Translation, history and tourism: travelers’ narratives in 19th-century Spain. Alexandre Laborde and his Voyage pittoresque (1806), translated into Spanish by Juan Fernández de Rojas in 1807

Abstract

I review the connections between travel literature, translation and the language related to tourism in an early nineteenth-century travellers’ book. I regard this text as a hybrid genre between literature and history, which is an excellent source for studies on the history of tourism. From the perspective of translation studies, this type of documents provides clues for the study of tourism as an ingredient of social life in modern societies, because they are placed at the meeting point between history, translation and tourism. Travel books offer a broad range of direct experiences, which are contemporary to the described facts, and whose three essential features are that they are real and descriptive narratives, in which subjectivity is more important than objectivity. Every trip can be regarded from a double historical approach: (1) the interpretation of the surprising observations and travelling experiences, that is, the places, the buildings, the people or the institutions which existed in the visited spaces; (2) the ability to understand the peculiarities of the historical moment, whose idiosyncratic features leave its imprint in the time of writing. The work employed to review these ideas is the Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Espagne (1806) by Alexandre Laborde (1773-1842), whose Spanish version (Viaje pintoresco e histórico de España, Madrid, 1807) seems to be the final result of the translation of the first volume published in Paris by Pierre Didot in 1806. The four volumes contain a compendium of political and civil history as well as descriptions of archaeological sites, some of them represented in the more than 900 images engraved thanks to the collaboration of great artists. The first volume on Catalonia had a first limited edition in Spanish by the Spanish Royal Press. It was dedicated to Spanish minister Manuel Godoy, who patronized the project. The translation was carried out by Juan Fernández de Rojas, an Augustinian monk who was part of the so-called Salamanca poetic which was active during the end of the 18th century. Comparing the Spanish and French works, the paper points out the rich synergies between tourism, history and translation.