Translating Genre and Gender for Madrid Audiences: The Case of María Rosa de Gálvez

This essay highlights the importance of translation for eighteenth-century women writers, giving special focus to the life and work of María Rosa Gálvez (1768–1806), the most successful Spanish woman writer of her day and a member of a family with important positions in the Bourbon administration in both Spain and colonial America. We will consider Gálvez’s comments on translation, theatre, and lyric, as well as the international texts that she adapted, translated, or imitated to understand better her attempts to make a place for herself in literary history. A focus on two translations—Catalina o la bella labradora (1801) and the opera Bion (1804)—along with one original sentimental drama—El egoísta (1804) will reveal the importance of genre and gender in the aesthetic and thematic choices that Gálvez made in her translations, adaptations, and original texts. Ultimately, we will go beyond the dichotomy of previous approaches to Gálvez’s work, seeing her translated and original work as separate and unequal endeavours, to see how her choices of genre and emphasis on gender run throughout her career.