Between imitation and adaptation: translations of Tomás de Iriarte's Fábulas literarias in France (1802-1849)

Abstract

The collection of Fábulas literarias (1782) by Iriarte, one of the most traslated Spanish poets of all times, has been one of the long-standing foreign source texts in the 19^th century France in the field of the apólogo. The French versions of Iriarte’s Fabliaux are mostly based on rewriting techniques (imitations in other poets’ production, adaptations to verse in complete translations or literal prose versions inserted in literary histories), while they simultaneously reflect the translators’ growing historicist awareness of their work. Our aim in this paper is to examine the French development of this collection through a selective and representative corpus framed in the first part of the 19^th century.