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Reviewed by:
  • Celestina
  • Joseph T. Snow
Fernando de Rojas. Celestina. Translated and with an Afterword by Peter Bush. Introduction by Juan Goytisolo. Sawtry, Cambs., UK: Dedalus, 2009. 219 pp. ISBN: 978-1-903517-67-3

Many of the English translations of Celestina have long been out of print and only available through such outlets as eBay. Mack Singleton, J. M. Cohen, Phyllis Hartnoll, and Wallace Woolsey are translators whose versions of the Tragicomedia are all gathering dust on shelves. Still in print, however, are James Mabbe’s 1631 version and the L. B. Simpson translation of the Comedia (often reprinted); they are, so far as I know, the only available Celestina translations in English, the former in older English and much retouched from the original, the latter offering only the earliest version of the complete classic.

For obvious reasons a new English translation is indeed welcome, and Peter Bush is a professional translator of works from modern Catalan (Quim Monzó) and Spanish (Valle-Inclán and Juan Goytisolo), as well as a former professor of literary translation (University of Middlesex and the University of East Anglia). I have a lot of admiration and approving comments about his efforts to bring Celestina to a twentieth-first-century audience. However, I think it appropriate in a scholarly journal to alert the reader to some few surprises in store.

The introduction is not by Bush but by Juan Goytisolo (9–17), whose stand on the converso roots of the Celestina enterprise has been repeatedly made and will be familiar. Bush limits himself to a very brief afterword (217–19), but adopts the converso position of Goytisolo. The reader is confronted with a familiar text whose preliminary materials (here all transplanted outside the structure of the original textual placement, i.e., following Pleberio’s lament), [End Page 323] and whose twenty-one acts have been transposed into chapters (the word is employed first by Goytisolo, 9). The arguments to the acts have been silenced, as have all titles and subtitles and the general argument to the entire work; this may be a good decision as it allows a first-time reader not to anticipate events (I almost said “actions”). And last, but certainly not least, is the final nail in the dramatic coffin of Celestina: the invention of a narrator. The opening lines of the opening chapter (here the word is not used, but Goytisolo has implanted it, and it is employed in Bush’s afterword again) strike a telling effect that pervades the rest of the text:

Calisto ran into the garden in pursuit of his falcon, saw Melibea and immediately felt love stirring.

“Melibea, I look at you and see why God is Great”.

The asides are handled much in the same way, with an authorial voice supplied. Here is Sempronio in the second scene: “‘I was half right. He is mad and a heretic into the bargain,’ mumbled Sempronio” (22). Here is another aside a few pages later: “‘What claptrap will my besotted master come out with now?’ Sempronio gnashed under his breath” (26).

On display here are a few examples I can give of the “modern” language used in the Bush translation: colloquial phrases like “into the bargain” abound, and lexical items such as “claptrap” are loose but effective. Bush explains some of his philosophy of this translation in the afterword:

Subsequently, Spanish academics have continued with this format [setting it out as a play to be staged] and have tended to bury the work under a mass of erudite footnotes mainly tracing sources and have failed to grasp its literary originality. . . . [I]n this translation, I have given a format that responds to the design of Rojas’s dialogue and set the work out as a narrative dialogue in chapters to be read, followed by accompanying poems and prose statements.

(218–19, emphasis added).

And this he has done in spades, with a flair not so much for literal translations but, rather, for an equivalent text transposed to modern and colloquial English. That said, I would like to interpose here a few passages from the Bush translation and the equivalent passages in Mack H. Singleton’s version, since they...

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