The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Adversities ed. by Ilan Stavens

Abstract

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Adversities ed. by Ilan Stavens Richard Squibbs Stavens, Ilan, trans. and ed. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Adversities. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. x + 178 pp. $14.37 paperback. The choices editors face when contemplating a new English edition of Lazarillo de Tormes should be more vexing than they often appear. In 1554, four Spanish editions of Lazarillo were published in four different cities, which has led some to speculate that all were based on a now-lost original (princeps). Whatever the case, this slim, anonymously authored first-person tale of a young Spanish urchin’s struggle to survive grinding poverty and hunger while serving a series of callous masters made little impact in its country of origin until the publication of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599; 1604), which drew attention to what, in hindsight, now appeared to be the popular Guzmán’s progenitor. As Ilan Stavans notes in the introduction to his new translation, Cervantes too in the First Part of Don Quixote (1605) acknowledges the status of Lazarillo as the first of the picaresque tales that would shortly proliferate in western Europe through the seventeenth century and beyond. But while Lazarillo had languished in relative obscurity in Spain for the half-century between its initial publication and the appearance of Don Quixote, in France and England during the same period it contributed vitally to emergent bodies of prose fiction via oft-reprinted translations and sequels. To date no modern English version of the work makes more than passing reference to this phenomenon. Stavans’s new version is likewise virtually silent about the many lives of the English Lazarillo from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but it does make the Spanish Lazarillo more of its time than has any previous English edition. Besides the maps of mid-sixteenth-century Salamanca and Toledo that help concretize the steps of Lazaro’s journey, Stavans includes a few pieces of Inquisition-era writing that illuminate the confessional dimensions of the tale (an emphasis of this edition that’s reinforced by David Gitlitz’s essay, “Inquisitorial Confessions,” one of eight useful and wide-ranging works of criticism appended to the text). Stavans’s translation is based mostly on Francisco Rico’s controversial 2011 Spanish edition of the hypothetical princeps. This means that this new English version of Lazarillo gives us a work that Rico imagines must have been the original, from which the four 1554 Spanish editions derived. One problem with using Rico’s version as the source text is that it includes [End Page 139] passages that are only found in one of the extant 1554 editions (published at Alcalá de Henares). Stavans notes in his introduction that the Alcalá edition “includes some additional episodes that are probably written by another hand” (vii), but it would have been good either to have set off these passages in the text, or to have relegated them to an appendix. This would have furthered Stavans’s aim of giving us a more deeply contextualized Lazarillo, since many more readers in Golden Age Spain, and every French, English, and German reader since the first translations appeared in those languages, knew only versions of Lazarillo without the Alcalá interpolations. It would also have given English readers an accessible alternative to Michael Alpert’s widely read translation (Penguin, 2003), which relies as well upon Rico’s edition. On the other hand, a brief excerpt from Juan de Luna’s 1620 sequel is a welcome inclusion; more from de Luna would’ve provided a real service to Lazarillo’s English readers. Despite Stavans’s dismissing it as not “nearly as engaging as the original” (viii), de Luna’s sequel is a classic of early modern misanthropic literature, and it was always published with the original in England from the 1630s through the 1820s as the conclusion to Lazaro’s story. Since then, however, it’s been cast on the dust heap of literary history owing to the widespread bibliographical fetishizing of an ostensibly “original” Lazarillo (which—as Rico’s edition of the princeps shows—remains a product of...