The Place of Argument: Essays in Honour of Nicholas G. Round (review)

No British Hispanist has operated at a higher intellectual level than Nick Round, whose mind has illuminated so many aspects of Spanish culture. He has enhanced our understanding of nineteenth-century novels and fifteenth-century historiography, and made contributions of daunting brilliance to translation theory and practice – and many other topics, as the remarkable list of his fourteen books, 76 articles and ten translations attests (xix–xxiv). His ability to combine an acute understanding of details with an appreciation of more general cultural principles is not confined to academic enterprises, for his role as an inspiring facilitator for colleagues and an exacting teacher of graduate and undergraduate students is also notably influential. All those who had reason to get to know the outstandingly intelligent department he headed at the University of Sheffield will vouch for the productive atmosphere encouraged there by his multidisciplinary energy and expertise. This effect was achieved partly through example, as he worked hard into the night preparing plenaries and writing longhand notes on student projects (as in the photograph in this volume), and partly by establishing that all those who worked with him, even when they disagreed, needed to think and articulate with the same wide-ranging precision as himself. And he can write an incisive review of a book on any subject at all. Round's humanist instincts, amiable generosity to colleagues, students and friends, and never-failing memory for the facts and for the ideas of other Hispanists have been allied to a belief in rational argument as the way to prevail, even in the anti-intellectual thickets of contemporary university administrations, so it was a stroke of genius for the editors of this homage volume to entitle it 'The Place of Argument', a decision not commented on in their Introduction (ix–xvii), but completely apposite.

The book reflects the interests and qualities of the honoree. The contributions are offered to him from former Belfast, Glasgow and Sheffield colleagues and students, and friends who work with similar omniscience. The latter category includes Jeremy Lawrance (127–48), considering sixteenth-century translators; Alan Deyermond (3–16), comparing different kinds of royal competition in thirteenth-century verse; Geoffrey Ribbans (57–72), tracing the novelistic trajectory of Galdós between 1878 and 1883; and Eamonn Rodgers (73–85), reevaluating Galdós's thoughtful 1909 fantasy El caballero encantado. All demonstrate how the literary creations being analysed need to be assessed with a more sophisticated knowledge of the historical context than they usually are, although in Lawrance's chapter the translators emerge with less credit than expected. Galdós is also considered carefully by the late Arthur Terry (103–11), in a beautifully written piece on different kinds of realism in El Amigo Manso, and by Rhian Davies, concentrating on Torquemada (86–102). The one non-Galdosian study in the nineteenth-century section is Harriet Turner's adventurous comparison of Ana Ozores (in La Regenta) with the American insider-trader Martha Stewart, carried out in the name of 'cultural studies' (112–24). There are three other medieval contributions: by David Pattison (17–30), on women in epics; by David Hook (31–42), on the use made of Pulgar's account of an agreement between King and Pope in 1482 during a similar controversy in 1718; and by John England (43–54) on Juan Manuel's attitude to money, which was more practical than Juan Ruiz's.

Translations are the theme of three studies in addition to Lawrance's. Robin Warner's serious analysis of why topical and political jokes and cartoons do or do not work in translation (179–91) is largely convincing. Warner is an expert in linguistic pragmatics and he and Nick Round will have had searching discussions on such topics at Sheffield. The others are Patricia Odber de Baubeta's presentation of ten different English translations of the deceptively simple poem 'En la huerta nasce la rosa' (161–78), sung in...