Las dos traducciones de El purgatorio de San Patricio por Denis Florence MacCarthy (1853 y 1873) Primeras calas

Abstract

The article analyses The Purgatory of Saint Patrick, a translation of Calderón’s El purgatorio de San Patricio which the Irish poet Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817-82) published in two versions, one in 1853 and one in 1873. The comparison of the two texts shows how MacCarthy, as a lucid importer of the Catholic and Baroque Calderón in a predominantly hostile Anglophone culture, progressively refined his poetics of translation, adopting in particular a completely imitative versification (including a bold assonant English verse) and showing a growing, if eclectic, fidelity to the Calderonian rhetorical universe.