Cursilería and Poetic Translation: Byron and Heine

Abstract

The verse translations of Byron and Heine into Spanish during the nineteenth century play an important role in the configuration of cursi as aesthetic category, in parallel with the development in Germany of another related category: kitsch. The kitsch poems are often pastiches (a mixture of Orientalism as a theme, traditional metric, and stilted, if not corny, vocabulary) that reconfigure the rhetorical and metrical composition of the original texts and disfigure them at the same time, as it is evidenced by comparison with the prose versions, sometimes anonymous, which are predominant in France and often act as intermediaries. All this, of course, is inseparable from the context in which cursilería emerges and holds on as a social and literary affectation with a failed pretentiousness of leveling classes and merits.