The “Primitive” Cecilia Valdés. A short story by Cirilio Villaverde. A translation and introduction by Thomas Genova

ABSTRACT: The text is the first English translation of Cirilo Villaverde’s 1839 “primitive” Cecilia Valdés, a short story that the author penned decades before publishing his canonical novel by the same name. The 1882 novel narrates the unwittingly incestuous relationship between the novel’s eponymous mulata heroine and her creole half-brother Leonardo Gamboa. Though the work enjoys high-canonical status, its textual history, tightly entangled with nineteenth-century Cuba’s racially fraught struggle for independence, is largely unknown to non-specialists. The translation is preceded by an introduction that discusses the short story’s relationship to the novel and the racial and political ideas present in the earlier text, as well as the translator’s efforts to render these paradigms legible to an English-language readership.   keywords: Cirilio Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés, Cuba 19th century, Afrolatinidades, Latin American literature in translation, literary translation