Philology and Translation on the Way to a New World: Andrés Bello, Translator

Abstract

Andrés Bello was born in Caracas in 1781, lived in London from 1810 to 1829, and then in Chile from 1829 up to his death in 1865. He is perhaps the most influential scholar in Latin America’s 19th century, as it can be seen in the wide reach and afterlife of his monumental Gramática Castellana para el uso de los americanos (1847) and Chile’s Código Civil (1855), as well as in his earlier poetical, editorial and philological undertakings in London. Founder and Rector of the University of Chile, his work cannot be comprehended without considering its shaping impulse towards an ordered political community (Jakšić 2010) based on the autonomous development of a received tradition which of course had still to be invented. Therefore, most of Bello’s work can and must be seized through the lens of a translational praxis which, as stated in the outline to this volume, had to be “fundamental and foundational” to the Latin American political, linguistic and literary tradition. Translator of Virgil’s Æneis and Voltaire in his youth, celebrated imitator of Hugos, it is thanks to his translation duties that the news from the political crisis in Spain that would lead to the first revolutionary attempt in Venezuela were spread in Caracas in 1810. Bello devotes an important part of his time in London to study, sometimes directly in the medieval codices preserved in the British Museum Library he regularly visited, the origins and development of Western European languages and poetic traditions – for instance, thanks to Jakšić and Avilés edition of his London notebooks (2017), we now get to know that his was the first Spanish translation of a text then unknown for Spanish scholars, the first written text in a romance language, the Serments de Strasbourg. Philological training is thus exercised in the form of traditio and translatio –which always involves, as already noted by Altschul (2012), the search for an adequate form of translating imperii in times of crisis and emergence of new States. Therefore, this paper aims at providing an analysis of Bello’s translational work in the intersection of poetry, philology and politics.