Helena Miguélez-Carballeira

El imperio interno: Discursos sobre masculinidad e imperio en los imaginarios nacionales español y catalán del siglo XX

This article takes as a starting point the notion that the Spanish post-imperial imagination after 1898 included the period’s preoccupation with the rise of Spain’s peripheral separatisms and the idea of Spanish national disintegration as the last phase of the country’s imperial decline. The article traces the manifestation of this internal imperial imagination in Ortega y Gasset’s Espana invertebrada (1922) and its reverberations in the writings on Catalan-Castilian relations by Ernesto Gimenez Caballero and Jaume Vicens Vives, which interact explicitly with Ortega’s text. Further, the article analyses the competitive power play present in the Spanish and Catalan twentieth-century national imagination, where symbolic evocations of empire function as manifestations of a coveted masculine power that are used to convey different political solutions to Spain’s internal national conflict.

Introduction: Translation in Wales: History, theory and approaches

Translation is a key part of the present-day ethos of bilingualism in Wales. One crucial point in the process through which Welsh recovered its rightful public role as one of the country’s official languages, after centuries of structural discrimination and invisibility, was theWelsh Language Act of 1993. Since then, translation and interpreting have become central instruments for implementing the policy of legislated bilingualism in Wales, which is based on the principle that through translation and translation-related practices (e.g. codrafting, subtitling, translation pedagogy and the creation of terminologies and computerassisted translation tools), Welsh can regain public visibility and Welsh-language speakers restore their right to conduct as much of their lives as possible in a language compatible with all aspects of the modern world. Under this framework, translation and translationrelated discourses have become a shibboleth for language rights advocacy in Wales, where (sometimes heated) debates about translation range from questions related to civil and political freedoms to matters of governance, public spending and social cohesion. Such debates have received widespread media coverage. One recent example was the controversy surrounding the decision by the Welsh Assembly Commission in 2010 to abandon the practice of publishing a full bilingual record of the proceedings (for which translation services are needed) in order to reduce spending (see the article in this issue by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost, Patrick Carlin and Colin H. Williams) or the 35-day imprisonment of Welsh-language activist Jamie Bevan in 2012, whose trial statement amounted to a plea for the right of Welsh-language speakers to receive hearings fully in Welsh, and not always through the mediation of an interpreter. Eighteen years after the passing of the Government of Wales Act in 1998 which initiated the (still ongoing) process of devolving political, legislative, cultural and economic competencies fromWestminster to Wales, views about translation as a means of facilitating Welsh language protection have become more ambivalent. While debate about the contradictory effects of bilingual literary publications and literary self-translation has already marked the field of Welsh literary studies (Clancy 1999, 63–64; Price 2002; G. Davies 2004), open criticism of translation’s part in reversing the Welsh language shift have also begun to appear in contemporary cultural and political commentaries. Certainly, translation has been integral to rebuilding the status of Welsh as a “living language” and to securing the right of Welsh speakers to use their language in situations where they previously would have been forced to switch to English by the pragmatics of politeness. Nevertheless, some cultural

From Sentimentality to Masculine Excess in Galician National Discourse Approaching Ricardo Carvalho Calero’s Literary History

This article studies the gendered meanings of Galician national discourse with particular focus on the notion of masculinity. The first part of the article analyzes cultural writings in the early stages of Galician regionalism and establishes how the metaphor of Galicia as feminine (and, as a consequence, of Galician manhood as marked with the notions of sentimentality and submissiveness) gradually became an important stumbling block for nationalism’s emergence as a viable political movement. In the second section, the author studies how the early texts of Galician political nationalism reacted against such metaphors by means of a heightened masculinist discourse bent on recasting national insurgence as a question of virility. Finally, the author analyzes Ricardo Carvalho Calero’s Historia da literatura galega contemporánea (1963/1981) in line with this rhetoric of national virility and as an example of what the author will call the masculine excess present in the seminal texts of Galician cultural nationalism.

Perpetuating Asymmetries: The Interdisciplinary Encounter between Translation Studies and Hispanic Studies

This section is devoted to writing that does not fall within the strict defi nition of ‘research’ but that is, nevertheless, of special interest to researchers. It enables us to publish a wide variety of material on many aspects of hispanism: opinion, discussion, interviews, revaluations, arguments, anecdotes and memoirs, and impassioned calls to arms. It also offers us the opportunity of publishing our readers’ responses to them. Contributions are invited, and may be of any length from a paragraph to 7,000 words.