La recepción de Milton en España: el papel del humanismo ilustrado sevillano

Abstract

This paper focuses on the first translations of Milton in Spain, namely, the literary work of three humanists living in Seville during the second half of the Eighteenth Century. We will discuss a literary contest held in the Andalusian city on the theme of the fall. As an underlying point, we will reflect on some aspects related to translation during the period in question, such as the intrinsic values of it, the moral and educational features applied to it, and its aesthetic and authorial characteristics. One of the foca1 points will be concerned with the date of translation, that is, why it took over 100 years to translate any of Paradise Lost into Spanish, and we will discuss what kind of political or artistic statements the various translations make. We will analyse Alberto Lista's and Félix José Reinoso's submissions. Each poet presented a full poem with more than a hundred lines centered on the Miltonic topic from Paradise Lost. As a secondary point, we will refer to the translation of the first book of Paradise Lost, written by Jovellanos when he was living in Seville, Finally, we will analyse some inherent features of the Spanish translations (stylistic, semantic, contextual, etc) and what kind of response there was to these versions when they appeared. The main conclusions will clarify the (early) reception of Milton in Spain within the humanist Enlightenment in Seville.