Travel literature: report of an earthquake in Honduras in 1865

Abstract

Introduction. The nineteenth-century travel books published in English, French and German are the result of the experiences lived by those people who for various reasons set out to explore unknown or little-known places. These books portray the era in which they were written and published, while showing the diversity of the world and a kaleidoscope of cultures. Case presentation. A free translation of the chapter of the book Les tremblements de terre published in French in 1885 was made, which describes the events of the earthquake that occurred in the Caribbean coastal area of ​​the Republic of Honduras in the year 1856 and whose experience was published in a single delivered in the American magazine Harpers New Monthly Magazine, with the title Notes from an Artist's Notebook. Discussion. The translation was done taking care of the double scriptural articulation from the originality: the intimate one from the perspective of the description and the second one that starts from the perspective of the cultural contact that the author-narrator has when visiting the Atlantic region and incidentally living the great telluric event. Conclusion. It is evident that from the literary point of view, that in this translation there is a recurring framework where the author-narrator is placed in a constant of space and time, in which a fascination for what is discovered in distant lands of the tropics is articulated, in addition to the detailed description of the experience that the traveling artist witnessed first-hand.