Literary Piracy in an Entangled Atlantic World

• In Event: La piratería y la imprenta

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which, in the absence of international copyright, translation, literary borrowing, and reprinting were figured as maritime piracy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines Martín Fernández de Navarrete’s Colección de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los españoles desde fines del siglo XV (1825) and Washington Irving’s History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), which drew heavily on the primary sources made available by Navarrete. Irving would later be accused of plagiarism for failing to acknowledge the extent of his work’s dependence on Navarrete’s, and significantly, this literary “robbery” was figured in terms of maritime piracy. Focusing on the little-explored area of Spanish-to-English translation and the movement from a Hispanophone to an Anglophone literary marketplace, this paper examines the metaphors used to conceptualize proprietary authorship in an entangled Atlantic World. It argues that, far from being accidental, the metaphors of maritime piracy that structure this discourse emerge from the very New World history that these nineteenth-century works rework for publication. In other words, the historical fact of maritime piracy in the history of New World colonization and empire becomes a structuring metaphor for the forms of proprietary authorship that seek to rewrite, publish, and profit from that history in the decades immediately following Spanish American independence.

Author

• Mary Lindsay Van Tine, Independent Scholar