In:Textual and Contextual Voices of Translation
Edited by Cecilia Alvstad, Annjo K. Greenall, Hanne Jansen and Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov
[Benjamins Translation Library 137] 2017
► pp. 223–240
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 | University of Oviedo | University of Massachusetts Amherst | University of the Free State
Published online: 19 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.137.12val
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.137.12val
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century translations of Cieza de León’s work
- 3.Twentieth-century voices: The translation-edition by von Hagen/de Onís and the translation by the Cooks
- 4.Cieza de León in twenty-first-century US academic discourse
- 5.Concluding remarks
