Academic literature on the topic 'Spanish chivalric romance; Montalvo'

This article explores how the reader is addressed in the sexual scenes of the Spanish, French, and English versions of Amadis de Gaule. Anthony Munday’s translation ( c. 1590) follows closely Nicolas Herberay des Essarts’s French text (1540), which he had translated from the Spanish Amadís de Gaula (1508) by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. It analyses how the narrator’s appeals to the reader change in the course of translation, transforming the omission of erotic details into a device to connect with the readers. The new versions make the sexual scenes more provocative and highlight a shared complicity with the audience.

I Was Born in Spain to a Spanish Mother and a Nigerian Father. I Moved to Nigeria on the Day That I Turned Seven and remained in the country for nine years. The interplay between my cultural liminality and an early aestheticism has determined my experience of literature—first as a precocious reader and later as a teacher and scholar.My first literary diet, like that of many children, consisted of fairy tales and abridged classics. At primary school in Nigeria, our English textbooks featured passages from African novels to teach reading comprehension. While I found the short storylines interesting, their pedagogical use meant that I did not perceive them as “literature”—a word that I associated with stories to wonder at, get lost in, and daydream about. At the age of nine I graduated to unabridged Dickens novels and Shakespeare plays alongside Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, supplementing my diet with Spanish chivalric romances such as Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadís de Gaula (1508) and Francisco Vázquez's Palmerín de Oliva (1511). Apart from a sense of intrigue, these two works gave me respite from an unrelenting sense of otherness. They provided vicarious adventure, and their settings reminded me of the Castilian castles that formed part of my early-childhood landscape.

