The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (review)

 i          : winter  primary importance when rethinking Spain’s intellectual tradition and early twentieth-century thought.        University of Wisconsin-Madison The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. Ed. Anthony J. Cascardi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. xvii ⴐ 242 pages. This is a frustrating volume, whose review I kept postponing. It has some good essays, but it is sloppy and unbalanced, not on the level of the Suma cervantina or the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Don Quixote. One misses the presence of the most distinguished and influential of Anglo-American cervantistas, such as Allen, Avalle-Arce, Close, Mancing, Murillo, Parr, or Riley. Melveena McKendrick provides one of the best chapters, ‘‘Writing for the Stage,’’ surveying thoroughly his theater and identifying some of its uniqueness and shortcomings. For Cervantes, content has primacy over form; Cervantes was a storyteller and told stories in his drama (). Mary Gaylord provides an unbiased and informed survey of ‘‘Cervantes’s Other Fiction,’’ including a sympathetic reading of La Galatea, pointing out the varied topography of the Novelas ejemplares, and how Persiles shares with La Galatea a treatment of multiple versions of love. All of his fiction teaches that ‘‘irony comes in many shapes and guises’’ (). I believe she overstates Persiles’s popularity with its first readers (none of the six publishers of the  editions brought out a second edition), and since she cites El Saffar, it surprises that Ruth is not mentioned as someone who has addressed the question of the Novelas ejemplares’ ordering ( n. ). Fred De Armas studies ‘‘Cervantes and the Italian Renaissance’’ and in the process deals intelligently and sensitively with Cervantes’s views on love and literature; it is the article that best examines Cervantes’s thought. Cervantes’s longing for Italy is a longing for the Renaissance. Anne Cruz reviews recent psychoanalytical studies of Cervantes in ‘‘Psyche and Gender in Cervantes,’’ and also provides briefer comments on Cervantes’s female characters. Barry Ife’s ‘‘The Historical and Social Context’’ provides a history of early modern Spain, focusing on political history and to a lesser extent on economics. That there was a Moorish ‘‘invasion’’ () is rather an old-fashioned view, and it is surprising to see Isabel la Católica’s expulsion of Jews presented as a step toward strengthening the power of the Church (). My only issue with Adrienne L. Martı́n’s ‘‘Humor and Violence in Cervantes’’ is that she tacitly equates Cervantes and Don Quijote; there is humor and violence     j  in ‘‘El licenciado Vidriera’’ and ‘‘Rinconete y Cortadillo,’’ for example. On Don Quijote her essay is persuasive: ‘‘Cervantes’s genius lies precisely in the ambiguities and profundity of his exploration of the literary relationship between humor (madness), comedy, and seriousness of purpose and meaning’’ (). This is precisely what Avellaneda does not ‘‘get,’’ she accurately notes. ‘‘The author teaches us the truth through laughter’’ (). She concludes with an exploration of the different relationships between humor and violence in Cervantes’s day and ours. Some essays are disappointing. Diana de Armas Wilson, in ‘‘Cervantes and the New World,’’ starts on the wrong foot by calling La Galatea ‘‘unreadable,’’ full of ‘‘classical furniture.’’ The exaggerated links she finds between Cervantes and the Western hemisphere I have commented on elsewhere, in a review of her Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/reviews/wilson.pdf,  June ). The most inadequate is that of Alexander Welsh, ‘‘The Influence of Cervantes’’; his only concern, as he himself says (), is the influence of Don Quixote, primarily on British novelists. This ignores, for example, the influence of the ‘‘Coloquio de los perros’’ on Freud, the political use made of La Numancia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influence of Persiles in England and Germany, that of the Novelas ejemplares in France, influence on Mark Twain and Góngora (La Galatea), and so on. Influence of Don Quixote does not even touch on the work’s influence in Spain, its role in burlesquing the libros de caballerı́as and preventing them from being revived under the more tolerant reign of Felipe III. A better alternative is Anthony Cascardi’s ‘‘Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel.’’ He points to an increased openness of form as Cervantes’s key innovation (), yet might have added that openness, of a slightly different sort, is precisely what the Toledo canon said was found in the libros de caballerı́as. Cervantes indeed saw Lepanto as an answer to chivalric romance (); he presumably would have said that his own adventuresome life was much more interesting–and true– than any work of fiction. Another disappointment are the topics that are missing altogether. While the publisher’s blurb claims that the book contains ‘‘a comprehensive treatment of Cervantes’s life’’ (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/cam/.html,  June ), we are given only a chronology and three pages in Cascardi’s introduction. There is almost nothing on Avellaneda, on the Viaje del Parnaso, or other verse (despite the editor’s claim in the introduction, ). Beyond De Armas there is nothing on Cervantes’s thought; Cervantes’s political, economic, historical, and religious views are unexamined. There is no general bibliography, and no summaries of any of Cervantes’s works. There are suggestions for ‘‘Further Reading’’ after each article; some are English-language only and others are plurilingual. In general they are sensible, though cervantistas will no doubt join me in shuddering at sending readers, as Welsh does, to Nabokov’s lectures.  