La Celestina (review)

290ReviewsLa corónica 33.1, 2004 Rojas, Femando de. La Celestina. Edited by Patricia S. Finch. Ceivantes & Co. Spanish Classics, vol. 9. Newark, DE:Juan de la Cuesta, 2003. 267pp. ISBN 1-58977-011-0 This new edition of the Rojas classic represents a welcome addition to Juan de la Cuesta's series of Spanish classics for classroom use, Cervantes & Co. Finch's edition is based upon Severin's 1969 edition, which is itself based upon the Valencia edition of 1514, although it draws upon insights provided by other editors as well. Finch does not mention why she has chosen to follow this edition, rather than, say, Severin's 1989 edition based on the text published in Zaragoza in 1507; one suspects that copyright issues may have been paramount. In any case, the differences between the two probably have little bearing on an undergraduate introduction to Rojas's masterpiece. Nevertheless, Finch's edition usefully adopts a variety of typographical conventions to set off the additions in the Tragicomedia, suppressions from the Comedia, and elements missing from the 1514 Valencia edition. It does so clearly and unobtrusively, making it quite easv to trace the changes from Comedia to Tragicomedia in a classroom context. It also includes a brief introduction, in English, covering a history' of the text, short statements about authorship, genre, and sources, a summary biography of Rojas, and quick considerations of some basic themes, including honor, love, death and magic. The introduction also says some things about the influence of La Celestina on later literature, and then wraps up with a user's guide to this publication's editorial apparatus, a crash-course on the peculiarities ofGolden Age Spanish, and a short bibliography. A Spanish-English glossary covering those tenus most likely to puzzle a modern American student of Spanish appears at the end of the book. As in the case of all of the Cervantes & Co. texts, the strengths of this edition of Celestina can also be considered to be its weaknesses. Like Tom Lathrop's classroom edition of Don Quixote, the text that inspired the series, Finch's Celestina provides running headers -in English- at the top of every page, telling some important narrative detail about what is going on in the story. Like Lathrop's Qiiixote, Finch's Celestina glosses difficult words in English in the margins, and entire passages in the footnotes. The notes also gloss mythological and Biblical references, and provide some necessary historical background. At no point, however, do they interpret the text, leaving that up to the reader. The modernization of spelling is much more conservative than it is in Severin's edition, preserving much of the flavor of Rojas's Spanish, but without frustrating the student. The result is an edition of this La corónica 33.1 (Fall, 2004): 290-91 Reviews291 early modern classic that makes it eminently accessible to American undergraduates . In my experience using the text in the classroom, I found that my students experienced minimal problems in basic comprehension, allowing us to dedicate almost all of our time to discussing the work itself. Even those students who had just finished our intermediate level introduction to literary analysis, and who were reading Golden Age Spanish for the first time, came into class with a clear grasp of the text, ready to discuss it. The more advanced students in the class, however, expressed disappointment with Finch's edition. They did not care for the glosses in English , suspecting that they constituted a crutch of sorts that was actually interfering with their on-going language acquisition. Unfortunately, there are even some errors in these glosses. "Alcoholada" is glossed as "drunk" rather than as "wearing make up" (29). The advanced students also found many of the notes regarding myth and history superficial. For example, Calisto's line, "Primero sean los caballos de Febo apacentados en aquellos verdes prados que suelen, cuando han dado fin a su jornada" is glossed as "Allusion to the horses of the chariot of Apollo (Phoebus), out to pasture at day's end, as Sempronio says in reply" (120). The note does little more than provide an English paraphrase of the passage, indicating erroneously that "Phoebus" and "Apollo" are...