University of Colorado at Boulder
James A. Parr's final sentence in his review of Maravall's
Utopia y contrautopia en el Quijote (Hispanic Review 48: 249-51) states unequivocally that the
book «belongs in every Cervantine scholar's personal
library»
. While the praise for the book is clear, an implicit note of
limitation is also clear: if the reader is not a Cervantine scholar, the
interest diminishes.
This is, perhaps, the center of critique to Felkel's translation: its necessity. If Parr's appreciation was correct, and if we assume that most -if not all- Cervantine scholars read Spanish, then the natural addressee of the translation is not that of the original. And since the original was interesting —128→ mostly to Cervantine scholars, one is compelled to reevaluate Parr's verdict and to try to ascertain whether or not we are faced with a book that can be of interest to English-speaking readers of the Quixote, or to English-speaking scholars interested in the vast field of Utopia or, more generally, in the political ideas of the Renaissance. For Felkel's translation to be deemed necessary, it must be of appeal to those readers, and it must be so fifteen years after the original was published, that is, fifteen years in which floods of water have passed under the critical bridge. If we consider that Maravall's book is, in its turn, a reelaboration of a work dating back to 1948, Felkel's task might very well be Herculean -indeed, quixotic.
Maravall's book places itself at the extreme end of a critical
spectrum of which the other extreme could be Cesáreo Bandera's now
famous statement: «El único tema del
Quijote es el Quijote
mismo»
. That is, Maravall's reading of the
Quixote is not just contextual, but a reading
of the context, rather than a reading of the text. Even at the time of Parr's
review, the book was already «traditional»,
«old-fashioned», and had an almost total disregard for contemporary
criticism. For instance, it did not incorporate until its last revision the
distinction between the character Don Quixote and the author Cervantes, and
when it does so, it treats both categories (the textual and the extra-textual)
as belonging to the same realm of reality.
Fortunately, Felkel is dealing with a classic from two points of view: it is a classic essay, and it deals with a classic book. Maravall's piece of thought, like Unamuno's Vida de don Quijote y Sancho or Ortega's Meditaciones del Quijote, has an intrinsic value which transcends the always arguable limitations that stem from its inherent -and inherited- method of analysis. Maravall's view is informative, for it puts together data collected over many decades of scholarship, plus it is original, seductive at times, intelligent like that of other dead scholars/thinkers with dead methods/methodologies, such as a Foucault or a Goldmann. The lure of Felkel's translation is to offer the wide world outside professional Cervantism one of the best books by one of the best critical Spanish writers of recent times. It should be read for the same reasons that Lukács or Bakhtine are still read -or are re-read after hiatus of interest.
Also, with deconstruction and reader-response criticism (to name
only the two perceived adversarial approaches that Parr named) receding, it is
perhaps the case that the most adverse times for Maravall's book were then, not
now. A book that deals with Utopia is, by necessity, an important book at a
time in which focus among Cervantists is shifting somewhat to the
Persiles, with its opposition to the
Quixote being posited as that of a
reconstruction vis-à-vis the Quixotesque destruction of a perfect dream.
For Parr, Maravall's book was even more important if we considered the
Quixote a satire -as he does. For this
reviewer, Felkel's translation comes at the precise time in which interest in
the countersatire (the
Persiles) reaches a peak, with a recent
English translation of the
other Cervantine masterpiece. If Parr could
recommend the original to Cervantists, I can recommend Felkel's translation as
a companion book to the recently acquired
Persiles in English.
—129→
As for the
translation itself, Felkel makes his own St. Jerome's words «non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de
sensum»
. I must say that some times he stretches the
intention somewhat. Maravall is a concise writer, as Unamuno was, and it is on
more than one occasion that we find the quality of the original in the precise
and exact
verbum, more than in the
sensum. To give but two examples;
Felkel translates as «in the face of contemporary escapism»
(33) Maravall's words «porque no
hallaba respuesta válida en el mito pastoril a los problemas de su
sociedad»
, or, when Maravall writes «... aparecer tan tempranamente entre nosotros la figura del
Estado moderno. Esta se vio desnaturalizada y confundida...
»
, Felkel translates not «the figure of the
modern state», but simply «the modern state», implying that
what becomes in the translation «perverted and confused» is not -as
in Maravall- the
figure or image, of the state, but the state
itself. Aside from that lack of precision at times, Felkel's text is an elegant
piece of prose in itself, which pays due homage to the recently disappeared
Spanish master.