The «Eternal Feminine» in Cristóbal de Castro and Scipio Sighele's Translation of «Eva moderna»

Abstract

Cristóbal de Castro (1874-1953) has been considered a feminist author by some scholars and editors of his work. This is insufficient if the emphasis is only made on the author as someone who wrote to describe women, not paying attention to this female characters. Since what type of woman does Castro present in his work? Furthermore, it is also insufficient if translation is not considered part of his writing and the treatment of women in his translated works is ignored. In this essay, Castro’s thinking on women as reflected in his literary and journalistic work is studied, as well as in the translation of Eva moderna (1921), by the Italian Scipio Sighele. Attention is paid to the ideological affinity between the author and the translator to reflect on whether the texts of both authors are committed to a new model of woman that goes beyond the nineteenth-century codes, which situated women in the sphere of the private and feelings, or, on the contrary, whether they reproduce an «eternal feminine»: an image of women dominated by men as an eternal truth, which, according to the theory of immanence, makes the emancipation of women and their conquest of the public sphere impossible.