El tratamiento estético de la figura de la prostituta en la lírica modernista española

This PhD thesis sets out to show, firstly, that Spanish modernist poets are lavish in their sublimation of the figure of the prostitute in their lyrical compositions. It argues that ultimately, they do not do this randomly or arbitrarily, but in response to a series of mechanisms that turn this sublimation into an investigation within the modernist movement. The need for a study such as this one seems indisputable, as not very much work has been done on this topic in Spanish literature, unlike in other literatures (particularly Latin American literature, precisely in the same turn-of-the-century period and in connection with Modernism). What little work has been published on the treatment of the figure of the prostitute in turn-of-the-century Spanish literature refers to narrative prose, notably the realist and naturalist novel, as well as the short story. Also, such work usually lacks a general theoretical framework, as it deals with one novel, one author, or in the case of greater generalisation, a specific type of novel. The study of this figure in literary texts involves studying Modernism itself, as it neatly draws together the panoply of topics so dear to Modernism, namely, the erotic, the marginal, the feminine, the cursed and Culturalism...

Miguel Sawa y la Revista "Don Quijote" (1892-1903)

In late 19th century and early 20th coexisted in time in Spain a lot of writers, many of them well known today, but many others who haven’t been rescued yet. This stage has been called the Silver Age of Spanish literature. Among the best known and most representative of Madrid’s bohemian characters were the Sawa brothers: Manuel, Alejandro, Miguel and Enrique. All of them had related to the literature or journalism, in greater or lesser extent, and were very significant figures in their time. Alejandro, who reached a high literary level, has recently been subject of various studies and biographies which have located him in his place as a outstanding writer, rescuing him from forgetting where he remained sunk until a few decades ago. But it has not happened the same with the rest of the brothers, especially with Miguel, who was also a writer. The object of the first part of this thesis is to recover the figure of the Miguel Sawa, rebuilding his biography and both journalistic and literary career. Miguel Sawa, belonging to the so-called generation of literarian bohemia, born in Seville in 1866. After moving with his family to Málaga, where he spent his childhood, settled definitively in Madrid in 1880. In Madrid lived the atmosphere of the newspapers offices and the literarian gatherings of the “cafes”. He was a friend of Valle Inclán, the Machado brothers, the Baroja brothers, and belonged to the “Gente Nueva” and to the Germinal generation. In 1901 he married María Palacio, with whom he had a son, Emilio, who died before completing one year of life, and a daughter, Carmen, who had five years when Sawa died. After spending a season in La Coruña, as director of the newspaper La Voz de Galicia, returned to Madrid at the beginning of 1910, ready to continue his literary career, but died suddenly on 1 October of that same year because of a fulminant pneumonia...

Ecotranslation applied: Two Spanish translations of H. G. Wells "The Country of the Blind"

The birth of the ecological movement in the 1960s motivated the conception of a new branch of Translation Studies known as Ecotranslation. This scarcely known theoretical research framework sets off from two main notions: firstly, the representation of nature in literature and secondly, the importance of the different roles and interpretations that nature can be provided with in literary works. From these bases, the goal of our pilot study was to apply this new nature-centered approach to the translations of H. G. Wells’ short story The Country of the Blind, as rendered into Spanish by Íñigo Jáuregui (2014) and Alfonso Hernández Catá (1919). The acknowledgement that Ecotranslation derives from a general awareness towards nature, considering it as an intrinsic feature of humankind which simultaneously influences and is affected by human behavior, motivated the following analysis of the role that Wells attributed to it in his short story The Country Of The Blind, which evinced a strong correspondence between environment and society in the original text, where nature was shown to be an essential instrument to figuratively reflect social concerns. Setting off from that critical analysis we compared how two chronologically separate translators rendered the natural elements of the original story into a different language, in this case Spanish. In general terms, data confirmed that Jauregi´s translation, published in 2014, encompasses a much more literal approach to the source text, rendering Well´s original terminology into the closest equivalent expressions in Spanish. While Hernández Catá, seems to have focused his work on the idea of human control over nature, even if this decision meant altering the precise way in which Wells articulated his ideas.