From the Publisher’s Authorial Forge: Pseudotranslations and the Invention of Oscar Vaudin and Jorge Merovell

Abstract

This article explores one of the most telling dimensions in the identity and activity of Romano Torres, a Portuguese publishing house that operated between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century, namely the invention of authors, based on a system of pseudonyms and pseudo-translations to which a number of writers, often anonymous, contributed. The pseudonym was a strategy widely used by large sectors of the publishing world for the creation of texts, literary names, and even whole collections, misleading the readers as to the authorship of the texts and the national origin of the published writers. Indeed, this practice was common in the editorial activity of Romano Torres, who published a considerable number of original texts written in Portuguese and by Portuguese authors, while offering them to the reading public as books of foreign origin. Thus, book publishing produced fiction for the public in which the idea of authorship is linked to a specific referential universe (being foreign, for example) and credibility, different from the context and the writer or writers who effectively produced it. In the Romano Torres catalogue there appear French-sounding authors such as Oscar Vaudin and Jorge Merovell who were invented and published in pseudo-translations, to which several writers contributed. These processes were not random, but were structured by criteria defined and executed by the editor, Carlos Bregante Torres, constituting examples of the publisher’s creative forge and his ability to configure the printed culture and the literary universe.