Les poisons du XIXe et leur traduction à l’espagnolMateu Orfila et son Traité des poisons (1814-1815)

Abstract

This paper deals with one of the pioneering reference works in 19th-century toxicology: the Traité des poisons published by Matthew Orfila in 1814-1815. Orfila was a Menorca-born physician living in France, and his book was translated into Spanish in Madrid by Mariano de Larra y Langelot in 1819. Apparently, both Orfila and Larra met while studying medicine in Valencia and, later, in their practice as doctors in Paris. In the Introduction, Larra boasts that his translation was reviewed by Orfila himself but not so the translations into German, English or Italian. In this paper I focus on the historical facts surrounding this first translation into Spanish, as well as the reasons that led Mariano de Larra, father of the famous romantic writer Mariano José de Larra, to translate this work after having been exiled in France for 5 years. Then I shall also conduct a terminological analysis, as the publication of this book took place in the years of important changes in chemical terminology, of which the translator was fully aware, to the point of suggesting some new expressions in his introduction. As it seems evident, my interest is diversified throughout the same axis: the translation of a scientific book, already more than 200 years old, which will serve as an excuse to make insights into the author’s rigorous approach, the translator’s peculiar personality and also into the historical circumstances that accompanied those two men; and last but not least I tackle the analysis, given my philological training, of the terminology used in it.