FRANCISCO JAVIER CLAVIJERO (1731-1787) AUTOTRADUTTORE ALL’ITALIANO

Arriving in Italy following the expulsion of the Jesuits from all the territories of the Spanish crown, the Mexican Francisco Javier Clavijero did not delay much to conceive the work that earned him the fame of initiator of the modern Latin American historiography. Eager to correct the erroneous and, in many ways, teratological image that the philosophes had offered of America, he composed, in the Spanish language, his, still fundamental today, Historia antigua de México, which, however, for various reasons, had to remain manuscript for a long time. Instead, he published it in Italian (Storia antica del Messico, 4 vols., Cesena, Biasini, 1780-81), two years after finishing it, in March 1778. The considerable extension of the work certainly makes Clavijero credible when he claims to have imposed himself a “new and difficult task by translating [his books] into the Tuscan”. The solutions that he adopts for some translation problems in the field of the subject dealt with are preferibiles to those of most contemporary translators of similar works.