Doña Mercedes de Castilla de James Fenimore Cooper, traducida por Pedro Alonso o'Crowley

The first Spanish translation of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel Mercedes of Castile, or The Journey to Cathay was published in Cádiz in 1841 with the title Doña Mercedes de Castilla o El viaje a Catay. The novel was translated by the prolific translator Pedro Alonso O'Crowley, born in Cádiz. The novel, a fictional chronicle of the first voyage of Columbus, aroused a great interest in Spain. In the present article, various features of this translation are described, using two levels of analysis of the translated text, the macro- and the microtextual. Doña Mercedes can be considered as a case study in the politics of translation carried out by the Imprenta de la Revista Médica of Cádiz in the mid-19th century, as well as a sample of O'Crowley’s style of translation.