A couple of years ago, I asked a friend who was doing Spanish Literature at a peninsular university for his reading list. As a reply, I received a list of male authors ranging from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. Had there really been no woman writer in Spain in six centuries of literary history? I wondered. The reason behind my request was that I had been asked to contribute a post on Spanish Literature to Susan Sellers’s successful blog  and I wanted to include some female writers—I ended up with only Ana María Matute, a well-known twentieth-century novelist. What is most disturbing about my friend’s reading list, aimed for those who would go on to educate the future generations, is that it didn’t even include those few women authors who have made it into the canon of Spanish literature—that is to say, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Rosalía de Castro or Carmen Martín Gaite.

These are just the tip of the iceberg. As my work in HERA shows, Castro and Pardo Bazán are just a handful of the women writing and publishing in Spain during the period under study (1790-1914). But if they remain ignored by some Spanish Departments in the twenty-first century, what hope is there for those working in the literary shadows? By literary shadows, I mean translating someone else’s texts, a profession which is not conductive to much literary fame, even nowadays and even if the translator is male. My exploration of the Spanish Collective Catalogue (see my earlier post) has revealed a huge number of translations done by women in Spain: such as Carmen Abreu, Rebecca Airé de Aguilar, María Ortiz Ortiz, Pura Belmonte, Matilde Otero de Nobella, Teresa Oyarzún  and Teresa del Sacramento, among many others. These are some of the new names I have added to our website Women Writers: all of them share the unenviable fate of having been all but vanished from the cultural legacy of the country. They lived in nineteenth-century Spain and translated from French, English and/or Italian. But here our information normally ends: if you check the entries for these women on our database, you will notice something striking: most of the categories in the template for writers’ personal and professional lives appear as “Not yet checked.” Now, rather than “unchecked,” this caption means “we-hope-someone-out-there-might-know.” And this is not wishful thinking: we expect to find out about their lives and careers at some point; it is only that today, and on an initial investigation, this data seems non-existent.

Let me finish on a more positive note, by sketching the case of Joaquina García Balmaseda, a translator already present on Women Writers about whom we do have more information. Known as Adela, Aurora, Baroness de Olivares, J. G. B., Ketty, Lady, Pérez Mirón, Samb and Zahara, Joaquina García Balmaseda seems the most prolific translator in mid and late nineteenth-century Spain—so far we have listed fifty-one translations done over the course of 47 years. As these numbers suggest, García Balmaseda often translated more than one novel per year. According to the database, the year 1862, one of her most prolific, saw the publication of, at least, six of her translations: of Edmund About’s The Man with a Broken Ear, Lardin and D’Achonne’s A Girl’s First Love, Hendrik Conscience’s The Joys of Being Rich, Paul Feval’s The Black Guard, Luis Ulbach’s The Story of a Mother and her Children, and Enrique Riviere’s The Chopped Hand. Apart from a translator, García Balmaseda was an actress, editor, journalist, playwright and poet. Perhaps this multitasking (yes, reputedly typically female trait) has contributed to her greater visibility, also the fact that some of these professions, such as acting, already placed her in the public arena.

Yet lots of work remains to be done about the “Pura Belmontes” of Spanish Literature, the ones who still remain as “Not yet checked” on our database. Even worse, there are those for whom we don’t even have a name: see the work done by “Silvia,”  “Araceli,” “Zoé” and “Violeta,”  whose real or full names elude us. And how many did know that Josefina Blanco de Valle-Inclán (wife to the famous Spanish playwright Ramón María de Valle-Inclán, author of Bohemian Lights) was a translator too?