Retrieved from Oblivion: On Short Story Translations from Spanish into Icelandic.

Abstract

It has been a common view that translations from Spanish into Icelandic are fairly recent, that they only date from the last decades of the 20th century. The following article shows that this is not so. Many translations of short stories by Spanish-speaking authors are to be found in the very rich tradition of newspaper and review publication from the end of the 19th century. The article attempts to summarize the history of these translations from the end of the 19th century up to this day. as an appendix there is a list of all the short story translations found during the research. Furthermore, the article explores the work of the scholar and translator Þórhallur Þorgilsson, the first romanist in Iceland. He left behind a great amount of scholarly work and translations from roman languages, especially Spanish, which have almost been forgotten.