Romance of Evast and Blaquerna by Ramón Llull (review)

Ramón Llull's curious, fascinating, and very long Romanç d'Evast e Blaquerna (ca. 1283) has not been the subject of much critical attention. If one compares the bibliographical entries for this work with those of other contemporary narratives, such as the Libro del Cavallero Zifar or the Gran Conquista de Ultramar (both written around 1300), it is not much of a contest. Despite Llull's status as one of the great foundational figures of Catalan literature, even in Catalonia Blaquerna has attracted less scholarly attention than later works of prose fiction, such as Bernat Metge's Lo somni (1399) or the anonymous Curial e Güelfa (ca. 1450). This makes Hughes' translation even more of a boon to anyone interested in medieval Iberian literature, scholars and aficionados alike.

The work is pretty much unknown to non-specialists, to many Iberianists whose main focus is Castilian literature, and, of course, to general readers. Blaquerna has been waiting a very long time for this new English translation. Whatever you may think of Allison Peers' 1926 translation, this volume was already ninety years old when Robert Hughes brought the current one to light, and –frankly–a lot has happened in the interim. Hughes' new annotated translation, together with the substantial introductory essay by Albert Soler and Joan Santanach (editors of the 2009 Catalan edition), is a major step forward in Blaquerna scholarship, perhaps the single most important intervention ever in this very small field.

Soler and Santanach's introduction is a rich and comprehensive view of the work, with sections on Llull in the context of the literature of his age, the title of the book, its structure and theme, the work's intertextuality with Llull's Book of the Lover and the Beloved and the Art of Contemplation, its narrative models, its transmission, and, finally, a bibliography. Soler and Santanach's introduction to their 2009 Catalan edition of the text is shorter and almost exclusively codicological and philological in nature, but their thematic and literary historical study of Blaquerna attached to Hughes' translation is a real feast for the literary critic. While there have been several excellent articles and essays on various aspects of Blaquerna in recent decades, this is the first substantial literary historical treatment of the text since Martí de Riquer's Història de la literatura catalana, published in 1964.

Hughes is forthcoming, specific, and explicit regarding his approach to translating Llull's work. He explains in his preface that his aim is to "produce a readable and plausible, if complex, modern rendering [of Blaquerna,] (given that the source text is one of considerable complexity itself), while still preserving some of its more technical lexical features, and, to a lesser degree, those of its syntax" (81). In this he definitely succeeds. He is quite knowledgeable about historical Catalan linguistics and combines this knowledge with a highly sensitive translator's eye, respectful of both original language and modern reader as he goes about arranging for the two to get together.

His own reflections on the translation process leave the reader wanting to read more. For example, he writes that he "tried to remain sensitive to the mood of verbs in the original text, [which may] lend the text in its English form a more wistful and provisional sense than it has in the original Catalan, which … manifests very directly a great definiteness in terms of conception, methods, and objectives" (79). His words conjure up a scene with a stern-faced and earnest Llull, his hand in declamatio pose, who spins theories, taxonomies, and neologistic terminology that would give any medieval reader a headache, as Hughes listens patiently and thinks about how best to make this crazed polymath understood to Anglophones living in an ardently secularist world of smartphones, low-cost air travel, and reality television.

Hughes writes that, in the notes to the translation...