i          : winter  The list of Quixote translations (xv) mysteriously omits two of the best known, those of Putnam (Modern Library) and Ormsby revised by Jones and Douglas (now unfortunately out of print, while the original Ormsby is ubiquitous on the Internet). There is no guidance about what translation(s) to use. That Persiles and the Novelas ejemplares have recently been translated into English is not noted. The Appendix on ‘‘Electronic Editions and Scholarly Resources’’ (–) provides some starting points in an ever-shifting electronic universe. One wishes that the Web site of the Cervantes Society of America, with the journal Cervantes, had been included (http://www.h-net.org/⬃cervantes/csapage.htm), and that Ormsby’s translation were cited from a more permanent home, such as the Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org) or The Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org), rather than from a high school Web site in Port Aransas, Texas. Finally, this is, without a doubt, the worst copy-edited book I have ever seen from Cambridge University Press. Misprints are unacceptable: El galladro español (), El ruffián viudo (), Luis (for Luı́s) de Camões (), Lusiadas (for Lusı́adas, , ), Angelica (for Angélica, ), Castro del Rio (), Numantia destruida (), ‘‘Texts A&M’’ for ‘‘Texas A&M’’ (). Augustin Redondo is spelled correctly on p.  but not on p. , where his book title is butchered into Otra manera de leer ‘‘El Quijote.’’ La casa de los celos is varyingly translated as The Abode of Jealousy () and The House of Jealousy (); Los tratos de Argel is translated two different ways on the same page: The Ways of Algiers (, ) and The Traffic of Algiers (); only the latter of these is found in the index. The index is a hodge-podge. Fielding merits a paragraph on pp. –, but is missing from the index; one will look in vain for Esther Crooks where the index says she is found, on p. . Isabel Lozano Renieblas is alphabetized under ‘‘Renieblas’’ (, ), but Paul Lewis Smith is under ‘‘Lewis’’ (, ); Las Casas is under ‘‘Casas, Bartolomé de las’’ (). Fernando de Saavedra is under Fernando (); ‘‘Diego de Miranda, Don’’ is under Diego (). There is no consistency on whether titles of works are indexed in Spanish or English; both are found. Spanish is capitalized as if it were English: ‘‘La Ejemplaridad de las ‘Novelas Ejemplares’ ’’ ( n. ), ‘‘Los Inquisidores Literarios de Cervantes’’ ( no. ). At other times it seems as if French style is being followed: ‘‘El Coloquio de los perros’’ (). Printers are cited instead of publishers: Rodrı́guez Marı́n’s – Quijote edition was not published by the Tipografı́a de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, nor was it the fourth edition of his ‘‘Clásicos Castellanos’’ edition (xiv). The Revista de Archivos Bibliotecas y Museos did not publish ‘‘facsimile versions of the first editions of the complete works’’ (xi). Schevill and Bonilla’s edition was not published by the Imprenta de Bernardo Rodrı́guez, nor by Gráficas Reunidas (xv). The title of Murillo’s edition is incorrectly cited as Don Quixote de     j  la Mancha (xv). Shelton did not translate Part II of Don Quixote into English (xv), although this has been discovered only recently. In sum, the volume is an uneven collection of essays, but not much of a companion.          Clifton Park, NY Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age. Ed. Fredrick A. de Armas. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. 310 pages. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age offers an impressive rethinking of the mutually illuminating media of text and image in Golden Age Spain, of the integral relationship between the verbal and the visual. Painting was clearly central to Golden Age writers, just as writing was a key context for artists of the period. To make this point, Frederick de Armas introduces this group of essays by observing that as the blind Homer could visualize and represent vividly intricate objects, so too Raphael in his Parnassus can paint art that he has never seen because of his reliance on verbal description. Professor de Armas opens ‘‘The Painter and the Writer are One and the Same,’’ the first of four units in this collection, with his essay entitled ‘‘(Mis)placing the Muse,’’ offering a reading of Cervantes’s Galatea from the perspective of the visual, pointing out that the entire work is framed by frescoes: Book I offers an ecphrastic presentation of Raphael’s Galatea, and Book VI a description based on Raphael’s Parnassus. Both artists, likewise, focus on the Muse of epic poetry, Calliope. De Armas’s analysis illuminates the reason why Calliope is misplaced (present where Thalia would seem more relevant) as a means by which Cervantes boldly figures himself as the Spanish Virgil (). Eric Graf’s ‘‘The Pomegranate of Don Quixote I, ’’ provides an original exploration of the political and religious significance of the pomegranate in the transition between chapters  and , the encounter between Don Quijote and the Basque. Explaining the significance of the granada/pomegranate, Graf argues that ‘‘the geopolitical pomegranate at the beginning of chapter  is but one of a cluster of details that converge to indicate that Cervantes’s principal concern while writing Don Quijote was the Morisco question’’ (). The next essay, ‘‘The Quixotic Art: Cervantes, Vasari, and Michelangelo’’ by Christopher Weimer, is a provocative piece that acknowledges Cervantes as a reader of Vasari. Reminding us that Don Quijote himself acknowledges the need for a knight to follow the painter’s example’’ (), Weimer then presents Don