“Translating His Way into the Book of the Living: Luis de Carvajal’s Expansive Translations of Sacred Text and the Creation of a New World Crypto-Judaism”
Abstract:
Luis de Carvajal, el mozo arrived in New Spain in 1579 together with his large extended family of judeo-conversos. While living an outwardly devout Catholic life, Luis maintained a passionate secret commitment to his ancestral faith. Rather than a mimetic attachment to certain rituals or garbled prayers passed down by his parents, Luis was committed to a re-creation of Jewish practice and belief based on sacred text. With no knowledge of Hebrew and with the strict prohibition on Jewish books, Luis sought out Jewish texts as they were preserved in Christian books: the Hebrew Bible as part of the Vulgate, Psalms as they appear in a breviary, passages of Talmud and Maimonides cited at length in the works of Oleaster and Nicholas of Lyra. This talk will explore the ways that Luis transforms these Latin texts into a Judaized Spanish and how the texts are transformed by his subversive translations. Luis often translates texts loosely, weaving in added details and rhetorical flourishes. To what extent is this a purposeful mistranslation, an undermining of the ideological power invested in these Catholic books by Carvajal’s extraction of their Hebraic source material?
