UCLA

My dissertation entitled Adapting Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso for Iberian Readerships: Jer�nimo de Urrea’s Spanish Translation and its Sephardic Adaptation (Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS Canon. Or. 6) explores the phenomenon of translation during the 16th century through the case of the Italian epic-romance Orlando Furioso. I examine the movement of Ariosto’s poem from its original Italian cultural context to versions of Jer�nimo de Urrea’s translation into Spanish, published throughout Spain’s 16th-century European empire and on to Sephardic cultural and linguistic enclaves in the Ottoman empire and Italy. I include the Judeo-Spanish adaptation found in the manuscript Canonici Oriental 6 at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, which uses a form of aljam�a: Spanish written in Hebrew script. The two translators/adapters—Urrea and the anonymous Sephardic adapter—write for Iberian audiences, although the geographical spaces in which their texts operate (from creation to reception) extend beyond the limits of the Iberian Peninsula. I claim that by taking a broader approach to the study of Orlando Furioso through an examination of the trajectory of Urrea’s translation, we can highlight essential connections for the translation process that spread throughout the wider Mediterranean. These connections prove to be relevant for the notions both of empire and of diaspora.

I reevaluate the phenomenon of translation as I consider it within the wider framework of its sociocultural circumstances in order to gain a better understanding of how literatures and cultures function. I consider the actors who contributed to the different versions of the translation, the locations in which they were produced and their reception. By including the Judeo-Spanish adaptation in my study, my dissertation reevaluates the influence of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso on Iberian letters and questions what constitutes Iberian literature, who produces it and where it is produced. Finally, my study aims to fill in the gaps between literary histories that have long been considered to be separate, though they clearly belong to the same tradition. The characteristics of the texts studied in this dissertation—translations, written outside the bounds of the Iberian Peninsula, in diaspora and in a different alphabet—have generally led them to be excluded from Spanish literary history.