Copyright

Andrés Claro

Published On

2023-11-14

Page Range

pp. 296–367

Language

  • English

Print Length

72 pages

5. Representation, Gender, Empire

Jane Eyre in Spanish

  • Andrés Claro (author)
Chapter of: Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages(pp. 296–367)
The essay examines the prismatisation of Jane Eyre in Spanish unabridged, condensed, and reduced translations over time, evaluating their literary and cultural refractions. A first section addresses the literary synthesis and representation of reality: through a series of comparative stylistic microanalyses, it evaluates the recreation, loss, or refraction of lexical, syntactic, musical, imagistic, and contextual forms of meaning. The next two sections examine the strong contextual refractions of women’s liberation and the colonial oppression motifs of the novel respectively; focusing on the first widespread reception of Jane Eyre from the 1940s onwards, it contrasts its prismatisation as an explicit cry for freedom in Latin America, where the women’s vote was being fought for and achieved in the newly independent republics, with its prismatisation as anything from apparent orthodoxy (self-censorship) and negative freedom (writing between the lines) in Spain, where Franco’s programme was pursuing the restoration of National-Catholic values.

Contributors

Andrés Claro

(author)
Professor at University of Chile

Andrés Claro (Santiago, Chile) is a philosopher, essayist and university professor. He undertook his postgraduate studies in philosophy and Literature at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at Oxford University. His work has interrogated extensively the ways in which poetic conceptions and figurations shape characteristic worlds, spatial-temporal configurations, with particular attention to translation processes. To a series of essays on poetics, theory of language and culture — most recently, the trilogy of books La Creación (2014), Imágenes de mundo (2016), and Tiempos sin fin (2018) — he adds two major books: La Inquisición y la Cábala, un capítulo de la diferencia entre ontología y exilio (1996; 2nd. ed., 2009) and Las Vasijas Quebradas, cuatro variaciones sobre la ‘tarea del traductor’ (2012). He has published collections of poems and literary translations from various languages. He teaches in the Doctorate in Philosophy (Aesthetics) at the Universidad de Chile and has been visiting professor in universities in Latin America, Europe and the United States.