The Life and Times of Mother Andrea/Vida y costumbres de la Madre Andrea PDF

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RESEÑAS 161 principios filológicos, representa una saludable llamada de atención sobre la pertinencia de la erudición en su grado justo y, sobre todo, en su sensata aplicación; junto a ello ofrece una muestra de las aportaciones de una mirada de carácter interdisciplinar y plantea una reivindicación ...

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RESEÑAS

161

Pedro Ruiz Pérez Universidad de Córdoba

The Life and Times of Mother Andrea /Vida y costumbres de la Madre Andrea. Ed. Enriqueta Zafra. Trans. Anne J. Cruz. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2011. HB. 176 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84615-940-4

Enriqueta Zafra and Anne Cruz have made a welcome contribution to several fields—including Hispanic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Jewish Studies, and Portuguese Studies—in their SpanishEnglish edition of Vida y costumbres de la Madre Andrea (The Life and Times of Mother Andrea). Theirs is the first edition of this anonymous female picaresque novella from the seventeenth century since Dutch Hispanist Jonas Van Praag published it in 1958 (Vida y costumbres de la madre Andrea. Revista de Literatura. 14 [1958]:111-69). The original author offers the scandalous story of the Celestinesque procuressprostitute Andrea. As the genre begs, the protagonist narrates her life, from her unorthodox birth and lineage—both in terms of paternity and purity of blood—to her administration of a brothel in what is most

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principios filológicos, representa una saludable llamada de atención sobre la pertinencia de la erudición en su grado justo y, sobre todo, en su sensata aplicación; junto a ello ofrece una muestra de las aportaciones de una mirada de carácter interdisciplinar y plantea una reivindicación sin ostentaciones del comparatismo, dimensiones todas ellas a las que en ningún caso pueden renunciar los estudios literarios. Góngora planteó y llevó a la práctica la empresa heroica del poeta; esta obra nos lo evidencia y demuestra, de paso, las posibilidades de la crítica para elevarse a una altura heroica.

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likely Madrid. She eventually retires and converts into a repentant Mary Magdalene figure. Zafra prefaces the source text with an introduction of 23 pages and five sub-sections. She summarizes the novella’s history, detailing Van Praag’s discovery of an eighteenth-century reproduction of the original manuscript. She then recounts her own thorough yet ultimately frustrated search for the copy that had once been in Van Praag’s possession, concluding that, while the original manuscript and its copies remain lost, a modernized, critical edition is a desideratum to the field (Zafra and Cruz 3). Next, Zafra situates the novella within its historical and literary context, drawing on her previous work with the genre, such as her dissertation El papel de la prostitución en la picaresca femenina and her article, “Teaching the Role of Prostitution in the Female Picaresque” (in Approaches to Teaching Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Tradition. Ed. Anne J. Cruz [New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008]: 108-12), as well as that of other scholars of both the Celestinesque and female picaresque traditions. Zafra’s overall claim is that the female picaresque novella generally functioned as a textual romping ground for men’s sex-capades. Works like La madre Andrea confined their loose protagonists to the page while their real life counterparts roamed the streets and actual brothels threatened clients with venereal disease. In other words, male readers could enjoy the coquettish characters safely and guiltlessly and at the same time gain an education about the dangers of flesh-and-blood pícaras. Zafra asserts that the novella is unprecedented in the genre for Andrea’s multi-faceted character as prostitute, pícara, procuress, and madre de mancebía, as well as the text’s insights into the legal and commercial aspects of brothel management. Zafra also speculates on the author’s origins. While she cautions against labeling him definitely as converso, she fleshes out a convincing argument for his likely Semitic background and relocation from Madrid to the more tolerant Netherlands. Evidence of the author’s identity and trajectory include social criticisms typical of converso writers, frequent Old Testament citations, the use of terms associated with mercantilism, and instances of linguistic colloquialisms common to Madrid. In addition, Zafra considers the function of the work’s anonymous authorship and the censorship that likely prevented the printing of the original manuscript.

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Following Zafra’s introduction, Cruz elucidates her approach to translating the novella from the original Spanish into English. As she explains, La madre Andrea has a “rhetorical richness” in contrast with its lowly subject matter reminiscent of La Celestina and La Lozana andaluza (26). Golden Age conceptismo and germanía (the linguistic register of thieves, prostitutes, and ruffians) abound, as do proverbs and Portuguese spellings. Despite such varied registers, Cruz makes every effort to retain the puns, as well as the erotic, often obscene language characteristic of the picaresque. In the interest of accessibility, however, she sometimes unpacks the base meaning of complex proverbs instead of searching for English equivalents. At other moments, she conveys the meaning of the original figurative language with an equally creative selection of words. While one can only fully appreciate the rhetorical games and other linguistic features in the language in which they were composed, Cruz clarifies much of the convoluted, archaic idiosyncrasies that may prove too thorny for the modern eye, even one well-trained in reading early forms of Spanish. The translation of the novella itself is presented on facing pages, making for easy cross-referencing. A separate set of footnotes accompanies each version of the text. Particularly valuable is how thoroughly the annotations link La madre Andrea with examples of the female picaresque tradition and its precursors, as well as other texts written in a Hispano-Jewish context. In these comparisons, Zafra juxtaposes La madre Andrea with El Libro de buen amor, Visión deleytable, La Celestina, La Lozana andaluza, Don Quixote, La pícara Justina, La hija de Celestina, and some erotic poems of the time. She glosses these works’ shared puns and cultural references, demonstrating how the ways in which several of their authors objectified, vilified, parodied, or silenced their female protagonists may have influenced the author of La madre Andrea. Given this comparative approach, perhaps more discussion of converso writers’ direct link to the (female) picaresque-Celestinesque tradition would have enhanced this study. To her credit and the reader’s profit, Zafra’s introduction and notes connect the novella to medieval and Golden Age misogynist discourse and provide strong textual, cultural, historical, and linguistic evidence in support of the author’s likely converso identity. In particular, she references Francisco Delicado and Manuel de Pina as descendants of the Sephardim, who, like the

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Andrea Nate Brown University

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probable author of La madre Andrea, lived and wrote polemical literature outside the Iberian Peninsula. However, I found myself wondering if one could draw comparisons between the anonymous author and other allegedly New Christian writers of picaresque and Celestinesque works who resided both in Spain and abroad, such as Fernando de Rojas, the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, and López de Úbeda. Certainly, Zafra and Cruz have set a benchmark for future scholarly work on La madre Andrea. Moreover, their readable, informative edition of the novella will surely encourage increased inclusion of the under-represented Celestina cycle and female picaresque in Golden Age literature courses. The novella is younger than its canonical companion pieces, but this edition’s modern, bilingual presentation and erudite commentary make it a fine choice for an introduction to the genres, as well as a representative text for both surveys and more specialized courses. Unfortunately, though, the book’s list price of about $90 may limit its adoption for course use. That quibble aside, Zafra and Cruz’s bilingual edition helps assure a place for Hispanic literature in multiple disciplinary contexts....