"El amante liberal": Cervantes's Ironic Imitation of Heliodorus
2006; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-7599
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
ResumoEL amante liberal, from Cervantes's 1613 Novelas ejemplares, has been described as one of Cervantes's least popular works to readers in the twentieth century. This is, no doubt, because it shares little of the content or purportedly more realistic style of his more popular works, such as the Quixote, or with other novelas from the same collection, such as La gitanilla and Rinconete y Cortadillo. Nevertheless, amante liberal was quite popular in its original Spanish as well as in translation in the period immediately following its publication (Hart, 41-42, and El Saffar xii). It is the story of how an essentially good but willful young man, and the woman who initially detests him, find love and personal growth through long and difficult trials. The exceptional nature of their trials is one of the story's main sources of interest; they are captured by Turkish pirates, sold and resold as slaves, threatened with physical violation and its subsequent dishonor, lost at sea in storms, witness to political intrigues of the Ottoman colonial administration, and, on the way to Constantinople, are engaged in a terrible naval combat of no fewer than four separate factions on three different ships. This collection of peripecias, of combat, travel, surprise, and recognition, with a distinct maritime flavor, clearly distinguishes the story's generic heritage as that of novela bizantina. This genre of Greek romance of late-classical origin provided the source materials for works such as the medieval Libro de Apolonio or the early-modern re-casting of the same story in Timoneda's patrana oncea of his 1567 Patranuelo. In Cervantes's day the genre had become particularly important because of the role it played in debates regarding the theoretical and moral implications of extended prose fiction. Many sixteenth-century literary theoreticians had concluded that extended prose fictions, such as the immensely popular libros de caballeria, were inherently immoral and in violation of the eternal rules of art, as expressed in the writings of Horace, for example. Others, though, suggested that it was possible to write extended imaginative prose that could be both morally instructive and entertaining--Horace's dulce et utile--as well as obey the established rules for art. This latter position was strengthened by the discovery in 1526, during the sack of a Hungarian palace, of a copy of Heliodorus's third-century Ethiopian History. The work was soon translated into a variety of European languages and held up as an example of a classical extended prose fiction that could be used as an appropriate model for contemporary writers. Cervantes's take on this debate, and its importance to the composition of the Quixote, was studied in Alban Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle and the Persiles. As such, and we can safely conclude that Cervantes's decision to write a contemporary novela bizantina would not have been accidental, and that his imitation was likely to reflect some of the theoretical issues that concerned writers of his day. While Cervantes does not refer to amante liberal as either a novela bizantina or as a work related to the Ethiopian History, we know that such a project was on his mind, because in the introduction to the Novelas ejemplares he promises la vida no me deja, te ofrezco los Trabajos de Persiles, libro que se atreve a competir con Heliodoro, si ya por atrevido no sale con las manos en la cabeza (53). Calling amante liberal a novela bizantina, or suggesting that it is related to Heliodorus, is not especially original; many others have already done so, including those who have worked extensively on the Novelas, such as Ruth El-Safar and Thomas Hart. My interest here, though, is in exploring how Cervantes chose to render those features of the Ethiopian History that were most appreciated by his contemporaries, and in particular, those features specifically singled out for praise by the text's most influential translator. …
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