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Forum To the Editor: Reviews generally describe and evaluate books. Reviewers of scholarly books often find fault. When editors or authors are taken to task, they are almost never pleased. Nevertheless a scholarly editor should be careful with texts. But I find myself quite unscrupulously re-written when Mrs. Gimeno takes issue with my idea of what the major critical task is with respect to the plays of Juan del Enzina. I wrote: ". . . it is his critic's task to show how he converted modest, even humble, materials into a drama of rich complexity ." Even before she misquotes this sentence, Mrs. Gimeno prepares her distortion by stating that: "the reviewer formulates the sole task for the critic of Encina's theater this way. . ." She then goes on to quote me as follows : "it is the critic's task to show how he (Encina) converted modest, even humble materials into a drama of rich complexity." And finally Mrs. Gimeno clinches her perversion of my words with the judgment that my objective: "is certainly not the only task for the Enciman critic." I quite agree. The words "sole" and "only" have been supplied by Mrs. Gimeno, and my original sentence will support no such reading. If this is Mrs. Gimeno's characteristic way with a text, then I am not reassured . No more reassuring are her interpretive powers when applied to the adjective "limited" in the same sentence of mine. Most educated speakers of English would recognize that the adjective has the literal sense of "circumscribed ," "having limits," as well as the somewhat pejorative figurative sense of "narrow" or "unimaginative." The words with which my sentence ends: "great dramatic art" clearly rule out the second acceptation. But Mrs. Gimeno seizes upon it to launch into a perfectly needless defense of Enzina, in which he is not well served. My point is that Enzina's limitations contribute to his achievement. Mrs. Gimeno's imposed meaning will not hold up. Further seemingly deliberate obfuscation occurs when Mrs. Gimeno replies to my dissatisfaction with the description of Enzina as a transitional figure. The basic difficulty here is that Mrs. Gimeno does not distinguish between language in transition and a writer writing at the same time. Changing language does not necessarily produce a "transitional figure," especially if he is a notable artist. As good as its English is the logic of Mrs. Gimeno's asseveration that I have "not comprehended Encina 's formation." Just how Enzina's plainly hyperbolic assessment of his education at Salamanca and his long residence in Rome address themselves to the problem of the "transitional figure " I cannot see. I congratulate Mrs. Gimeno on her much-needed clarification of the Covarrubias "cuatra témpora," but is there any reason for keeping in the quite banal recitation in Latin of the four seasons? Moreover, the main point of the exchange—its humor—passes unnoticed . Mrs. Gimeno defends her failure to mention the biblical sources of w. 10003 on p. Ill by referring to a note which in turn refers to an article that provides the source. There is such a note, and I read it; but is of no help whatsoever with the passage in question , because Mrs. Gimeno merely states that the study referred to is an investigation of Enzina's biblical 123 sources, nothing more: "Para un estudio de las fuentes bíblicas de esta égloga, vid. Gabriel Boussagol, "La deuxième 'Eglogue' de Juan del Encina," Revue de l'Enseignement des Langues Vivantes , 66, 1929, pp. 193-98." In her defense , Mrs. Gimeno writes: "Having cited this article, I systematically do not identify these sources observable in the strophes of the eclogue." But she does not alert her readers to this fact, and how I could have divined that information from a simple reference to the Boussagol article I fail to see. Moreover , Boussagol's piece is quite inaccessible , and Mrs. Gimeno ought to have identified all sources, his and those found by others. When the discussion moves to the issue of the sources for the Gideon's fleece episode, I will persevere in the view that Bernard extends his metaphor far indeed, even though he and Augustine are doctors...

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