scripture disagreeably): see essay 14 below, by Léa Rychen, for discussion of the translation of these quotations into French. But it is above all the metrical psalter in the Book of Common Prayer (1662 version), with its solemn cadenced language, which may have been critical in influencing this parallelistic form of representation of entities and events.
31 JE, Ch. 8. All the unabridged and compressed Spanish renderings keep the parallelism well here, with different emphases over time. Thus, Antonini emphasises the proverbial aspect of the parallelism rather than the biblical language: ‘Mejor es comer hierbas donde hay amor, [/] que buenas tortas con nuestros enemigos’ (Antonini 1941B); Luaces is more literal: ‘Más vale comer hierbas en compañía de quienes os aman, [/] que buena carne de buey con quien os odia’ (Luaces 1943B); and then we have: ‘Mejor es comer hierba con quienes nos aman, [/] que un buey con quienes nos odian’ (Pereda 1947A); ‘Más vale comer hierbas donde reina el amor, [/] que un buey bien cebado en el seno del odio’ (Gaite 1999A); finally, Hill generalises in more secular terms: ‘Sabe mejor una comida sencilla hecha con amor [/] que un festín suculento aderezado con odio’ (Hill 2009A).
32 JE, Ch. 2.
33 JE, Ch. 12.
34 JE, Ch. 37.
35 See Essay 13, below, for further discussion of this quotation.
36 Gaite begins: ‘Aquella Jane Eyre ardiente y esperanzada, disfrazada de novia, [/] volvía a ser una muchacha solitaria y encogida, [/] su vida era desvaída, [/] su porvenir desolador. [/] Una helada navideña había sobrevenido en la plenitud del verano, [/] sobre el mes de junio cayeron las ventiscas de nieve de diciembre; [/] el hielo congeló las manzanas en sazón [/] y aplastó los rosales’; and ends without marking the internal quotation from the Bible: ‘Toda la consciencia de mi vida solitaria, [/] de mi amor perdido, [/] del naufragio, de mi esperanza, [/] de mi fe agonizante se abatió sobre mí de lleno, como un macizo de sombras. No es posible describir la amargura de aquella hora; las aguas anegaron mi alma, [/] me hundí en un cenagal sin fondo, [/] donde no se hacía pie, [/] hasta lo más profundo de las aguas’ (Gaite 1999A). Hill begins: ‘La Jane Eyre ilusionada, ardiente, casi una novia, [/] había dejado paso de nuevo a una chica fría y solitaria, [/] que se enfrentaba a una vida desvaída y a un futuro desolador. [/] Una helada navideña había invadido el verano. [/] Una tormenta de nieve había secuestrado el mes de junio: [/] el hielo había petrificado los frutos del manzano, [/] el viento había deshojado las rosas que despuntaban’, and ends: ‘La absoluta conciencia de una vida sin valor, de un amor perdido, [/] de las esperanzas mutiladas y de una fe derribada a golpes, [/] cayó sobre mí con la intensidad de un alud. No soy capaz de describir esa hora tan amarga: la única verdad es que “aquel mar siniestro invadió mi alma y me hundí en una ciénaga; [/] rodeada de agua, sin encontrar un solo punto de apoyo, [/] la corriente me arrastró hasta el fondo”’ (Hill 2009A).
37 ‘La evidencia de mi soledad, de mi amor perdido para siempre, [/] de mis esperanzas destrozadas y lejanas, la idea de mi fe muerta…, [/] todo ello me abrumó con infinito desconsuelo. [/] No podría expresar la amargura y el desaliento de aquellas horas interminables. [/] Bien puedo decir que las olas inundaron mi espíritu, que me sentí sumergida en el espeso fango, [/] que caí en las aguas profundas y que sus oleajes me cubrieron’ (Pereda 1947A).
38 JE, Ch. 12.
39 These addresses to the reader are not kept in the condensed version of Antonini 1941B, nor in, predictably, the abridged ones of Sánchez 1974C or Robles 1989C.
