The Self-Translator’s Preface as a Site of Renaissance Self-Fashioning

Preface writers project an image of themselves; they carefully craft a persona. This exercise in self-portrayal can be linked to the Foucauldian notion of “self-fashioning” coined by Stephen Greenblatt. Reluctant to give up Latin, a language that for several generations to come would hold the promise of a wider audience, they took to self-translating. Self-translators can be seen as stakeholders on both sides of the language debate and divide. This required them to position and fashion themselves according to the perceived priorities of the different audiences they sought to address, to assuage or to flatter. This is why Early Modern prefaces are ideal sites for the observation of the dynamics involved in self-translational self-fashioning. Like elsewhere in Europe, (self) translation took off in earnest once written vernaculars firmly established alongside Latin. One of the most significant works of the Spanish Golden Age to appear in self-translation was the monumental Historia general de Espana by the controversial Jesuit Juan de Mariana.