Out now from Hackett Publishing! Lazarillo de Tormes and The Grifter (El Buscon), Two Novels of the Low Life in Golden Age Spain. This was in many ways the most difficult (and therefore one of the most rewarding) translations I’ve done. And I have to admit, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.
Lazarillo de Tormes is a very short book, just 20,000 words — that’s about 50 normal-sized pages. (By comparison, Don Quixote weighs in at 400,000 words.) El Buscón is about twice as long: 43,000 words. Based on word-count alone, I thought I might knock off the project in a couple of months.
Think again! Lazarillo is one of the very first modern novels, published first published (anonymously) in 1553. The language is, shall we say, a bit outdated. El Buscón is a bit more recent, published in 1626; but its author, the Baroque poet Francisco de Quevedo, delighted in word play and filled its pages with puns (based, more often than not, on the street slang of the early 17th century).
In other words, the dictionary became my best friend. Fortunately, the Real Academia has put dozens of early Spanish and Spanish-English (and Spanish-French, Spanish-Latin, etc.) dictionaries online here, making it possible to check both the meaning of words as they were used back then and the English equivalents then current. In the end, I looked up virtually each one of those 63,000 words! And between the translating, polishing, more polishing, and doing the research needed to write the notes and the essays introducing the novels, the project ended taking almost an entire year.
Anyway, it’s out now and seems to be getting a good reception. And it’s on to the next project!
