The Complete Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Cervantes (review)

The Complete Exemplary Novels is a revision of a previous version, published in four separate volumes (1992), of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares. With the facing-page format (the Spanish on the left and the English translation on the right-hand page), this version is a highly useful vehicle for any course that would include some or all of the Novelas ejemplares, especially in a class where some students might not be in sufficient command of Spanish to read and appreciate the stories if read solely in the original—and by “original” I refer to the language found in one of the many more or less modernized versions (e.g., the editions of Harry Sieber, Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, and others). The included Spanish text has been edited with great care and very helpful endnotes (in English) have been provided for all of the novelas. Thus, for a class or seminar that included both those students without Spanish language mastery as well as those who do read Spanish with ease, this edition would be quite appropriate.

Like its predecessor, this new edition includes all of the twelve (or eleven) novelas in the usual order, and while the Spanish texts and the English translations are largely the same as those of the earlier edition, several important changes make this version more useful. The editors have added the Spanish text and facing translations for the preliminary materials of the 1613 publication—the four aprobaciones and Cervantes’s dedication to the Conde de Lemos—which were not included in the 1992 edition. The consolidation of all the novelas in one volume has allowed Ife’s General Introduction to be presented just once, rather than being repeated at the head of each of the four separate volumes. Likewise, the endnotes for all of the novelas along with the bibliography are combined and placed at the end (681–709). The bibliography, while somewhat limited, covers the basic and most fundamental primary and secondary critical sources. While this bibliography might not be adequate for graduate students or advanced researchers, it provides a very good resource for students at the undergraduate level.

Ife’s General Introduction has been much revised and expanded from the version published in the 1992 edition. In addition to its incisive comments on the Novelas ejemplares, it offers a good setting of the context of Cervantes and his work in a way that will be helpful to students without (or perhaps even with) much previous knowledge of Cervantes. The Prologue and the individual novelas that follow have been translated by different scholars, each of whom has also provided a short introduction to the story. Cervantes’s “Prólogo al lector” has been translated by Ife, who has also done the introduction to and translation of La gitanilla. For El amante liberal, the introduction and translation are by Lynn Williams. La española inglesa, El licenciado Vidriera, and La fuerza de la sangre have been introduced and translated by R. M. Price. For the next three, El celoso extremeño, La ilustre fregona, and Las dos doncellas, the translations and introductions are by Michael and Jonathan Thacker. La señora Cornelia and the final double-novela unit—Novela del casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros—are introduced and translated by John Jones and John Macklin. On the whole, the introductions are virtually the same as those done, all by the same translators, for the 1992 edition, with some revisions and editorial changes (additions, deletions, and changes of paragraph breaks, etc.), and all of them are, to my mind, extremely useful, accessible to the student and general reader, and not overly burdened with specialized critical references or distracting apparatus.

In the spirit of “full disclosure,” I should mention that I have used parts of the 1992 edition of these translations of the Novelas ejemplares in a course on Cervantes—along with other editions...