Juan Rivera, un traduttore militante nella Spagna del Triennio Liberale

The aim of this paper is to investigate the figure of Juan Rivera, a Spanish translator working during the Liberal Triennium, through the analysis of prefaces he added to his three translations of important Enlightenment texts one of them being On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria Bonesana. Since much of its fortune depended on the reception of its translations, first of all the French one by André Morellet, this paper analyses other translators’ prefaces, namely that of Morellet himself, the first anonymous English translation and the first Spanish one, in order to highlight correlations between the historical and political context and the translation method employed. Morellet, for instance, transformed the philosophical Italian essay into a legal treatise as he was guided by the idea of writing a useful tool for the French Nation and the whole of humanity, as he declared in his “Preface of the translator”. Juan Rivera, author of the second translation into Spanish of On Crimes and Punishments, seems to have followed his example: in his “Preface” he declared a manifest willingness to influence the political debate of his age (the Liberal Triennium, 1820-23) and, more precisely, to offer a useful instrument to legislators who were about to approve the first Spanish Criminal Code. He did the same with the two other translations he published in the same short liberal period, and with the same publisher (Imprenta de D. Fermín Villalpando), that is, the Spanish translations of Scienza della legislazione (The Science of Legislation) by Gaetano Filangieri and the Traité d’économie politique, by Jean-Baptiste Say, in this case, from French. Through the analysis of some passages from peritextual items, such as prefaces and open letters addressed to the Spanish National Congress, we attempt to draw the profile of this activist translator operating during an age full of optimistic expectations of the progress of society.