The book review might be thought of as a provisionally authoritative assessment designed to evaluate a book on behalf of potential readers, and to place the text within an appropriate literary context. It is, perhaps, more often associated with newly published works than established “classics,” which exist both as saleable commodities in the form of published books, and as more abstract entities within the cultural memory of a given audience. This suggests part of the difficulty of reviewing a book like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, originally published in 1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II). Don Quixote is a long book, and is often referred to through ellipsis or synecdoche. Pared back to its most famous episode, Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills (Part I ch. 8: 63-5), it is frequently interpreted in terms of a comic opposition between the world of chivalric romance that determines the central character’s perceptions and actions, and the world of early modern Spain in which he is set. This seems as good a summary as any of Don Quixote’s behaviour, as the “quixotic” symbolism of this episode is easily transposed onto both the internal world of the text, and the external world in general. But Cervantes’s novel also seems to resist definition in such simple terms; as I intend to suggest, the relationship between what Don Quixote is seen to represent, and his role in the novel, can generate some interesting repercussions for the process of reviewing. Cervantes represents his character’s delusions as a consequence of the books he reads, providing the opportunity for a review (in the sense both of a survey and a critique) of various contemporary literary discourses. This process is formalised early on, as the contents of Don Quixote’s library are examined, criticised and selectively burnt by his concerned friends (Part I ch. 6: 52-8). The books mentioned are real, and the discovery of Cervantes’s own Galatea among those reprieved suggests a playful authorial reflection on the fictional quality of his work, an impression reinforced as the original narrative breaks off to be replaced by a “second author” and Arabic translator between two chapters (Part I ch. 8-9: 70-6). Part II of Don Quixote depicts characters who have read, and refer to, Part I, effectively granting Don Quixote an internal literary identity that is reviewed by the other characters against the figure they actually encounter. To complicate matters, it also contains repeated mentions of a real, but apocryphal, Part II (published in Tarragona in 1614 under the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda), culminating in Don Quixote’s encounter with a proof copy of a (fictional) second edition in a Barcelona printing shop (ch. 62: 916). Ironically, while this text appears to question the later, authorised version from which it differs markedly, Cervantes’s mention of it within his own text allows him both to review the work of his rival, and reflect on the reception of his own. These forms of self-reflexivity suggest both a general interest in writing and literature, and a rather more perplexing sense of the text reviewing itself. In an odd sense, Don Quixote pre-empts and usurps the role of the reviewer, appearing somehow to place external reviewers in the position of being contained or implied within it. But despite these pitfalls, more reviews than usual have appeared in 2005, the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, Part I. Some refer specifically to editions released for the anniversary: Jeremy Lawrance reviews two new editions in Spanish, while Paddy Bullard examines a newly-restored edition of Tobias Smollett’s 1755 translation, recommended “for readers of Cervantes who are interested in his profound influence on eighteenth-century British culture, or on the development of the novel as a modern literary genre.” This also suggests something about the way in which translations, like reviews, serve to mark and to mediate their own context. Lawrance’s verdict of “still readable” implies the book’s continuing capacity not only to entertain, but also to generate readings that throw light on the history of its reception. Don Quixote provides a perspective from which to review the concerns implied in critical interpretations of different periods. Smollett’s translation (like Laurence Sterne’s invocations of Cervantes in his Tristram Shandy) suggests an eighteenth-century interest in the relationship between Don Quixote and the novel. This may be contrasted, as Yannick Roy suggests (53-4), both with earlier perceptions of Don Quixote as a figure to be laughed at, and the post-romantic perception of a tragicomical everyman seen as representative of a human condition. Modern interpretations of Don Quixote are also complicated by the canonisation of its hero as a household word. Comparing the anniversary of Don Quixote to the attention given to the centenary of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Simon Jenkins notes “few English people read Don Quixote, perhaps because they think they know it already.” It is frequently described as a foundational text of the modern novel; however, at a thousand pages, it must also compete for readers’ time and attention with the ever-increasing gamut of long prose narratives it helped instigate. Don Quixote, the deluded knight-errant lives on, while the subtleties of Cervantes’s narrative may increasingly be dependent on sympathetic reviewers. It would seem that it is no longer necessary to read the story of Don Quixote in order to know, or even write about him. Nevertheless, not least because the book entertains a complex relationship with its character, and because it seems so conscious of its own literary enterprise, Don Quixote is a dangerous book not to have read. Responding to Jenkins’s claim that Cervantes’s work represents a more unique, and more easily grasped, achievement than Einstein’s, Stephen Matchett takes exception to a phenomenon he describes as “a bloke who tilted at windmills.” Arguing that “most of us are sufficiently solipsistic to be more comfortable with writers who chart the human condition than thinkers who strive to make sense of the universe,” he seems to consider Don Quixote as exemplary of a pernicious modern tendency to privilege literary discourses over scientific ones, to take fiction more seriously than reality. Even ignoring the incongruity of a theory of relativity presented as a paradigm of fact (which may speak volumes about textual and existential anxiety in the twenty-first century), this seems a particularly unfortunate judgement to make about Don Quixote. Matchett’s claim about the relative fortunes of science and literature is not only difficult to substantiate, but also appears to have been anticipated by the condition of Don Quixote himself. Rather than arguing that the survival of Cervantes’s novel is representative of a public obsession with fiction, it would seem more accurate, if nonetheless paradoxical, to suggest that Don Quixote seems capable of projecting the delusions of its central character onto the unwary reviewer. Matchett’s article is not, strictly speaking, a review of the text of Don Quixote, and so the question of whether he has actually read the book is, in some sense, irrelevant. The parallels are nevertheless striking: while the surrealism of Don Quixote’s enterprise is highlighted by his attempt to derive a way of being specifically from a literature of chivalry, Matchett’s choice of example has the consequence of re-creating aspects of Cervantes’s novel in a new context. Tilting at chimerical adversaries that recall the windmills upon which its analysis is centred, this review may be read not only as a response to Don Quixote, but also, ironically, as a performance of it. To say this seems absurd; however, echoing Jorge Luis Borges’s words in his essay “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “to justify this ‘absurdity’ is the primary object of this note” (40). Borges explores the (fictional) attempt of obscure French poet Pierre Menard to rewrite, word for word, parts of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Menard’s initial undertaking to “be Miguel de Cervantes,” to “forget the history of Europe between 1602 and 1918,” is rejected for the more interesting attempt to “go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard”. While Menard’s text is identical to Cervantes’s, the point is that the implied difference in context affects the way in which the text is read. As Borges states: It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself. . . . Cervantes’s text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer (41-2). Menard’s “verbally identical” Quixote can also be identified as a review of Cervantes’s text, in the sense that it is both informed by, and dependent on, the original. In addition, it allows a review of the relationship between the book as published by Cervantes, and the almost infinite number of readings engendered by the historical permutations of the last three (and now four) hundred years, from which the influence of Don Quixote cannot be excluded. Matchett’s review is of a different nature, in that it stems from an attempt to question the book’s continuing popularity. It seems absurd to suggest that Matchett himself could have served as a model for Don Quixote. But the unacknowledged debt of his piece to Cervantes’s novel, and to the opposition of discourses set up within it, reveals a supremely quixotic irony: Stephen Matchett appears to have produced a concise and richly interpretable rewriting of Don Quixote, in the persona of Stephen Matchett. References Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Trans. James E. Irby. Labyrinths. Eds. James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates. New York: New Directions, 1964. 36-44. Bullard, Paddy. “Literature.” Times Literary Supplement 8 Apr. 2005. De Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. Don Quixote. Trans. John Rutherford. London: Penguin, 2003. (Part and chapter references have been included in the text in order to facilitate reference to different editions.) Jenkins, Simon. “The Don.” Review. Weekend Australian 14 May 2005. Lawrance, Jeremy. “Still Readable.” Times Literary Supplement 22 Apr. 2005. Matchett, Stephen. “A Theory on Einstein.” Review. Weekend Australian 11 June 2005. Roy, Yannick. “Pourquoi ne rit-on plus de Don Quichotte?” Inconvénient: Revue Littéraire d’Essai et de Création 6 (2001): 53-60. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Noonan, Will. "On Reviewing Don Quixote." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/03-noonan.php>. APA Style Noonan, W. (Oct. 2005) "On Reviewing Don Quixote," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/03-noonan.php>.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2009.
Thesis research directed by: Dept. of English. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

