Soledad Acosta de Samper spoke English, traveled the world, wrote every day, and saved the newspaper clippings in which her novels appeared to transform them into albums. She married out of love, had four daughters – one of them, a nun and a poet, published an edition of Novena de Aguinaldos It is sung during the nine days before Christmas in Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador – founded five magazines, established herself as a journalist and historian, fought for the place of women in society and today protested the censorship imposed in Latin America on its most famous female protagonist: Dolores.
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Acosta was one of the most prolific writers of her time, both male and female. He wrote “twenty-one novels, forty-eight short stories, four plays, forty-three social and literary studies, twenty-one historical texts, and founded and directed five newspapers (to which he himself contributed most of the fictional and non-fictional texts); he also made several translations.” Like many nineteenth-century women writers, she was censored and later forgotten. His generation was one of those thinkers who were politically committed to defining how individuals should be shaped as citizens of a civilized nation. Of course, this also included the place of women, who were constantly kept in silence and subservience and entrusted with the responsibility of home and children. Acosta’s writing was politically engaged and openly thought-provoking.
dolores Translation is like a unicorn in practice for several reasons.
The 1980s, fortunately, brought with it a feminism that was committed to revisiting and recovering the literary canon of women writers. Acosta was reclaimed during that decade by leading scholars such as Monserrat Ordóñez and Carolina Alzate, whose teachings paved the way for this translation project, through which I hope to fill the gap in literary production and scholarship surrounding the author. It may have been difficult to place her within a tradition in her own time, but, like many others, she was writing – as readers can now see in this book – for the future. His depiction of social customs appears almost fantastical in the light of the transformation his protagonist undergoes.
doloresThe novel, titled after its heroine, was written in 1847. It tells the story of a young woman in nineteenth-century Bogotá who discovers a family secret that gradually leads to her downfall. Through her letters and diaries we enter her inner world, full of meditations on death and love, religion and nature, illness and the meaning of youth. This book was published in the same year Maria Written by George Isaac, a novel that has since been recognized as Colombia’s foundational novel and has been published in over 150 editions (while dolores Only four have occurred in the last 150 years). Although its genius was probably not recognized at the time of publication, dolores Today Acosta’s works are among the most studied and critically reviewed.
dolores Translation is like a unicorn in practice for several reasons. To begin with, there exists an English translation produced in New York in the late nineteenth century. We do not know the name of the translator or the exact date of his work, as neither exists in the printed edition. It is rare for a modern translator to have access to an edition produced in the same period as the original work, and this access provides unique opportunities. On the one hand, the translation serves as a source for nineteenth-century English idioms; On the other hand, as evidence of the ideas that the translator had about a Colombian female writer.
For example, there are passages in the English version in which Dolores’ complexion is described as “pure” or “white”, words that do not appear in the Spanish manuscript, although the latter portrays her with rosy cheeks and beautiful skin. At other moments, when Acosta devotes several sentences to describing the customs of Bogotá at the time – many of them using now obsolete words – the nineteenth-century translator opts for a mixture of approximate equivalents and Spanish words (sometimes, though not always) explained through footnotes.
I decided to preserve the Anglicisms and nineteenth-century syntactic structures used by the original translator, even when they did not alter the meaning of the source text.
Yet this is not the most interesting feature. In the original English translation of doloresThe entire third part of the novel has been omitted. The book is a framed narrative: although Dolores is the protagonist, she is not the narrator; His story is told by his cousin Pedro. His voice is prominent in the first part; The second combines his words with letters sent to him by Dolores. The third section – omitted in the nineteenth-century translation – consists entirely of the protagonist’s diaries, in which his voice, mediated through earlier letters and repeated conversations, comes through directly with palpable intensity. This structure is a way for a male narrator to circumvent the public’s preferences and allow Dolores to have the last word in her story, without Pedro having to speak for her, as Alzate notes – a reading I share.
Although the absence of the third part of the book is surprising, the most fascinating aspect of the manuscript comes from an act of co-authorship that corrects it: Acosta de Samper himself translated, by hand, the omitted third part. Or rather, he revisited it (needless to say, rewrote it). Every writer knows the temptation to keep revising a text indefinitely, as well as the experience of re-reading a book long after it has been published. Time, distance and experience make us editors and expanders. Furthermore, translation offers the possibility of giving a text something like a parallel life, in which it can exist in another register. This is exactly what Acosta de Samper did when he returned to his novel. dolores. In his English edition, the final section is full of annotations and beautiful added passages that do not appear in the original Spanish text.
All these reasons make dolores A particularly attractive challenge for a contemporary translator. This is how I decided to adapt the text: I decided to preserve the nineteenth-century anglicisms and syntactic structures used by the original translator, while making no changes to the meaning of the source text. Naturally, I did not include unnecessary explanations for the modern reader, nor did I add comments regarding race or femininity that are absent in the original.
Whenever possible, I have kept Spanish words that have no direct translation and included their meanings in the glossary, following the definitions of Alzate in the 2021 edition published by the Universidad de los Andes, which presents the authorized text. As for the stimulating—yet challenging—third part, in which Acosta de Samper restores what is missing but also resorts to paraphrase to adapt long sentences of Spanish syntax to the English version, I have left them almost intact. Where I found passages of particular beauty and poetic power, which also add a layer of complexity to the story and the psychology of character, I retained them, while carefully marking the beginning and end of these additions in footnotes for curious readers who may wish to trace the changes to the text.
Finally, I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Jessie Haley and Juliana Castro Varon for making Sita Press possible and giving a home to thousands of women writers who, like Soledad, do not always find a place in the feminist and democratic publishing circuit. I dare say the author would be glad to see dolores Reach so many readers around the world. Thank you thank you.
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From dolores By Soledad Acosta de Samper, published by Sita Press.
read an excerpt from dolores Here.
