A vueltas con la «divina Farsalia» (I). Martín Laso de Oropesa, traductor del Bellum civile de Lucano

Abstract

The environment of Laso de Oropesa helps to explain why he took on the daunting task of translating Lucan's epic. Faced with the great difficulties of the text, he certainly did as translators in the service of Alfonso X had done two centuries before: he used an exegetical apparatus provided by people better acquainted than him with the world and the language of the poem. But instead of using, as the anonymous medieval translators had done, the multitude of manuscript scolia that had accompanied the text since late antiquity, he used, according to the hypothesis we set out in the article, the recently printed commentaries, fruit of the humanism of his time. Laso had easy access to them, because throughout his career as a secretary in the service of eminent figures in the Spanish Church, his most productive and mature moment came when he was living in Flanders in the service of a lay patron, the couple of Marquesses of Cenete and Counts of Nassau, in an aristocratic circle intellectually dominated by Vives. The Bellum Civile in Castilian was composed within a humanist culture that was still relatively free of confessional conditioning.

Keywords

• Laso de Oropesa
• a translator under the Emperor Charles the Fifth
• Pharsalia in Spanish
• translation and epic poetry