Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” has received a great deal of scholarly attention over the years from a variety of perspectives, not least the domestic and symbolic presence of Pluto in the story. Kent Ljungquist (1980) saw Poe’s narrative in terms of classical literary tradition, specifically the notion of the daemonic, yet confined his study to Pluto’s demonic features, arguing that the cat may be an infernal spirit sent to castigate the narrator. Other studies, such as Clark Moreland and Karime Rodriguez (2015), have reached similar conclusions. However, there is a surprising absence in the literature of any discussion of Poe’s decision to name the ‘phantasm’ of his narrative after the Hellenic god of the Underworld. The present paper seeks to address this, and proposes that Poe’s Pluto may not simply function as a demonic spirit, but rather as the Pluto of Hellenic mythology himself.
During the early 1950s, Argentine writer Julio Cortázar was commissioned by UNESCO to translate Edgar Allan Poe's prose into Spanish. Cortázar's deep knowledge of the English language and his acquaintance with the life and work of the American writer meant that, over the ensuing decades, he produced renditions which are still considered to be among the most literary of all twentieth-century Spanish translations of Poe's work. This article presents a detailed analysis of two paragraphs from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” comparing Cortázar's translation with other, more recent Spanish versions. I aim to show that although Cortázar's rendering is in many ways the most faithful to the original text, his sometimes nonstandard use of Spanish substantially changes the meaning of the original. For this reason, speakers of Peninsular Spanish may have difficulty in understanding his translation, and might not fully appreciate the unity of effect around which Poe composed this story.
Pío Baroja (1872–1956), the most prolific novelist of the so-called Spanish Generation of '98, began his literary career as a storyteller. The publication of Vidas sombrías (Somber Lives) in 1900, a volume of over thirty stories set in the Basque Country, Madrid and Valencia, earned him wide critical acclaim, despite its poor reception by Spanish readers. Baroja himself acknowledged that four or five of the stories were written in imitation of Edgar Allan Poe. This article explores traces of Poe in Baroja's early storytelling, although it sets out by considering a concept such as unity of sensation (unity of effect), which Baroja indeed borrowed from Poe, although he never acknowledged this. My central concern here is that Baroja's early admiration of the writer from Boston manifests itself in the adoption of bleak landscapes, Gothic interiors, and psychologically unstable characters. This trend was soon to be abandoned, although Baroja's concept of the novel, a development of Poe's poetics of the tale, would remain with the Basque writer for the rest of his life. The final part of this study analyzes Poe-like elements—literary devices, Gothic motifs, semantic structures—which can be found in “Médium,” one of the stories in Vidas sombrías.
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