This thesis analyses the English versions of Spanish chivalric romance as examples of translation practice in early modern Europe. It focuses specifically on three works: Margaret Tyler’s "The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood" (c. 1578), a translation from Book I of the Spanish romance "Espejo de Príncipes y Caballeros" (1555) by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra; Anthony Munday’s "Palmerin D’Oliva" (1588), Parts I and II, a translation from the French "L’Histoire de Palmerin D’Olive" (1546), which Jean Maugin had translated from the anonymous Spanish romance "Palmerín de Olivia" (1511); and Books I to IV of Anthony Munday’s "Amadis de Gaule" (1590-1619), all translated from the first four books (1540-1544) of the French "Amadis de Gaule" series, translated by Nicolas Herberay de Essarts from the Spanish "Amadís de Gaula" (1508) by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. I analyse the way in which Tyler and Munday use their translation practice to reflect or comment on aspects of their contemporary culture. I examine the way that the translators’ modifications work next to their literal translation. Through a comparative study between the translations and their sources, I focus specifically on how both translators draw attention to the topics of marriage and sexuality in their texts. I also analyse in particular Tyler’s treatment of the classical material in her source and Munday’s attention to the topic of religion. In this respect, this thesis fills particular gaps in the knowledge of literal translations and of early modern romance. Moreover, it widens the scope for exploring the figures of Margaret Tyler and Anthony Munday, showing that the gendered aspect of the former’s translation is only one aspect of her practice and that the latter’s work is more complex than has commonly been assumed.

The Libro del rey Canamor is one of a small group of chivalric narratives that reached popularity levels in sixteenth-century Europe similar to the “best-seller” of today. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these works were often overlooked or easily dismissed by scholars and many have been forgotten by the modern press. My proposal is to present the Libro del rey Canamor to the scholarly public for closer examination, easier access and renewed interest. This study presents a review of the essential distinctions often made between various types of chivalric narratives, leading to a brief discussion of their history in Hispanic literature, as well as their classification and acceptance through the years. It also examines the history of the shorter narratives and their relation to sixteenth-century printing and the creation of an editorial genre. The analysis of the Libro del rey Canamor examines its editorial history and narrative structure. Although some of its contemporaries were published for a longer period of time, this text was not able to extend its publishing life into the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, there were at least ten different editions in its heyday. The Libro del rey Canamor consists of two independent nuclei which create a hybrid text, the first part of which comes from a medieval source, while the second brings to light the aforementioned editorial genre. It is likely that the second part was written specifically for publication in early sixteenth-century Valencia. The analysis of content focuses on the major protagonists, folk motifs and their roles and functions in the more developed episodes. Finally we examine the presence of humor found in each section, concentrating on battle bravado, love intrigues, and jests. The review of the history of the chivalric narratives, both editorial and social, as well as the analysis of the internal elements of the Libro del rey Canamor in particular, show that this brief narrative is a hybrid text: a combination of a medieval narrative, albeit heavily edited, and a newly written second generation, melded together to create one of the best-sellers of sixteenth-century Spain.

This is a book about readers: readers reading, and readers writing. They are readers of all ages and from all ages: young and old, male and female, from Europe and the Americas. The book they are reading is the Spanish chivalric romance known in English as Amadis de Gaule. Famous throughout the sixteenth century as the pinnacle of its fictional genre, the cultural functions of Amadis were further elaborated by the publication of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in 1605, in which Amadis features as Quixote’s favourite book. Amadis thereby becomes, as the philosopher Ortega y Gasset terms it, ‘enclosed’ within the modern novel and part of the imaginative landscape of reader-authors such Smollett, Mary Shelley, Keats, Southey, Scott, and Thackeray.Amadis in English ranges from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, demonstrating through this ‘biography’ of a book the deep cultural, intellectual, and political connections of English, French, and Spanish literature across five centuries. At once an ambitious work of transnational literary history and a new intervention in the history of reading, this study argues that romance is historically located, culturally responsive, and uniquely flexible in the recreative possibilities it offers readers. By revealing this hitherto unexamined reading experience connecting readers of all backgrounds, Amadis in English also offers many new insights into the politicization of literary history; the construction and misconstruction of literary relations between England, France, and Spain; the practice and pleasures of reading fiction; and the enduring power of imagination.

This chapter’s title quotes Margaret Cavendish’s description of Amadis and it explores the return to prominence post-1660 of Amadis’s relationship to French, rather than Spanish, literary culture. Don Quixote’s ‘witty abusing’ of chivalric romance is tempered from the 1650s by the importation of heroic romance from French and the development of ‘serious’ romance which defines itself in opposition to its Iberian forebears. Amadis became part of the Restoration refashioning of antebellum literary culture partly thanks to English writers’ experience of exile in France and the Low Countries. After the Restoration, Amadis continued to be a popular reference point in comedies, as the archetypal text of ‘amour and adventure’ and a window onto the lost world of Caroline theatre. Behn’s Luckey Chance (1686) and Farquhar’s The Inconstant (1702) are representative of this refashioning of the literary past, while D’Urfey’s Don Quixote plays of the 1690s look back to Jacobean stage satire.