El anzuelo de Fenisa. Fenisa's Hook, or Fenisa the Hooker (review)

240BCom, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Winter 1989) Lope de Vega, El anzuelo de Fenisa. Fenisa's Hook, or Fenisa the Hooker. Ed. & Trans. David M. Gitlitz. San Antonio: Trinity UP, 1988. Cloth, xxv + 189 pp. $25.00. Professor Gitlitz argues in his introduction that the Spanish Golden-Age plays which are best known to today's readers tend to misrepresent to us the mainstream of dramatic production of the period, which consisted of a substantial proportion of romantic comedies. This is true, and although such "nonmainstream " plays as El burlador de Sevilla and La vida es sueño made a great impact in the century in which they were written as well as later, we ought to look more closely at the best examples of what was one of the Golden Age's most successful genres. El anzuelo de Fenisa is one of these, and if translation needs justification, in this case it lies in the fact that £/ anzuelo is part of European literary history, deriving ultimately from Boccaccio's Decameron. (One has to say "ultimately," since Victor Dixon has just argued that Lope never knew the real Boccaccio, but relied instead on the neutered version of Salviati, "un libro del todo nuevo.") Lope's Fenisa derives from the courtesan Iancofiore of Decameron, VIII, 10, his Lucindo from the merchant Salabaetto who is first fieeced by her, and who later gets his own back. To make this last for three acts, he had to introduce more characters and more complications, among them Albano, who has fled from Spain, having wounded Don Félix in a swordfight, and seduced and abandoned his sister Dinarda. Dinarda and Félix have pursued Albano, independently of each other, and Dinarda adopts male attire soon after her arrival. Fenisa, having once been jilted, regards men only as creatures to be preyed on, until she meets the disguised Dinarda and falls for "him." These are only some of the complications Lope adds. The play is choc-à-bloc with all the themes and situations which most appealed to Golden-Age audiences, so it might have been interesting to know what connection these themes of deceit and counter-deceit, in the context of ladies who are no better than they should be, have in common with El casamiento engañoso, written about 1604-5, especially since El anzuelo was written about 1604-6. As this play belongs to Lope's early forties, it uses eight different verseforms . Professor Gitlitz believes that verse should be translated as verse, and that metrical forms should be retained as far as possible. His argument that verse was meant to separate stage speech from everyday reality is a strong one, but retaining metre and rhyme invariably leads to a less literal translation. It can be claimed that Golden-Age plays are already sufficiently fantastical for a modern audience to manage without the verse. I admire Professor Gitlitz for his verbal dexterity, Reviews241 but I remain unconvinced by his arguments on this score. Take, for example, a passage in octavas (1922-5): CapitánComo entables juego en tu casa, y español se pique, habrá día que valga cien ducados, y doscientos es poco. CampuzanoTraigan dados. This becomes: OsorioIf you protect gamblers, and these Spaniards start making sport, in one day you can make a hundred ducats. Bring on the dice. Campuzano You'll soon have gold in buckets. "Protect" does not translate entables, nor "making sport," se pique, but they rhyme with "sect/respect" and "retort/sort" respectively; Captain Osorio's doscientos es poco has to be abandoned, Campuzano's Traigan dados given to the Captain, and a new speech invented for Campuzano to create a rhyme for "ducats." The difficulty is not that this reads badly: on the contrary. But any reader whose Spanish is less than perfect will be both puzzled and misled. I am not sure, either, that the best way to deal with Fabio's immensely difficult "Italian" is to leave so much of it as it is. As Professor Gitlitz says (p. xx) , Spanish audiences would have picked up the sense, but I doubt if a monoglot English speaker will make much of Fabio's song: Se tutta...