Nineteenth century unpublished translations of Sophocles into Spanish

Abstract

In Spain, all preserved tragedies by Sophocles were not available until José Alemany Bolufer translated them and were later on published in the “Biblioteca Clásica” series (Hernando editions), in 1921. Before the nineteenth century, there is only one translation: Oedipus Tyrannus by Pedro Estala (1793). In the nineteenth century, three Sophocles’ tragedies were published in Spain: Oedipus Rex (1878), translated into Catalan language by Enric Franco; and, into Spanish language, Antigone (1883), by Antonio González Garbín, and Philoctetes (1886), by Ángel Lasso de la Vega. In Italy, three nineteenth-century translations of Sophocles’ tragedies by Pedro Montegón, preserved in a manuscript of the Royal Academy of History, will be published at the end of the 20^th (1992): Oedipus Rex, Electra and Philoctetes. Finally, three new translations of Sophocles’ tragedies are still found in manuscripts from the Menéndez Pelayo Library archives, in Santander: Antigone, translated by Graciliano Afonso; Oedipus at Colonus, by Emeterio Suaña y Castellet; and Ajax, with two versions (prose and verse) by José Musso y Valiente. The aim of this article is to present and comment on these texts which we propose to retrieve shortly.