40 JE, Ch. 12.
41 See the discussion of the novel’s multilingualism in Chapter II above by Matthew Reynolds.
42 JE, Ch. 11.
43 JE, Ch. 28.
44 JE, ch. 25. For further discussion of this passage, with an animation, see Chapter VII below.
45 Gaite gives: ‘Pasó el prólogo, señor; aún le queda por oír la historia. Al despertar, un resplandor deslumbró mis ojos. ‘Ya es de día’, pensé en un primer momento. Pero estaba equivocada: se trataba simplemente de la luz de una vela. Supuse que sería Sophie, que había entrado a buscar algo. Había una vela encendida sobre el tocador, y la puerta del armario donde había colgado mis atavíos de boda y que cerré antes de acostarme estaba abierta. Escuché un crujido procedente de allí. “¿Qué estás haciendo, Sophie?”, pregunté. No obtuve respuesta, pero sí vi que una silueta surgía del armario’ (Gaite 1999A).
46 Pereda gives: ‘He terminado el prólogo señor; la historia es más larga [no reference to future to narrate past]. Al despertarme noté que una luz cargaba mis ojos, y pensé que sería el día [no direct account of thoughts]; pero me equivocaba; en efecto: era una luz; creí que Sophie habría entrado, pues la luz brillaba sobre el tocador, frente al armario de mis vestidos, donde, antes de acostarme, colgué [no pluperfect] mi velo y mi traje de boda, y cuya puerta se hallaba abierta. Al oír el ruido, pregunté: “Sophie, ¿qué está usted haciendo?” Nadie me contestó; pero una persona se separó del armario’ (Pereda 1947A; ‘I have finished the prologue sir; the story is longer. When I woke up I realised that a light shone on my eyes, and I thought that it must be day; but I was mistaken; indeed: there was a light; I thought Sophie had come in, since the light was shining on the dressing table, in front of the closet where, before going to bed, I hung my veil and wedding dress, and the door of which was open. When I heard the noise, I asked: “Sophie, what are you doing?” Nobody answered me; but a person moved away from the closet.’)
Hill gives: ‘Esto fue solo el principio, señor. La historia acaba de empezar [no reference to future to narrate past]. Cuando desperté, distinguí un resplandor. Pensé que ya era de día [no direct account of thoughts], pero me equivoqué: era sólo la luz de una vela. Supuse que se trataba de Sophie. Había luz en el tocador, y la puerta del armario donde había colgado el vestido de novia antes de acostarme estaba abierta. Oí un crujido procedente de allí y grité: “¿Eres tú, Sophie? ¿Qué haces allí?” Nadie respondió, pero una silueta emergió del armario’ (Hill 2009A: ‘This was only the beginning, sir. The story has just begun. When I awoke, I was aware of a glow. I thought that it was already daytime, but I was mistaken: it was only the light of a candle. I assumed it was Sophie. There was light on the dressing table, and the door of the closet where I had hung the wedding dress before going to bed was open. I heard a creak from there and shouted: “Is that you, Sophie? What are you doing there?” Nobody replied, but a silhouette emerged from the wardrobe.’)
47 Luaces gives: ‘Todo el prólogo. Ahora falta el relato. Al despertarme, una luz hirió mis ojos. Pensé que ya era de día [no direct account of thoughts]. Pero no era más que el resplandor de una vela. Supuse que Sofía estaba en la alcoba. Alguien había dejado una bujía en la mesa, y el cuartito guardarropa, donde yo colocara mi velo y mi vestido de boda, se hallaba abierto. “Qué hace usted, Sofía”, pregunté. Nadie contestó, pero una figura surgió del ropero’ (Luaces 1943B: ‘All the prologue. The story is still to come. When I awoke, a light hurt my eyes. I thought that it was already daytime. But it was only the glow of a candle. I assumed that Sophie was in the bedchamber. Someone had left a candle on the table, and the closet where I had put my veil and my wedding dress was open. “What are you doing there, Sophie?” I asked. No one answered, but a figure emerged from the closet.’)
48 Antonini gives: ‘Vi luz y creía que era el alba; pero no: era una bujía que estaba en mi tocador. Al mismo tiempo sentí que alguien revisaba mi armario y creyendo que era Sofía, le pregunté qué estaba haciendo. Nadie me respondió, pero un bulto se desprendió de la sombra’ (Antonini 1941B: ‘I saw light and thought it was the dawn; but no: it was a candle on my dresser. At the same time I noticed that somebody was looking in my wardrobe, and, thinking that it was Sophie, I asked her what she was doing. Nobody replied, but a shape came out of the shadows.’) Sánchez 1974C and Robles 1989C use this earlier translation by Antonini, with only minor changes of vocabulary.
49 JE, Ch. 17, Ch. 24, and Ch. 27.
50 Hill renders it: ‘También llevaba un vestido de color negro, pero su corte era muy distinto del de su hermana: mucho más favorecedor y vaporoso, menos puritano y más elegante’ (Hill, 2009A).
