Autotraducción, autoría y autopromoción en el Siglo de Oro : las posturas de Juan de Mariana y Bernardino Gómez Miedes

The purpose of this article is twofold: it aims at being both a contribution to the historical study of self-translation and an introduction to the analysis of the translator’s preface as a subgenre of the preface, a paratextual space typical of the then-new object that was the printed book in the Renaissance. Prefaces written for their self-translations from Latin into Spanish by two authors of Spain’s Golden Age, Juan de Mariana (1536-1624) and Bernardino Gómez Miedes (1515- 1589), highlight two aspects. On the one hand, they are studied as self-reflexive devices: how does the rhetoric of self-portraiture relate to the discursive position, the "posture", adopted by the author-translator in a time of patronage? On the other hand, when looking at the interlingual dynamics at work, prefaces to (self)translations allow a glimpse into the ways in which language differences could (not) be bridged. In Habsburg Spain, an increasingly strict hierarchy between (printed, written or merely spoken) languages collectively conditioned the flow of (self)translations but also opened up possibilities for individual self-promotion.