El labrador by José de Viera y Clavijo, an unpublished translation of a passage from Virgilian Georgics

Abstract

The objectives of this work are to edit the text by the Canarian priest and enlightened José de Viera y Clavijo entitled El labrador and contextualize it in the author's literary production through a comparative analysis of it. Specifically, it is an autograph manuscript that contains an imitation or translation of a passage from Book II of the Virgilian Georgics and which until now had remained unpublished on the shelves of the Municipal Library of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, like so many of his works, which are currently being edited. By publishing it, we intend to make known a notable work from the corpus of translations or imitations of the polygraph, which represents, without a doubt, one of the greatest of his production. The analysis has allowed us to conclude that this is a very particular case, since the majority of the works that he either translates or imitates are of French origin. Although Viera had a great command of the classical languages, his direct translations from Latin did not reach ten and this bilingual imitation, made up of more than eighty verses, is, by far, the longest known to him.