N.b. The text below has been translated by E. Valdivieso. The original Spanish version can be found here: Estudios Griegos de Laura Mestre.
This post was written by Elina Miranda Cancela, Professor Emerita of the University of La Habana, director of the Chair of Philology and the Classical Tradition in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at the same university, Vice-director of the Cuban Academy of the Language and titular member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. She is the author of more than a dozen books and co-editor of many more. She has also published in edited volumes and journals, as well as offering courses and lectures throughout the Americas and Europe.
Laura Mestre‘s Estudios Griegos: The first Cuban book about the Greeks
by Elina Miranda Cancela
Due to its continued status as a Spanish colony throughout the nineteenth century, school texts in Cuba were the same as those in the Peninsular metropole. Despite the dominance of books from Spain, the first Greek textbook composed by a Cuban author appeared in 1839, and throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the island produced numerous articles dedicated to classical studies. But it was only in 1929 that Laura Mestre (1867–1944), the first woman to translate both Homeric poems into Spanish, published her Estudios Griegos [‘Greek Studies’]. Hers was the first book written in Cuba dedicated to providing an orientation to Greek literature, which she viewed as necessary for the moral formation of young readers.
Born into a family of intellectuals, Laura Mestre received an education that was very unusual for women of her time. Cloistering herself in her home, she devoted herself to her studies, and it was only after years of silence that she published a few articles. With her own money she defrayed the publication costs of her first book, inspired by a desire to educate and a willingness to serve. However, most of her work, including her translation of the Homeric poems, remains in manuscript, while her contributions to Cuban intellectual history are virtually unknown. Hence the importance of rescuing her and her work from obscurity.
With the hundredth anniversary of its publication approaching, it bears noting that Estudios Griegos is not a mere collection of articles, but a selection of materials carefully curated for educational purposes. It begins with a chapter entitled “Lessons on Homer’s Greek” that presents proficiency in the ancient language as essential for a full appreciation of the literary text. Then, likely as a demonstration of this requisite knowledge of the Homeric poems, Mestre provides her translation of a passage from Iliad 2. In the following chapters, she reviews various poetic genres, such as lyric and drama, as well as the concept of history and popular songs from modern Greece, which culminates with a chapter that compares the Biblical heroine Ruth to Nausicaa.
In Estudios Griegos, Mestre opts for brief readings which place her interlocutor in direct contact with the texts. This encourages one to read and appreciate this literature, as well as its later influence, through Mestre’s own translations. For lyric texts—Pindar, Sappho, and a selection of Anacreontics—she emphasizes moral and political themes, as well as beauty and grace; for tragedy, a focus on character; for history, a consideration of the continuities between Greek, Roman, and even modern approaches to historiography. She even includes neo-Hellenic popular poetry, some of which was completely unknown in Cuba at the time. Through her selection of this last category of texts, which she offers in the original Greek with her translation, Mestre shows her appreciation of the linguistic and literary links between antiquity and modernity, eschewing a narrow focus on the classical period alone.
In the conclusion of her last article in Estudios Griegos, Mestre draws attention to the affinity between the poet of the Odyssey and her readers, a vision applicable to the book as a whole. For Mestre, the Hellenic past finds resonance in her own time because it contains what she sees as the germ of modern culture, at the same time as it constitutes its clearest prototype. In her opinion, one must reject anything that conflicts with the ideals she identifies in Greek literature—truth, wisdom, honor and courage. The combination of fantasy and positive spirit that she finds in classical Greece, which is the product of her own education, inspires her to take Greek art, literature and philosophy as a paradigm for the education of young people. This, in turn, explains her express desire to publish her translations of the Homeric poems, although, unfortunately, these texts, like the rest of her work, have remained unedited and neglected even up to today.