The Lost Translation of Wieland by Luis Monfort (Spain, 1818)

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to recover an early nineteenth-century Spanish edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale, originally published in 1798. One reason this 1818 edition, titled Vie-land in Spanish, lay unrecognized by most critics for two centuries is that it was translated not from the original but from an 1808 French free translation that did not acknowledge Brown, and its French provenance initially made it less attractive in a Spanish cultural panorama still influenced by the Inquisition. The late twentieth-century re-publication of a Spanish-language critical edition of Brown’s novel translated from the English increases the importance of these previous translations into French and then Spanish.