The Celestina: A Fifteenth-Century Spanish Novel in Dialogue.
Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson.
Book Series: World Literature in Translation.
Oakland, California: University of California Press, 1955, 2019.
Book Information : Publisher; Google Books; Wikipedia; GoodReads.com; Amazon.com.
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Wikipedia Articles : La Celestina; Spanish Literature; History of Spain
- Fernando de Rojas (c.1465/73 – 1541).
- La Celestina (1499). ~~~~~~~~~~
- Spanish literature.
- Medieval Spanish literature.
- Spanish Renaissance literature.
- Chivalric romance.
- Anonymous, compiled by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (c.1450 – 1505), Amadís de Gaula (early 14thC; first printed 1508).
- Picaresque novel.
- Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554).
- Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616).
- Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616), Wikipedia Spanish.
- Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605, 1615).
- Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), Wikipedia Spanish.
- Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares (1613).
- Lope de Vega (1562 – 1635).
- Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600 – 1681).
- Calderón, Life Is a Dream [La vida es sueño] (1635). ~~~~~~~~~~
- History of Spain.
- History of Spain: Early modern Spain.
- Spanish Golden Age, 1492 – 1681.
- Siglo de Oro, Wikipedia Spanish.
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Translator Information : Lesley Byrd Simpson
- Woodrow Borah, "Lesley Byrd Simpson (1891-1984)", Hispanic American Historical Review, Volume 65, Issue 2, Pages 353–356, 01 May 1985.
- Lesley Byrd Simpson articles in the Hispanic American Historical Review.
- Lesley Byrd Simpson, GoodReads.com.
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Other Recent English Translations of La Celestina :
- Fernando de Rojas. Celestina. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. Book Series: The Margellos World Republic of Letters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 2012.
[Publisher; Google Books; GoodReads.com; Amazon.com.] - Fernando de Rojas. Celestina. Book Series: Penguin Classics. Translated by Peter Bush. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.
[Publisher; Google Books; GoodReads.com; Amazon.com.] - Fernando de Rojas. La Celestina. Translated by Robert S. Rudder. Claremont, California: RSR Publications, 2013.
[GoodReads.com; Amazon.com.] - Enrique Fernandez (editor). A Companion to Celestina. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2017.
(This is a collection of essays.)
[Publisher; Google Books; GoodReads.com; Amazon.com.]
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Notes :
- In my post for June on The Song of Roland I outlined the literary predecessors of Don Quixote. La Celestina is a major work in pre-Don Quixote Spanish literature. I only became aware of La Celestina from following Roberto González Echevarría's lecture course Cervantes' Don Quixote. Now that I've read La Celestina and given that Celestina is such a vivid character I'm somewhat surprised that La Celestina isn't more widely touted and known as a landmark for its period of European literature; on the other hand, many commentators observe that Spanish literature is generally ignored or deprecated in the European context or that, if Spanish literature is recognized at all, Don Quixote gets all the attention. I'm looking forward to Lazarillo de Tormes.
- The 2019 reprint of Lesley Byrd Simpson's translation of La Celestina has a couple defects that I cannot overlook. One defect is book production related: I suspect the publisher must have scanned an old printing to prepare the new reprint edition. Everything looks great in this 2019 printing except for one recurring item. Many sentences in the text of La Celestina end with an exclamation point. In at least 3 or 4 instances a sentence-terminating exclamation point is missing, no punctuation of any kind indicates the end of the sentence, and one space after the last word of the sentence appears a superfluous capital letter "I". The other "defect" is a stylistic choice made by the translator in his original translation: he uses English currency units like penny and farthing when characters discuss money. I found this jarring. Clearly ideas about how to deal with cultural differences when translating literary texts have changed over the half century and more since Simpson prepared his text. Compare the Simpson text with Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote: Grossman uses Spanish currency units presumably as the characters used them in the original text with footnotes to explain them to the English language reader. This highlights an unfortunate absence in Simpson's translation: there are no footnotes / endnotes at all, which could have allowed him to use the original currency units with an explanation. More generally, the absence of footnotes / endnotes in Simpson's translation means the reader will not get the kind of helpful additional information one often finds, for example, in Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Classics editions. For all of the reasons in this note, I think prospective readers of La Celestina should look to the Yale and Penguin editions listed above (but I cannot verify whether there are any footnotes / endnotes to these editions).
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