Father Galo’s translations from Italian: An approach to the translator, the poet and the man

Abstract

Over the first third of the 20^th century, a figure of exceptional cultural and human interest emerges within the Asturian literary dimension. However, despite his priceless contribution to the Asturian Language and Literature Father Galo has remained in the shadows until very recently. The documental collections of his personal archive are currently being digitized and studied by the Fernán-Coronas Project. This project is making and outstanding contribution in order to bring to light an immense literary, philological and ethnographic legacy, whose in-depth analysis is starting to allow researchers to paint the portrait of a man of a great intellectual persona, passionate about research in his mother tongue in very different fields. Within the enormous poetic production of Fernán-Coronas, which is preserved in thousands of recently discovered handwritten files, the translation of lyrical work occupies a place of special relevance. This article will explore the few but extraordinary poems that Fernán-Coronas translated into Asturian from the Italian language. These works range from the Renaissance poetics of Buonarroti to the different aesthetic currents of the 19^th century, with names as immortal as those of Leopardi, Carducci, Pascoli or Tommaseo. This paper will also cast some light on the poetic and translating personality of Father Galo, by contemplating his work from different perspectives (aesthetic, lexical, metric, traductological, historical or biographical). It will also show the importance that direct reception of universal literature has for the normalization of a minority language, such as the Asturian language, as the translation of this literature typically goes through the linguistic, thematic or commercial filter of a dominant language in the translation process.