51 More generally, Gaite states in these same notes: ‘Many of the learned allusions in this novel reveal the Brontë sisters’ fondness for Bible reading and their belief that their readers will have had exactly the same education’ (Gaite 1999A; note 6).
52 JE, Ch. 11.
53 ‘A Charlotte Brontë le gustaba exhibir sus conocimientos de literatura. Es una frase del acto III de Macbeth de Shakespeare, y alude al rey de Escocia, Duncan, recién asesinado por él’ (Gaite 1999A).
54 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: J. M. Dent, 1971 [1857]), p. 160.
55 JE, Ch. 9.
56 Indeed, Gaite and Hill, translating more than half a century later (1999 and 2009), reinstate the words of the original: ‘¿Y para qué quiero yo la mitad de su patrimonio, rey Asuero [nota: ‘Rey persa inmensamente rico que prometió a su mujer entregarle cuanto pidiera]? ¿Me toma por un judío usurero en busca de una provechosa inversión? (Gaite 1999A); ‘¿Y para qué quiero yo la mitad de su herencia, rey Asuero? ¿Acaso cree que soy un usurero judío que desea hacer una buena inversión?’ (Hill 2009A).
57 JE, Ch. 25.
58 It is enough to look again in more detail at the childlike innocence of these scenes of friendship between Jane and Helen (where the former, albeit admiringly, shows doubts about religious beliefs and rebels against the latter’s submissiveness) to find several instances of moderation and self-censorship in Luaces; thus, when confronted with a kind of programmatic summary like ‘I could not comprehend this doctrine of endurance; and still less could I understand or sympathise with the forbearance she expressed for her chastiser’ (JE, Ch. 6), a defiance with religious and political overtones in Franco’s Spain, Luaces cuts out almost everything, leaving just: ‘No podía estar de acuerdo con aquella opinión’ (Luaces 1943B; ‘I could not agree with this opinion’).
More broadly, and on a strictly religious issue, one may take the most sustained instance of doubt on Jane’s part about existence in the other world that follows. The original reads:
‘I believe; I have faith: I am going to God.’
‘Where is God? What is God?’
‘My Maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me.’
‘You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven, and that our souls can get to it when we die?’
‘I am sure there is a future state; I believe God is good; I can resign my immortal part to Him without any misgiving. God is my father; God is my friend: I love Him; I believe He loves me.’ (JE, Ch. 9)
Luaces avoids any dissonance with dogma and doubt vis-à-vis religious authority by condensing this whole anguished dialogue into a single speech uttered by Helen: ‘Sí, lo sé, porque tengo fe. Voy a reunirme con Dios, nuestro creador. Me entrego en sus manos y confío en su bondad. Cuento con impaciencia las horas que faltan para ese venturoso momento. Dios es mi padre y mi amigo: le amo y creo que Él me ama a mí’ (Luaces 1943B: ‘Yes, I know, because I have faith. I shall be reunited with God, our creator. I resign myself into his hands and trust in his goodness. I impatiently count the hours until that happy moment. God is my father and my friend: I love Him and believe that he loves me.)
59 Ortega Sáez, ‘Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo’, p. 183.
60 For instance JE, Ch. 35.
61 ‘Mujeres de mi Patria, recibo en este instante, de manos del Gobierno de la Nación, la ley que consagra nuestros derechos cívicos. Y la recibo ante vosotras, con la certeza de que lo hago en nombre y representación de todas las mujeres argentinas, sintiendo jubilosamente que me tiemblan las manos al contacto del laurel que proclama la victoria. Aquí está, hermanas mías, resumida en la letra apretada de pocos artículos, una historia larga de luchas, tropiezos y esperanzas. Por eso hay en ella crispaciones de indignación, sombras de ocasos amenazadores, pero también alegre despertar de auroras triunfales. Y esto último que traduce la victoria de la mujer sobre las incomprensiones, las negaciones y los intereses creados de las castas repudiadas por nuestro despertar nacional’. Eva Perón, Dicursos (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, 2012), p. 46.
