Leopardi antes de Valera y Alcalá Galiano : nuevos datos sobre su primera recepción en las letras hispanas

This article presents the results of a search for references to and translations of Leopardi in Spanish-speaking countries prior to Juan Valera's essay Sobre los cantos de Leopardi (1855) and José Alcalá Galiano's translation of Canto notturno (1877), which until now have been considered the beginnings of Spanish leopardism. These two milestones continue to be important by virtue of the wide circulation enjoyed by these publications, which was far greater than that of the mostly ephemeral low-impact journals that are the basis of this study. Nevertheless, the landscape of the reception of Leopardi is inevitably shaped by the relatively high number of translations published not only in Latin America (the earliest in 1844), but also in Spain itself (the earliest in 1853). In Madrid circles, the unifying role of Juan Valera is clear, but in the 1850s and subsequent decades, small nuclei of leopardism were also active in Cuba, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.