A mouraA deusa traducida

Abstract

Our currently ongoing PhD research focuses on the origin of the mouras, the female leading characters in Galician folktales. We consider them as the result of a number of translating and paratranslating cultural processes derived from several changes within social and religious systems from an original concept we identify with a pre-Indo European ancient female deity. Thus, we agree with Vladimir Propp that when a religion dies, its content becomes mythology. We think this would have been what happened with the mouras. Through our comprehensive corpus compiling these legends about the mouras or encantos –one of the most common variations of this form–, we analyze semantic, formal and pragmatic aspects that link the characters of these current folktales to the ancient deity. Our study relies on anthropological and ethnological findings that reveal her frequent snake-like representation, and her symbolic association with water, earth and stone, hierophanic elements that, like paratexts complementing the main text, enhance its meaning. Our theoretical ground is built on the contributions made by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marija Gimbutas and Mircea Eliade on Anthropology, as well as on the T&P Group at the Universidade de Vigo on paratranslation and Itamar Even-Zohar’s proposals on interferences among polysystems, in order to support our thesis. We sustain that the origin of the mouras would go back to an Indo-European ancient female goddess, whose distortion in the primary system would have been continued through successive cultural translating and paratranslating processes.