62 See Marta Ortega Sáez, ‘Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo: el caso de Jane Eyre de Juan G. de Luaces’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Barcelona, 2013), p. 103. (‘No disfrazadas sino desvestidas, cubiertas solo sus carnes rosadas por una camisilla muy sutil, dos gentiles mujeres desconocidas, parapetadas en el no levantado antifaz, tuvieron el absurdo capricho o la insolente desvergüenza de mezclarse a la multicolor algarabía de las máscaras del baile de la Prensa en el Teatro Real. Nosotros, los recios españoles de añeja casta, enamorados del cristiano recato y del misterio meridional, hemos, con esta pública demostración de impudicia y antiestética, sufrido un nuevo traidor zarpazo del deforme y hediondo monstruo del feminismo sin feminidad. Mujeres electoras, mujeres regidoras, mujeres escritoras y togadas, mujeres públicamente desnudas, libre prostitución multiplicada, esterilidad que aumenta, bestialidad triunfante, espiritualidad mugiente: ambigüedad, miseria, decadencia… He aquí la labor del feminismo. ¿A dónde vamos por este camino? ¿Es que no hay en España moralidad, conciencia, ni siquiera masculinidad? ¿Es que hemos de tolerar indefinidamente el repelente espectáculo de las pseudo-mujeres alejadas del hogar, de la maternidad y de la Religión, que, bajo un manto de artistas o letradas ocultan la deshonesta falda de picos pardos? Ya sé que estas, y aún mayores atrocidades son en el extranjero moneda corriente, pero ¿mediremos a la España severa, viril, noble y conquistadora con el mismo metro que a la Francia frívola o la Yanquilandia tocinera? […] Ante la descarada desvergüenza de esas mujeres indignas de ser dichas españolas, ante el afeminamiento de los varones, ante la indiferencia, la negación y el escepticismo, de todo lo bueno, lo bello y lo grande, hemos de alzar un muro de sanas tradiciones, de sincera austeridad, de virilidad triunfante. Hemos de predicar una Cruzada ética, estética, y restauradora de todos los antiguos sustentáculos del verdadero españolismo’).
63 For the unstable and undecidable nature of meaning when an author writes effectively between the lines, which constitutes an ‘art of writing’ very different from ‘logical encoding’, not allowing censors (including scholarship) to ‘prove’ their point by methods of inquisitio or factual research, see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (London: Chicago University Press, 1988, esp. “Introduction” and “Persecution and the Art of Writing”), pp. 1–37. For Juan de Luaces’ political stance, his problems with censorship, imprisonment, as well as his attempt to escape to Latin America during the Spanish Civil War, see the appendix ‘Lives of Some Translators’ below. More broadly, see Marta Ortega Sáez’s ‘Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo: el caso de Jane Eyre de Juan G. de Luaces’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Barcelona, 2013).
64 JE, Ch. 23. Emphases my own.
65 JE, Ch. 27.
66 See JE, Ch. 28, and Ch. 19.
67 JE, Ch. 27.
68 This issue of the power of Catholic priests over women created paradoxical situations in both Spain and Latin America, where female suffrage was supported right across the political spectrum, whether out of principle or pragmatism. Thus, in Chile, where intellectuals had upheld women’s right to vote since the beginning of the twentieth century as part of their civic, cultural, and educational emancipation, that same right was also upheld by sections of the Conservative Party allied to the Church in the hope that it would work in their favour, given that women received a Catholic education (in fact, the Conservative Party was the first to present a bill to bring in female suffrage, in 1917, and this was rejected by the centre-left, which feared that the generally Catholic education of women would favour right-wing parties in elections). A similar argument against female suffrage was put forward by some Spanish Republicans: giving the vote to women would lead to a conservative and theocratic state, they thought, because of the influence of the Catholic Church on women’s education. Even Victoria Kent, the Spanish lawyer and Republican politician — and the first woman to be admitted to the College of Lawyers in Madrid — argued in 1931, against what she acknowledged were her own principles, for the female vote to be postponed because women’s generally limited political knowledge as a result of Church influence would ensure that they inclined towards the conservatives. As she summarised it: ‘I don’t think it’s the right time to give Spanish women the vote. I say that as a woman who at the critical juncture of having to come down on one side or the other finds herself forsaking an ideal’. (The law was passed with support from the right, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and small Republican groups, but the great majority of Republican Action, the Radical Republican Party and the Radical Socialist Republican Party voted against it. As was observed earlier, this law conferring suffrage was repealed by Franco, who would ultimately proscribe all voting rights, for both men and women).
