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The voices of Cieza de León in English

Notes on el nefando pecado de la sodomía in translation and in US academia
  • Roberto A. Valdeón
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Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation
This chapter is in the book Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation

Abstract

Cieza de León’s Crónica del Perú, a chronicle of his travels through the Andean region in the sixteenth century, was translated into English by John Stevens in 1709 and by Clements Markham in 1864, and then again in the twentieth century by Harriet de Onís and Alexandra and Noble Cook. This chapter explores how the voice of Cieza de León has been changed in the translations and their paratexts, and in the recent appropriation of parts of his work by some US scholars, who have used the topic of sodomy for their representations of colonial sexual habits in the Andean world. My analysis shows that by doing so, these scholars misrepresent the polyphonic nature of Cieza de León’s work.

Abstract

Cieza de León’s Crónica del Perú, a chronicle of his travels through the Andean region in the sixteenth century, was translated into English by John Stevens in 1709 and by Clements Markham in 1864, and then again in the twentieth century by Harriet de Onís and Alexandra and Noble Cook. This chapter explores how the voice of Cieza de León has been changed in the translations and their paratexts, and in the recent appropriation of parts of his work by some US scholars, who have used the topic of sodomy for their representations of colonial sexual habits in the Andean world. My analysis shows that by doing so, these scholars misrepresent the polyphonic nature of Cieza de León’s work.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Part I. Opening the field
  4. Introduction 3
  5. Part II. Charting the field
  6. The Scandinavian singer-translator’s multisemiotic voice as performance 21
  7. Translators, editors, publishers, and critics 39
  8. The making of a bestseller-in-translation 61
  9. Contextual factors when reading a translated academic text 81
  10. When poets translate poetry 101
  11. Translators in search of originals 119
  12. Part III. Traveling the field
  13. Unraveling multiple translatorship through an e-mail correspondence 133
  14. Silenced in translation 159
  15. The voice of the implied author in the first Norwegian translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe 181
  16. Three voices or one? 201
  17. The voices of Cieza de León in English 223
  18. References 241
  19. Index 263
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.137.12val

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Part I. Opening the field
  4. Introduction 3
  5. Part II. Charting the field
  6. The Scandinavian singer-translator’s multisemiotic voice as performance 21
  7. Translators, editors, publishers, and critics 39
  8. The making of a bestseller-in-translation 61
  9. Contextual factors when reading a translated academic text 81
  10. When poets translate poetry 101
  11. Translators in search of originals 119
  12. Part III. Traveling the field
  13. Unraveling multiple translatorship through an e-mail correspondence 133
  14. Silenced in translation 159
  15. The voice of the implied author in the first Norwegian translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe 181
  16. Three voices or one? 201
  17. The voices of Cieza de León in English 223
  18. References 241
  19. Index 263
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