Cuentos de Cuanto Hay: Tales from Spanish New Mexico (review)

A revival of popular interest in traditional New Mexican cuento, or folk narrative, has grown steadily over the past two decades. Bilingual public performances and books of master storytellers Joe Hayes, Paulette Atencio, Teresa Pijoan, and others are widely found in schools, libraries, and festivals. The literary emulation of oral traditions can be found in regional writers such as Sabine Ulibarrá, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chávez, Jim Sagel, and Esteban Arellano. Ethnopoetic elements such as oral genres and performance features are especially well captured in the fiction of Arellano, which has almost ethnographic qualities. The stage for the revival of the cuento has also been set by scholar Nasario Garcìa in a series of more than a half-dozen anthologies of the nuevomexicano oral tradition from the Rio Puerco valley, faithfully transcribed and translated.

Joe Hayes is correct in his observation that, with the exception of Garcia, practically all of the stories in print are "retellings" of this tradition that respond to the literary and pedagogical aspirations of the "retellers." But now, the bilingual (and monolingual) reading public is "ready" to drink a little closer to the original wellspring and savor the performances of traditional storytellers themselves.

In Cuentos de Cuanto Hay, with the blessing of the original author/collector and the American Folklore Society, Hayes has edited and translated a classic, his own favorite source-book: José Manuel Espinosa's Spanish Folk-Tales from New Mexico (Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, vol. 30 [G. E. Stechert and Co., 1937]). Unfortunately, one-third of the original texts were excluded due to length, but the current selection is well and carefully chosen. The woodblock illustrations of William Rotsaert are a superb visual counter-part to the texts, and fully convey their rustic, frontier qualities.

Magic, religious, picaresque, and romantic tales are all included, along with animal fables and anecdotes. All the most famous and colorful characters are present, including the metaphysical trickster Pedro de Urdemalas, the Fashico numskulls, the Saints and the Virgin, New Mexico's autochthonous Tar Baby (made of piñòn [pine pitch]), and a selection of Juan stories or Jack tales, notably Juan del Oso or John the Bear, one of the archetypal figures of Iberian masculinity. Since a good many of these stories can be heard almost anywhere in Spain and Latin America, the unmistakably New Mexican flavor emerges through language, and to an appreciable extent, through setting and characterization.

A close reading reveals that, for the most part, the new edition closely follows the original transcriptions, laboriously taken verbatim and by hand. Hayes deserves abundant credit for improving the paragraph structure of Espinosa's texts for both clarity and emphasis of character dialogues. The engaging English versions recreate the rich texture of the originals, a vast improvement over the monotonal summaries of the 1937 edition. The parallel Spanish and English texts are helpful for learners of both languages and are easily referenced with the flick of an eye. Bilingual cross-referencing is indeed so convenient that Hayes must be taken to task for rescuing the novice reader and zealously standardizing the New Mexican Spanish of the originals. It is true that phonetic spellings of regional pronunciation can be distracting, so some Orthographic regularization is welcome. But eliminating the most renowned attribute of New Mexican Spanish, its 17th-century archaisms, exceeds reasonable editorial license. The texture so painstakingly recreated in the English versions is blurred in the Spanish originals.

If the regionalisms and archaisms that characterize Appalachian English were erased from collections of mountain tales, similar concerns would be raised. An expression like "down yonder in the holler" has a resonance and semantic depth that "over there in the forest clearing" lacks, even though the latter might be preferable for new students of English.

In his own defense. Hayes reminds...