Mexican Miltons

Abstract

This essay follows key traces of John Milton’s presence in Mexico and concludes with a discussion of their extensions into twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico, the hispanophone world, and related critical discussions. Milton’s works circulated in Mexican collections despite the fact that, starting in the eighteenth century, Milton was proscribed by two significant texts that circulated in the Americas: the Spanish Catholic Inquisition’s and Roman Catholic Inquisition’s infamous indexes of proscribed works and authors. English, Spanish, and French versions of Milton’s works appear at the first public library in the Americas, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, confirming the multilingualism of and active participation in Western cultural trends by Mexican readers. After Mexican independence (1821), Mexico’s Francisco Granados Maldonado published his hispanophone translation of Paradise Lost (1858), even though three others by European Spaniards were available. Granados Maldonado’s translational choices reflect a linguistic and political engagement with, but independence from, Spanish and European cultural trends.