James/Diego/Jaime Clark: Shedding light on the translator who sparked modern Spanish translations of Shakespeare

Abstract

This chapter presents the first major Spanish Shakespeare collection which was rendered directly from English (1873-1874). It provides an intriguing case of how binary oppositions such as native-foreign and national-international can be challenged by translation history. Its only translator, barely known to date, was not Spanish and Spanish was not his first language. Indeed, James, Diego or Jaime Clark, as he was named in different moments of his life, was born and raised in the multicultural Naples of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in a British family. Moreover, he studied for several years in Germany before moving to Spain at the age of 20. In Madrid and Barcelona, he translated from German, English and, also, French into Spanish, and he published political essays, press articles and poems written originally in Spanish. His ten Shakespearean plays transformed Spanish Shakespeare history, doing away with the norm of translating from French, which was replaced with the norm of translating directly from English. Furthermore, they provided a model for translating in verse, in contrast with the prosaic tradition; this model is still today taken as a guide to capture Shakespeare’s variety of styles in Spanish. Combining a range of approaches including transfer studies, translation sociology and descriptive translation studies, the present case study delves into this key agent’s cultural transfer activities and maps his artistic networks with the ultimate aim of working towards a research methodology that comfortably embraces his and other similarly complex mediation roles.