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Cuadernos de Londres by Andrés Bello

2019; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 102; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hpn.2019.0059

2153-6414

Barry L. Velleman,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

Reviewed by: Cuadernos de Londres by Andrés Bello Barry Velleman Bello, Andrés. Cuadernos de Londres. Edited by Iván Jaksić and Tania Avilés. Universitaria, 2017. Pp. 902. ISBN 978-9-56112-557-5. Cuadernos de Londres is an annotated transcription of the handwritten notebooks of the great Venezuelan humanist Andrés Bello (1781–1865), documenting his extensive research at the Library of the British Museum during his London period (1810–29). In the thirteen extant Cuadernos, Bello transcribes and comments upon his investigation of numerous works, primary and secondary, with special emphasis on Classical and Medieval poetry and metrics. On the basis of the watermarks found on the paper Bello used, the notebooks can be dated between approximately 1814 and 1823. The editors' helpful "Prologue" outlines the major themes of these documents, putting into context their importance to Bello's life and later works. The volume continues with notes on the criteria of the edition, images of pages of the Cuadernos, the transcription of the manuscripts, a compelling "Epilogue" by the eminent German-American scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on "La formación humanística de Andrés Bello," and four Indices. For a variety of reasons, these materials have been little utilized in Bello studies. They were kept in the possession of the Amunátegui family between Bello's death and 1955, when they were donated to the University of Chile. Although Bello's biographer Miguel Luis Amunátegui (1828–88) used some of the material of the Cuadernos in his Prologues to a number of volumes of Bello's earliest Obras completas (1881–93), few scholars were aware of the existence of the manuscripts until the 1980's. In addition, Bello's handwriting, with its small and complex letters, was extremely difficult to read. This was compounded by the variety of languages present in the manuscripts (Spanish, Latin, Greek, Italian, English, and French), by antiquated and/or inconsistent spellings (Spanish xefe, Latin loeta for laeta), by Bello's frequent use of idiosyncratic abbreviations, and by marginal notes, crossed-out words and passages, and unmarked transitions between sources. Working with a team of linguists and literary scholars, the editors were able to [End Page 291] provide a reliable transcription of these materials, including the transliteration and translation of the Greek passages. In addition, there are full bibliographical references to the hundreds of works cited by Bello and his sources. Bello included an Index of topics for most of the Cuadernos and also titled them in Roman numerals (I, III, V, VI, VIII, IX, X, XI, XIV). Others notebooks were named A, Lope de Vega I, and Lope de Vega II. In addition, there were a number of loose pages found with the notebooks. The editors include all of this material, re-ordering the Cuadernos to provide greater thematic continuity among them. The editors' "Prologue" provides an excellent introduction to the major themes of Bello's notes and commentaries in the Cuadernos: the emergence of Romance languages and literatures in the wake of the decline of Latin in Europe; the Poema del Cid as a monument to national unification under the law; versification and metrics, especially the rise of assonance and the octosílabo; comparisons between prose Chronicles and their poetic versions; and the influence of French verse rather than Arabic in Spanish poetry (17). Consistent with Bello's well-known reserved temperament, he offers little information about himself. However, the editors suggest that his themes of interest, and particularly the question of loyalty to the monarchy in the Poema del Cid, have parallels with Bello's own situation as an expatriate in London at the critical moment of the "crisis imperial" in America (18). Bello's interest in medicine and other sciences is documented by passages from several works that deal with the origin of syphillis (532–37), and notes and formulas related to the physics of moving objects (751–53). These diverse investigations would be central to Bello's writing and teaching during his London period and especially in Chile (1829–65), where he played a central role in nation-building through his production in the areas of literature, law, criticism, government, historiography, education, physical science...