Translating Otherness in El Abencerraje

The sixteenth-century romance El Abencerraje y la hermosa Jarifa tells the story of a close friendship between a Christian and a Muslim knight on the border between Castile and Granada at the end of the Middle Ages. This paper examines the Granadan character, Abindarráez, as a product of a translation process that, while seemingly challenging the degrading rhetoric and discriminatory laws of the period against the Moriscos in Spain, ultimately reinforces certain hierarchies. This analysis highlights the shared values between the characters that facilitate their friendship and favourable reception by the Spanish readership of the time, in contrast with the complexities of cultural and religious coexistence in this historical context. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .