Translation and reception of Old Spanish romances in Serbian cultural environment

Abstract

Old Spanish romance (romance viejo) is one of the most important phenomena of oral Hispanic literature and also a metric constant of Hispanic poetry. The reception of this poetic form in our literature is primarily conditioned by the cultural and physical distance between Serbia and the Hispanic world. The earliest traces of interest in the Spanish romance occur in the Serbo-Croatian speaking area among members of the Illyrian movement, influenced by the German Romantics, especially Jakob Grimm and Johann Gottfried Herder, while the first old Spanish romance in Serbian cultural environment can be found in 1862 and 1863, in the literary magazine Danica, translated by writer and politician Jovan Subotić. Although the term romance is present in our twentieth-century literary science, the reception of the old Spanish romancero in Serbian cultural milieu is limited by a lack of translations of a significant corpus of these poems. By publishing the collection of Old Spanish Romance (2011), which includes forty-five representative compositions, conditions have been fulfilled for changing the horizon of expectations of the domestic readership.