The Spanish Translations of Fernando Pessoa in the First Francoism: Ideological and Aesthetic Factors

Abstract

The reception of Fernando Pessoa in the Spanish state constitutes a field of study that has progressed significantly in recent years thanks to work carried out by specialists in comparative literature and translation studies. After Pessoa’s initial reception in the 1920s, his work was translated, studied, and disseminated in Spain in the 1940s and 1950s by a group of authors linked to the deep ideological–aesthetic tensions that emerged after the Civil War. This context generated an interesting reception for the Portuguese writer, deeply marked by the political situation in which the country was living. Although the first references to Pessoa’s work in Spain appeared in the 1910s in Galicia and Catalonia, his reception in Spain after his death in 1935 was clearly guided by the official cultural centralism of the Francoist regime. After establishing the phases of Pessoa’s reception in the Iberian context and pointing out the essential differences between the Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque fields, the chapter focuses on the most important translations and editions of that period in the Spanish context.