Les Mois, by Jean-Antoine Roucher, and José de Viera y Clavijo’s version, Los Meses

Abstract

This article deals with the “translation/re-creation”, “adaptation/re-creation”, or “imitation” of the work of the French poet Roucher Les Mois by the Canarian intellectual Viera y Clavijo. Before examining his version of the work itself, the paper analyses the “agriculturalist-style” poems that were in fashion in France in the second half of the 18th century, outstanding among which were those composed by Saint-Lambert and “l’abbé” Delille. Inscribed in the tradition of these two writers, Roucher’s work would raise him to the status of master of the descriptive didactic genre. In his version, Viera sometimes translates and sometimes adapts; he replaces French referents with Spanish allusions, making abundant use, as in many of his translations-imitations of French works, of the resource of reduction