Honor, Gender, and Translation in the Spanish Enlightenment: Mariano Madramany y Calatayud’s El engaño feliz (1795)

Abstract

Honor, Gender, and Translation in the Spanish Enlightenment:Mariano Madramany y Calatayud’s El engaño feliz (1795) Catherine M. Jaffe (bio) In May 1795, the Gazeta de Madrid announced a new novel: “El engaño feliz: novela exemplar que manifiesta los precipicios á que se exponen las incautas doncellas en dar oidos á los jóvenes y á los malos consejos de una falsa amiga; asimismo enseña á los padres á velar sobre la educacion y custodia de sus hijas al cargo de mugeres extrañas: tomado su argumento de las obras de Le-Sage.”1 The brief descriptions of new titles in this official bulletin often advertised the morality and utility of the works and suggested a focus for their readers. In the case of the announcement for El engaño feliz, the warning that parents should protect their daughters from the advances of young men and from the treachery of untrustworthy (possibly foreign) female companions comes directly from the novel’s title page, and the connection to a famous French author imparted legitimacy and prestige to the novel. (fig. 1) The 1790s were marked by reaction, censorship, and uneasy relations between France and Spain, but Spanish readers’ interest in translations from the French increased, proof of the continued cultural influence of the neighboring country.2 El engaño feliz is part of a history of translation and cultural adaptation of a text across three centuries that provides insight into how Spanish novelists of the late eighteenth century attempted to guide [End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Mariano Madramany y Calatayud, El engaño feliz: novela exemplar (Valencia, 1795) Biblioteca Valenciana Nicolau Primitiu. Biblioteca Nicolau Primitiu [End Page 38] the energies of complex seventeenth-century plots, full of swashbuckling intrigue and erotic charge, toward a moralistic end, harnessing the newly popular genre to the goals of enlightened reform. Spanish translators used their work to manifest their ties to the European culture of Enlightenment.3 Mariano Madramany y Calatayud (1746–1822), an erudite Valencian lawyer, Inquisition official, and later priest, produced El engaño feliz, his only novel, in 1795 when he was energetically publishing to complement his legal career. His other works included several literary satires, a study of silk harvesting, treatises on noble lineage, military virtues, arms and letters, and elocution, and, later in life, several sermons, devout poetry, and a defense of constitutional monarchy published in 1820 during the Liberal Triennium.4 A comparison with the source text for Madramany’s novel, Alain-René Lesage’s Le diable boiteux (1707, second edition 1726), shows how the Valencian author adapts a French story based on a Spanish play to a new cultural and historical context by omission and embellishment. While embellishing descriptions of the virtue of the female protagonist, Madramany omits references to a sexual liaison, which would have been deemed scandalous by censors of his time, and to a marriage arranged by the King, most likely to avoid any implicit criticism of monarchy. Finally, he appends didactic comments to the title page of the first edition and in a prologue and epilogue written for a later edition of the novel. Thus, Madramany follows the widespread tendency of Spanish translators of novels in the eighteenth century to purge them of immorality and to add prologues defending their practice.5 Madramany does not, however, alter the essential plot, characters, or descriptions of customs in order to update the work to reflect a contemporary reality. His didactic comments on the danger posed by the young protagonist’s female companion or aya reveals Madramany’s intent to align his translation with the Enlightenment debate over the means and ends of women’s education. Although the popular appeal of novels was precisely that they reflected their readers’ own lives and concerns, I argue that Madramany’s translation strategy of closely following the original plot shows that he expected that the novel’s themes—the power of love to transcend social class, but also the affirmation of an antique, aristocratic honor code that negotiated relations between men through the exchange of women—would continue to appeal to modern readers at the turn of the eighteenth century despite the Baroque setting...