Translating the Dictionary
published by New Directions, Janet Hendrickson experimentally translates Sebastián de Covarrubias's four-hundred-year-old Spanish dictionary. In the essay below, Hendrickson describes the process of bringing Covarrubias's idiosyncratic entries into English, both erasing and translating his work to create a new poetic text.
For several years, I translated a dictionary. It was the first monolingual dictionary of a European language, the
Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language by Sebastián de Covarrubias, originally published in 1611. When I tell this to English speakers, they often seem puzzled or amused. When I tell this to Spanish speakers, they often say brightly, oh, Covarrubias. He’s something of a Samuel Johnson, I sometimes explain to English speakers as a cultural translation, except that Covarrubias came first, which might make Johnson the translation, and to me Covarrubias is a more interesting writer. His