From the Neapolitan printing press to fountain pen in Río de la Plata: the problem of translation in Idamia o la reunión inesperada (1808) by Luis Ambrosio Morante

Abstract

Idamia o la reunión inesperada is Luis Ambrosio Morante’s translation of the Italian text Il Selvaggio, by Francesco Cerlone. In this regard, we study the concept of translation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Spain and the colonies. We saw that there were translators/adapters or re-writers that localized texts, keeping the storyline’s main plot and amplifying the Spanish local color, even erasing the original author’s name. Plagiarism was a common way of making texts known, especially feuielletons and drama pieces. In that sense, we are interested in thinking about how, in spite of being translate, that Morante’s play builds supra-territorially a poetic world in service of the independentist cause.