Translating Leonor de Meneses: recreating seventeenth-century protofeminist Spanish in twenty-first-century English

This thesis presents The Last to Yield, the first English translation of Leonor de Meneses’ seventeenth-century novella El desdeñado más firme (1665), alongside a critical translator’s note that frames translation as a feminist, mediating practice. Meneses was a Portuguese noblewoman wrote under the pseudonym Laura Mauricia to craft a baroque narrative that interrogates illusion (engaño), disillusion (desengaño), and the constraints of patriarchal society. Her work, though historically popular, has remained largely inaccessible to English-language readers.

This translation animates Meneses’ text for a twenty-first century audience through a triadic critical framework that positions Reader, Author, and Translator as co-constitutive agents. Rather than privileging fidelity as strict equivalence, the project treats translation as a dynamic, situational practice of negotiation, where meaning emerges through rhetorical effect, tone, and structure. Strategies such as syntactic recalibration, metaphorical adaptation, and tonal modulation allow the translation to balance clarity with strangeness, preserving Meneses’ stylistic density while enabling accessibility.

The translator’s note situates the novella within both its historical moment—the decline of the Spanish Golden Age—and contemporary contexts marked by persistent gender inequities and performative social systems. By drawing parallels between seventeenth-century courtly culture and twenty-first century current events, the project underscores the enduring relevance of Meneses’ critique of gender, power, and representation.