The translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Canaria et insulis reliquis by Gregorio Chil Authorship and comparative analysis

Abstract

The letters of a group of Florentine merchants, established in Seville and sent to Florence in 1341, contain the account of an expedition to the Canary Islands. This narrative was translated into Latin, then the language of culture, by the Italian humanist Giovanni Boccaccio, and received two nineteenth-century translations. Sabin Berthelot rendered it into French in 1842 in his work L’Ethnographie et les Annales de la Conquête, which was translated into Spanish in 1849 by the Catalan archaeologist Juan Arturo Malibrán y Aubet; and in 1876 Gregorio Chil y Naranjo published his own version in Estudios históricos, climatológicos y patológicos de las Islas Canarias. Some studies (Martínez Hernández, 2001) have questioned Chil’s translation, arguing that it largely reproduces Malibrán’s Spanish version, albeit with some modifications possibly prompted by Berthelot’s later claim in Antiquités Canariennes (Paris, 1879), where he criticised the Canarian historian for omitting mention of his French translation. This article seeks to examine the extent to which Chil’s translation depends on Malibrán’s one. After an initial review of the state of the question, the paper provides relevant biographical information and describes the chronicle (its circumstances of composition and its contents). It then discusses the methodological principles guiding Chil’s work, particularly with respect to sources, and offers a comparative analysis of both translations on different levels. This study concludes that Chil was familiar with the translations by Berthelot and by Malibrán (who translated the French scholar’s version of the Boccaccian text). Yet, although Chil coincides with Malibrán in certain passages, he produced a new version, most likely to avoid the errors in Berthelot’s translation, which Malibrán had uncritically reproduced.