69 JE, Ch. 35, Ch. 23.
70 Gabriela Mistral, ‘La instrucción de la mujer [1906]’, in Mujeres Chilenas. Fragmentos de una historia, ed. by Sonia Montecino (Santiago: Catalonia, 2008), p. 97.
71 Ortega Sáez, ‘Traducciones del franquismo en el mercado literario español contemporáneo’, p. 103.
72 JE, Ch. 1.
73 Antonini misreads the original here, rendering ‘slave-driver’ as ‘cochero eslavo’, i.e., a ‘Slav coachman’: ‘¡Malvado y cruel muchacho — exclamé —, eres un asesino, más bruto que un cochero eslavo y semejante a los emperadores romanos!’ (Antonini 1941B). Gaite’s later translation removes the reference to African slaves and the work connotations: ‘ — ¡Maldito canalla! — le increpé —. Eres un asesino, un déspota, como los emperadores romanos’ (Gaite 1999A). Hill is more literal, but has a less effective and natural rhythm: ‘¡Chico malvado y cruel! — grité —. Eres igual que un asesino, te comportas como un tratante de esclavos, como un emperador romano’ (Hill 2009A).
74 JE, Ch. 2.
75 These unabridged translations published much later in Spain give:
Me daba cuenta de que algunos instantes de rebelión ya me había hecho acreedora de extrañas penitencias y, como cualquier esclavo rebelde en mi caso, decidí, llevada por la desesperación, llegar todo lo lejos que hiciera falta.
— Sujétele bien los brazos, señorita Abbot; está igual que un gato furioso.
— ¡Qué bochorno! — gritaba la doncella — ¿no le parece una conducta bochornosa señorita Eyre, atacar a un muchacho que además es hijo de su bienhechora? ¡A su joven amo!
— ¿Amo? ¿Por qué va a ser él mi amo? Yo no soy ninguna criada. (Gaite 1999A).
Era consciente de que un sólo momento de desobediencia me había reportado un injusto castigo y, como cualquier otro esclavo rebelde, estaba tan desesperada que habría hecho lo que fuera para escapar.
— ¡Tómela por los brazos, señorita Abbot! ¡Parece un gato salvaje!
— ¡Qué vergüenza! ¡Qué vergüenza! — exclamaba la doncella de la señora —. ¿Cómo se ha atrevido a golpear al joven señorito? ¡Al hijo de su benefactora! ¡A su señor!
— ¡Mi señor! ¿Cómo va a ser mi señor? ¿Acaso soy una criada? (Hill 2009A).
76 JE, Ch. 18.
77 JE, Ch. 27.
78 JE, Ch. 38.
79 JE, Ch. 26. For a discussion of the idea of Bertha as an alter ego, see Chapters I & II above.
80 JE, Ch. 20.
81 JE, Ch. 25.
82 Retranslated into English:
‘Horrifying and ghostlike, sir! It is impossible to conceive of anything like it: the face, without human colour; the expression, that of a wild beast. What would I give to forget the look in those bloodshot eyes and those blackened and swollen features.’
‘Ghosts are usually very pale, Jane.’
‘Yet this one was not; it had a purple colour, the lips violet and as though swollen, a furious brow and thick black eyebrows. Do you know what it reminded me of, sir?’
‘What?’
83 JE, Ch. 27.
84 JE, Ch. 26.
85 Retranslated into English:
‘It looked horrible to me. I have never seen a face like that: a face discoloured, horrifying. I would like to forget that bulging movement of its bloodshot eyes, its features swollen as though about to burst.’
‘Ghosts are pale, as a general rule.’
‘This one was not, though. It had protuberant, purplish lips, the brow was wrinkled, the eyelids wide open over its reddened eyes. Do you know what it reminded me of?’
‘What?’
‘The apparition of the Germanic legends: the vampire…’
86 Retranslated into English:
‘I found it frightful: I have never seen a face like that one. I cannot forget those bloodshot eyes and inflamed features!’
‘Spirits are usually pale.’
‘This one was purple in colour, with blackened lips and thick raised eyebrows. It seemed to me a spectre, a vampire.’
87 JE, Ch. 27.
88 The much later unabridged translations by Gaite (1999) and Hill (2009) restore the ‘savage’ face, but using ‘savage’ unambiguously as an adjective (‘the face was savage’ in Gaite, ‘the face had something savage’ in Hill), thus no longer referring explicitly to the supposedly uncultivated native inhabitants of the colonies, but evoking someone with a fiery look, an expression like a wild beast’s, like Pereda before them.