Translator's Note

Los aires fijos (1780-1784) is an early modern poem that offers readers a peek into the archaic practices, theories, and nomenclature of eighteenth-century pneumatic chemistry. Before there was nitric oxide, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and oxygen, there was nitrous air, inflammable air, fixed air, and dephlogisticated air, all of which could be generated by pouring acids or focusing sunlight on certain kinds of chalky or metallic substances. The “airs” these solid materials released could be trapped in glass vessels turned upside-down in tubs of water called pneumatic troughs. From there, they could be submitted to examination with the help of mice, among other involuntary assistants.

The author of Los aires fijos was José de Viera y Clavijo (1731-1813), a mischievous, inquisitive priest born in the Canary Islands. He had several run-ins with the local Inquisition before moving to Madrid to work as a tutor for an aristocratic family. While visiting Paris with his patrons, he had the opportunity to take a course on pneumatic chemistry with the well-known scientist, Joseph-Aignan Sigaud de Lafond. When he returned from France to Madrid, he assembled a lab of his own, performed the first public experiments on gases in Spain and began drafting his poem. The final result was Los aires fijos, a six-canto epic published in three installments (1780, 1781, 1784) about pneumatic chemistry, photosynthesis (aka “vegetable airs”), and balloonomania (a delirium induced by buoyant gases). The text belongs to the Lucretian tradition of didactic poetry, an ideal form for Enlightenment thinkers eager to disseminate the latest scientific developments, such as Joseph Priestley’s (1733-1804) work in chemistry.

Priestley’s experiments with fixed air (CO₂) led to his invention of a method for artificially carbonating water (the basis for the modern soft drink industry), but his most enduring work involves what he dubbed “dephlogisticated air” (O₂). He generated the air by heating mercurius calcinatus per se, or mercuric oxide (HgO), with a large burning lens. The name he bestowed on it reflects the prevailing chemical theory of his time, which held that a substance called phlogiston made combustion possible. Priestley’s work on dephlogisticated air inspired further research by the French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier, who later proposed a new theoretical system in which the same gas became known as oxygen. Thus began the so-called Chemical Revolution. The stanzas of this excerpt detail the properties of dephlogisticated air as revealed by Priestley’s experiments and reproduced by his successors, such as Sigaud de Lafond and his pupil, José de Viera y Clavijo.

I wanted to create a translation that was, like the original, amusing and somewhat informative. Using an informal, contemporary idiom was an important part of achieving this, but so was taking seriously the historical experiments, instruments and theories being described. (Yes, even the phlogiston.) Furthermore, I wanted to find a way to honor the formal poetics of the text without committing to the rigors of the original’s octava rima, so I exchanged the eight-line stanzas with their consonant rhymes for stanzas of varying lengths and assonant rhyme. This compromise mostly worked well, but one of the gases, aire inflamable (inflammable air), stubbornly resisted my imposition of an iambic meter. In trying to avoid using the anachronistic term “hydrogen” for inflammable air, I have sometimes translated it simply as “air” and let the parenthetical modern chemical symbol (H₂) do the remaining semantic work. Elsewhere, as in this excerpt, I simply accept the term’s unfortunate rhythmic consequences, for the sake of historical precision.

The biggest challenge to translating this text was understanding what it was literally saying about the gases and the procedures and instruments used to manipulate them. It forced me to become conversant in the basics of the history of eighteenth-century chemistry, for which I relied on number of resources. Not least of these were the notes by Prof. José Cebrián in his modern Spanish edition of the text and Prof. Carmen Giunta’s online Glossary of Archaic Chemical Terms. Priestley’s own text, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Airs (3 vols. 1774-1777) also came in handy.

At times, Priestley’s treatise on gases appears to be Viera y Clavijo’s primary source for his own poem. In the stanzas translated here, however, the Spanish author is basing his descriptions on his own experiments with his French teacher. Nevertheless, the parallels with Priestley’s text are clear, and these can be seen in the marginal notes I have inserted in the translation. Viera y Clavijo himself scattered comments on the sides of his poem that were meant to explicate or expand on references made in the body of the text. In this excerpt, for example, he glossed the allusion in stanza 53 to “el gran abate etrurio” (the great Etrurian abbot), clarifying that he was referring to “El señor abate Fontana” (the abbot Mr. Fontana). My marginal note reads “The great Etruscan, the Italian polymathic abbot Felice Fontana (1730-1805).” The other marginal notes in my translation are of my own creation. Some seek to reinforce descriptions with passages drawn from Priestley’s own writings. Others paraphrase or react to the text from a less-than-serious perspective that seeks to acknowledge the admittedly unusual content of a poem about obsolete chemistry.

Although I have used eighteenth-century nomenclature for gases, I do insert modern chemical symbols after them. Thomas Kuhn, the renowned historian of science, probably would have cringed at this implied equivalence (incommensurability!), but it aids comprehension of the text and contributes to its updating in the same way that using colloquial language does. Given my interventions, I call my translation Hot Air, instead of the more literal Fixed Airs. I think my version of the poem would have made Viera y Clavijo smile, and I hope it does the same for twenty-first century readers.

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Jason McCloskey