The two first French translations of the Guzmán de Alfarache: enigmas and revelations of an editorial investigation

Abstract

At the end of the XVIth century and during the beginning of the XVIIth, the enthusiasm of French lectors about the esthetic innovations of the Spanish narrative prose stimulated a ground-breaking importation of texts. Among them, the Guzmán de Alfarache, by Mateo Alemán, best-seller of the years 1599-1604, took over the European literary space. The architects of that library success were the author himself, printers, booksellers, from Madrid, from the other capital cities of the Spanish Monarchy, and Paris. Translators, real passeurs of culture, magnified that importation of Spanish literature in France. Through the line of an editorial investigation intending to uncover the mysteries of the two first translations of the Guzmán de Alfarache in French,this article studies the international diffusion of a successful text, and the activities of agents who promote the circulation of the book as a cultural and literary material, and a commercial object.