Description:

Soledad Acosta de Samper was a celebrated Colombian author and intellectual in the 19th century. At a time when few women participated in literary circles, Acosta de Samper founded a magazine dedicated to women and girls, La Mujer (1889-1891). It was in this periodical that she first published the play El Viajero, which features an intellectual woman high-school graduate as one of the main characters. The play offers a comical portray of rural life, and pokes fun at the contrast between city people and country people. It’s a conventional domestic comedy from a woman’s perspective. Beyond theater, Acosta de Samper was a prolific writer in her day, and a collection of her work can be found at the Biblioteca Digital Soledad Acosta de Samper through the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

Excerpt:

DON MATEO: (Getting up and with an angry voice) Ridiculous girl! What is this nonsense? This has gone too far! I have decided not to put up with this anymore... It’s been about a year since I took you out of that boarding school in Bogotá, where you were learning, or rather where I wanted you to learn. I thought that you would come to be of some use on the farm and to help your sister with the household chores, but it turns out that we have a know-it-all who is disgusted by everything, who knows nothing except for how to recite verses. Someone who’s always nervous, scared of everything, and only gets in Juanita’s way...

TIBURCIA: (Crying) I was born to be a victim… so everyone persecutes me at all times of the day. What terrible luck I have! I wonder which shooting star made my life so terrible? 

DON MATEO (Aside:) I think she really has gone crazy! (Aloud, standing in front of her) Let’s talk, Tiburcia, rationally. You remember that, four years ago, I had to go through the pain of losing your mother. I wanted to send my two daughters to Bogotá, to school. But since Juanita, who was about sixteen years old, begged me to let her stay by my side, I decided to send you alone to Bogotá, because there, they said, the school was inexpensive and the girls learned a lot. For three years, Juanita has been my support and my comfort.

TIBURCIA: (Disdainfully) She’s an ignorant woman who barely knows how to read, write, or pray!

DON MATEO: (Enthusiastically) She’s a gem! She supports the helpless. She’s an example for the whole community. She’s the most hard-working and industrious woman in the entire district, the most well-groomed person in our house. A joy everywhere. Wherever she goes, no one is sad, because she knows how to be kind with such tenderness and devotion, as if she were the Angel of Peace...

TIBURCIA: (Impatiently) Enough, father. You’re always praising my sister, who would be considered a moron in Bogotá, she’s got no manners and no culture.

DON MATEO: (Ironically) It’s true, my poor Juanita knows nothing about botany nor astronomy. She doesn’t know cosmography, or geology, or mineralogy, or meteorology, or the art of calisthenics (Aside:) or the art of being elegant, (Aloud) she doesn’t sing songs in Italian, or know how to dance lanceros and mazurkas and sottises… But, on the other hand, she makes everyone around her happy... Which of the two of you do you think fulfills her obligations on earth?

Translators' Note:

In working with this play, we encountered a few issues that we needed to solve when translating. We needed to rework some of the jokes and idioms found in the play so that they made sense in English. For example, Don Mateo says “Anda… a freir monos a no sé dónde” which literally translates to “go fry monkeys somewhere else.” While we were tempted to use the direct translation, because we found it comical and outlandish, we determined that since this is not an expression in English we should use the closest translation. Our research led us to the expression "go spin your yarns somewhere else." We also tried to maintain the different dialects and ways of speaking found between the characters from the city and those from the country. We made sure that the “well-educated” characters used very flowery and intelligent language while the characters from the country used less sophisticated speech. Don José is depicted as a foreigner speaking something that resembles English. Since we translated the whole play into English, we made the foreign language he was speaking include French as well to make it equally foreign to English-speaking audiences.

The Traveler PDF:

Citation:

Farnsworth, May, Abel Guzman, Isabelle Girolamo, and Demarius Coleman, “The Traveler/El viajero,” Spanish and Hispanic Studies Digital Gallery at HWS, July 18, 2024, https://galeriahispana.omeka.net/exhibits/show/feminist-revivals/the-traveler--colombia--1880--.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.