Hello, dear readers! This year, we’ve begun a blog series highlighting Austen-lovers around the world—sharing how they first discovered Austen’s fiction, why they love Austen, how they’ve contributed to the Janeite community, you get the picture. Fans, who cultivate and engage in discourse surrounding Austen’s life and fiction, participate in workshops and conventions, host book clubs, and don I ❤️ Darcy merchandise with pride (but hopefully not prejudice—wink, wink), are the reason Jane’s spirit survives in the twenty-first century. This Janeite Spotlight celebrates Cristina Huelsz, a bilingual Janeite dedicated to sharing the joy of Austen’s work with Spanish-speaking individuals around the world.
Native Spanish-speaker Cristina Huelsz—Cristy for short—was born and raised in Mexico, where she continued to live until five years ago, when she moved with her husband to the Puget Sound area of Washington State. As a child, Cristy always loved to read, gobbling up the classics—J.R.R. Tolkien and Louisa May Alcott were big favorites, although Jane Austen was notably absent from her reading list. It seemed natural to turn her passion for literature into a career, so she went to university to become an English teacher—a profession she held for many years. Although many of her translated works include Austen-adjacent titles, Cristy was not always the dedicated Janeite she is today.
Having only been exposed to the 1990s film adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, Cristy didn’t think much of Jane Austen until she saw Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005). After falling in love with Darcy and Elizabeth on-screen, she decided to pick up Austen’s original Pride and Prejudice. To her surprise, she enjoyed the book even more than the film! She “found so much joy” in reading Austen’s novels for the first time—to be with Austen was “to be with [an old] friend.”
Five years after first encountering Austen’s work, Cristy began to read works of Jane Austen fanfiction, including Pamela Aidan’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman trilogy and Sally Smith O’Rourke’s The Man Who Loved Jane Austen. While reading the Spanish-language edition of O’Rourke’s novel, she felt like something was missing from the translation—a certain je ne sais quoi, if you will, or in Spanish, un no sé qué. Around this time, Cristy decided to quit her job as a teacher and try her own hand in the field of literary translation.
Cristy’s first translation was of Nicole Clarkston’s novel Rumors & Recklessness (Rumores e Imprudencias: Una Variación de Orgullo y Prejuicio). Cristy’s edition turned out to be a big hit with Spanish-speaking audiences, who often lack access to public reading materials. Libraries in Latin America are underfunded; they don’t incorporate books by new authors, carry few copies of the books they do offer, and do not promote e-books or other online resources.
A few years ago, Cristy officially founded Cris Translates, a company dedicated to bringing classic and contemporary works alike to the Hispanic and Latin American public. To hone her skill, she has taken master's level courses and diplomas in translation at the Universidad de Guanajuato and the Mexican Association of Literary Translators. She has so far translated twenty titles, including Austen-adjacent books by authors like Maria Grace (a former JASP speaker!), Monica Fairview, and Don Jacobson.
Cristy delights in her work. “It’s the perfect excuse to be reading all day!”
However, Cristy’s passion for improving literacy among Spanish-speaking communities does not come at the cost of protecting authors’ rights to their own intellectual property. Previously, the only Spanish-language translations of Austen-adjacent titles were illegally pirated—and badly translated, likely using Google Translate or another auto-generated online source—and uploaded to the internet, without giving any credit or royalties to the original authors. It is Cristy’s goal to produce quality translations that respect copyright laws and promote authors’ ownership over their own works.
Cristy’s next venture, she tells me, will hopefully bring her into the realm of Austen-related non-fiction, including academic volumes and critical theory. To date, only two biographies of Austen’s life have ever appeared in Spanish. In 2009, a small press in Spain published a limited print-run of the only Spanish-language edition of Austen’s letters. There aren’t any academic texts on Jane Austen currently translated into Spanish. (Not to mention that only a handful of books have ever been published on Austen by native Spanish-speakers.)
Cristy’s dedication to translation, especially where Austen is concerned, is changing the literary world “little by little, little by little.” She says, “I’m not doing it for the money … it’s an art, a hobby for me.” On the side, she offers English-speaking classes to adult students in Washington. In her limited free time, she enjoys partaking in a popular Spanish-language Jane Austen book club online, as well as many Austen-themed Facebook groups.
This holiday season, Cristy will be publishing her fifth annual Austen-inspired Christmas anthology, for which she invites authors to contribute winter holiday-themed short stories inspired either by Jane Austen’s life or fiction. Cristy provides the translation for every story, and her sister designs the cover art. Like Austen describing Pride and Prejudice in this letter to Cassandra, Cristy lovingly refers to the anthology series as “[her] child.” Early editions of the anthology are published on Cristy’s personal blog and free to the public, but the 2024 edition will be available for purchase on Amazon with all royalties going to the Jane Austen House Museum.
Excerpted from Zoom interview with Cristina Huelsz, March 22, 2024.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider making a donation to keep all online Jane Austen Summer programming free to the public.
Comments