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Good book.

I am not sure I understand the reason for another edition of this medieval work.
There are extremely fine editions already in the market. The
Blecua edition is even a litle confusing in attempting to achieve a diplomatic
edition in such small format and in the kind of font that was employed. However, I have used
Blecua`s according to the audience. For example, the British favor this edition
above all others. So I might like to reciprocate accordingly. But I would
be hard pressed to point at the great positive singularities of this edition. Eureka!
Perhaps its excellent introduction might explain the magic for some readers, but not
much more..

Great Deal

I anjoyed this book

Es un excelente libro. Hay muchos apuntes para ayudar el lector también. Hay muchos comentarios del texto al fin del libro para facilitar el entendimiento de un obra tan viaja como esta. ¡Disfrute!

"The greatest of all Spanish "mester de clerecía" works and a comic masterpiece. The "buen amor" of the title refers to spiritual love as contrasted with "amor loco", carnal love. Although nominally favoring the former, the first-person narrator makes a concession to human frailty by dwelling at length on the former. Juan Ruiz goes far beyond the theme of love, introducing a satire of medieval life and manners. Unforgettable characters are Trotaconventos, an old hag who is the hero's panderess and the prototype for all future go-betweens in Spanish literature, and Don Furón, the hero's rascally servant. Memorablealso is the "parade of sausages" which anticipates Rabelais. This is a work by a good humored, jovial human being, yet who is also profoundly religious, charitable and tolerant. Quintessentially Spanish in his love of proverbs, little things and the anecdotal, he grounds his dreams and visions in real life." Such is this work reviewed in the definitive guide to reading in Spanish "The New Essential Guide to Spanish Reading" which is published by America Reads Spanish: a campaign aimed to increase the use and reading of the Spanish language through the thousands of libraries, schools and book stores in the US.

Libro de buen amor, by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. Edited by Alberto Blecua for Letras Hispánicas. ISBN 8437610117.

Ordinarily I do not review books which I have not finished reading; but because this edition of the Libro de buen amor has received no reviews, and because my review will deal primarily with the edition and not with the work itself, I'll add my two cents.

Here's the table of contents:

------------------------------------

Introducción
El hilo narrativo
La fecha y el autor
La invención
El artista
Manuscritos y ediciones
Los problemas textuales
Errores separativos de α
Errores de α o de x
Errores no significativos de x
La rama S
Intervenciones de Paradinas
Las innovaciones de la rama S
La rama G
La rama T
El problema de las dos redacciones
La lengua del arquetipo
La métrica
Criterios de Edicion
El texto
Las variantes
Notas

Libro de buen amor (Blecua here lists each section by title and page number)

Variantes graficas y lingüísticas
Notas suplementarias
Indice de voces
Indice de nombres propios

------------------------------------

As can be seen from the contents, Blecua does a thorough job discussing the textual problems of the LBA, and it's dry going unless you're interested in textual criticism. He also devotes seven pages to the meter, which along with the text, is "el otro gran problema que plantea el LBA." The metrical discussion, which of course assumes a basic knowledge of Spanish prosody, is of more practical use to the average reader than the textual one. For attempting to tackle the LBA without understanding the meter is as preposterous as reading Shakespeare and not knowing why he placed line breaks where he did.

The copious notes are of course designed for the SPANISH-SPEAKING undergraduate, and so idioms which might escape a native English speaker are not explained. Blecua explains his procedure thus: "[. . .] he puesto dos tipos de notas: unas, a pie de pagina, para el lector mas lego; otras, en el apendice, para discutir con la clerecia experta." The footnotes sometimes gloss one word, sometimes half a line, sometimes whole lines: anything which might present "dificultades para un estudiante de bachillerato." Since not all readers begin at the beginning and read the LBA through, he repeats throughout common glosses such as "inmediatamente" for "luego," "hora sexta" for "siesta," and "bienes materiales" for "algo." The endnotes are primarily philological and rather technical. The bibliography is thirty pages, and cites works in Spanish, English, French, and German.

The language of the text is not modernized, but the spelling is slightly modernized. Blecua replaces the long s and sigma with the modern `s,' reduces double consonants, and modernizes the usage of `u' and `v.' He preserves, however, the `c' with cedilla, along with other characteristics of fourteenth-century Spanish.

Here are the first two stanzas according to Blecua's edition (the brackets are his):

Señor Dios, que a los jodíos, pueblo de perdiçión,
sacaste de cabtivo del poder de Far[aón],
a Danïel sacaste del poço de Babilón:
saca a mí, coitado, d'esta mala presión.

Señor, tú diste gracia a Ester la reína,
ante el rey Asüero ovo tu graçia digna.
Señor, dame tu graçia e tu merçed aína,
sácame d'esta lazeria, d'esta presión [...ina].

The numbering of the stanzas is continuous throughout.

All in all, it's an excellent edition of the Libro de buen amor. I give it five stars because it combines excellent scholarship with a low price. Students might be better advised to start with Libro de buen amor), which is glossed in English. You can view sample pages at [...] And there's also Cejador's venerable edition for the Clásicos Castellanos series, out-of-print but available for free on Project Gutenberg ([...]