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The Dog and the Fever: A Perambulatory Novella by Pedro Espinosa ed. by Jonathan Cohen

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wcw.2019.0010

1935-0244

Richard M. Ratzan,

Latin American Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: The Dog and the Fever: A Perambulatory Novella by Pedro Espinosa ed. by Jonathan Cohen Richard Martyn Ratzan The Dog and the Fever: A Perambulatory Novella by Pedro Espinosa. Translated from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams, Raquel Hélène Williams. Edited by Jonathan Cohen. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 2018. 88 pp. US$30.00 (hardcover). Where to begin? Perhaps with the commonplace observation, an observation that has perplexed students of creativity for decades, that oftentimes Giants walk the earth not only simultaneously and in proximate pairs but sometimes in small herds! Think Byron, Shelley and Keats. Think Pound, Stevens, Williams, Eliot and Marianne Moore. Think, now, of Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616), Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), Lope de Vega (1562–1635), and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), the four titans of Spain's Siglo de Oro. It was the professional and personal conflict between Quevedo and Góngora that furnished the ideological schism in that era's literature, a schism that gave rise to the novella under review, The Dog and the Fever (El Perro y La Calentura) by Pedro Espinosa (1578–1650). This schism was part of a Eurocentric shift in thinking about classical origins and diction versus a more "modern" preference for concepts, substance. Whether it was metaphysical poetry in England with John Donne, or marinismo in Italy, or Andreas Gryphius and Angelus Silesius in Germany, the disgruntlement with the literary status quo had settled in. [End Page 126] The distinction as originally formulated by Menéndez Pidal and Dámaso Alonso centered about the preference for Latinate models, subjects, ornate speech—the camp known as "culteranismo," exemplified by Góngora (indeed, culteranismo was also called góngorismo)—versus an emphasis on substance, a deeper intellectual concern with ideas, concepts—thus "conceptismo," as exemplified by Baltasar Gracián (1601–58) and his Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio, and Francisco de Quevedo. As the editor, Jonathan Cohen, summarizes it in his introduction: "Culteranismo is characterized by an ostentatious vocabulary, complex syntactic order and overabundance of complicated metaphors" (xvi). Playful language—puns, double entendres—also figure prominently in conceptismo, more so than in culteranismo. However, this disregard was more than purely ideological. In fact Góngora and Quevedo squared off not only professionally but personally, with the latter writing a satirical poem about Góngora's prominent nose. Cohen is correct in comparing their sharply opposed ideas to those of Williams and Eliot and, less so, Williams and Stevens, and, in the minds of some, Williams and Pound. Although more modern scholars like Molfulleda downplay the apparent differences between culteranismo and conceptismo, accentuating their reciprocal affinities and point out that this distinction is often "obsolete," since, as Mas writes, "Góngora is wont to be more complicated intellectually than his rival Quevedo" (author's translation, 5), for many it was, like many other simplistic dichotomies, a working literary opposition for centuries. It is important to understand this background to appreciate The Dog and the Fever since this novella is, if any Siglo de Oro text is, the poster child for the excesses of conceptismo. Imagine Tristam Shandy's Laurence Sterne on acid, or Donald Barthelme gone aphoristic, or Clarice Lispector writing about a dog and a fever rather than a cockroach. Espinosa, as Jonathan Cohen, the editor of this book explains, probably based the idea for the novella on El Coloquio de los Perros, a picaresque novella by Cervantes. This observation is part of an excellent introduction to this edition of The Dog and the Fever issued by Wesleyan Press. Cohen has a distinguished record in Spanish translation and Williams studies. In addition to the introduction, there is an effusively useful foreword by Paul Mariani; an introduction by Williams to his translation; Williams's translation with his notes italicized at the bottom of pages; Cohen's notes on the translation; and Williams's collected commentary from various sources, [End Page 127] like his Autobiography and letters, about his work on the translation. Finally there are several biographical pages about Espinosa, Williams and Cohen. There is no index. It is, unfortunately, not a bilingual text, as Cohen's By Word of Mouth is (reviewed by Peter...