Exemplary Novels

by Miguel de Cervantes, Edith Grossman (Translator), Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (Editor)

Overview

Edith Grossman, celebrated for her brilliant translation of Don Quixote, offers a dazzling new version of another Cervantes classic
 
“Compressed masterworks, containing great canvases and big ideas in just a few pages. . . . A pleasure.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
The twelve novellas gathered in Exemplary Novels reveal the extraordinary breadth of Cervantes’s imagination: his nearly limitless ability to create characters, invent plots, and entertain readers across continents and centuries. The assemblage of characters (eloquent witches, talking dogs, Gypsy orphans, and an array of others), the twisting plots, and the moral heart at the core of each short tale proved instantly irresistible to readers. Love is the overarching theme.
 
Now, as when it was published in Spain in 1613, the book brings readers pure entertainment, but also a subtle artistry that invites deeper investigation. Edith Grossman’s translation brings this timeless classic to English-language readers in an edition that will delight those already familiar with Cervantes’s work as well as those about to be enchanted for the first time. Roberto González Echevarría’s illuminating introduction to the volume serves as both an appreciation of Cervantes’s brilliance and a critical guide to the novellas and their significance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300230536
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	01/09/2018
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) was a Spanish author, poet, and playwright most notable for the creation of Don Quixote. Edith Grossman has brilliantly translated many Spanish-speaking authors of the past century, including Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. Roberto González Echevarría, Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literatures, Yale University, received the 2010 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Edith Grossman is the award-winning translator of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Mayra Montero, and other Spanish-language writers. Her translation of Don Quixote is widely considered a masterpiece. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Editorial Reviews

Compressed masterworks, containing great canvases and big ideas in just a few pages. . . . A pleasure.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Grossman’s prose is clear, accurate, and, fittingly, never flashy. As with Don Quixote, the language and formal devices of Cervantes make the transition from Spanish to English with only minor shifts in tone and tenor. Relatively little is lost in translation, as it were.”—Choice


“[Translator] Edith Grossman . . . masters the nuances and artistic vision of Cervantes. . . . This collection is a fresh take on the intricate plots and vivid characters that Cervantes is known for.”—World Literature Today

“For most English-language readers, Cervantes is a one-book wonder. But these twelve novellas, newly translated by the virtuosic Edith Grossman, are a revelation to us. They are a feast for Cervantes’ admirers, and stand truly by themselves—witty, naughty, trenchant, smart, widely ranging, thoroughly modern and readable. Coming late in Cervantes’ life, they are a sly and mischievous and memorable adiós—just as we would expect.”—Richard Ford

“Exemplary Novels spans nearly the whole creative life of Cervantes. . . . The book is like a summing up of Cervantes’s fiction, displaying its broad range of topics, characters, styles, and plots.”—Roberto González Echevarría, author of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Open Yale Course Series)

“It seems appropriate that Edith Grossman publishes her translation of the Exemplary Novels thirteen years after the printing of her masterful translation of Don Quijote, as it took Cervantes ten years to come out with his second part of Don Quijote. Thus the supreme English translation of the best novel ever written on this side of the galaxy both precedes and follows the colloquy of Cipión and Berganza, as the wise words of both dogs precede and proceed those of the knight and the squire on their painful search for the meaning of human identity.”—Carlos Rojas

“Finally we have a worthy translation of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels, the extraordinary follow-up to Don Quixote that enchanted generations of readers, but that has not been widely available to English readers in a version that approaches the sparkling original. Reading Edith Grossman’s gorgeous prose is like traveling to a far-off place, unearthing a hidden container, and finding in it a glove that slips onto your hand like a second skin.”—William Egginton, author of The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World

“Edith Grossman is one of the best Hispanists in the English language world and an extraordinary translator. Her version of the Quijote, which appeared a few years ago, was unanimously celebrated, and the same will no doubt happen with this new version of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels.”—Mario Vargas Llosa

From the Publisher

“Cause for celebration . . . In a sparkling translation by Edith Grossman . . . the twelve interlocking novellas charm from first to last.”—Alan Bisbort, Sunday Republican (Waterbury, CT)

Sunday Republican - Alan Bisbort

“Grossman’s prose is clear, accurate, and, fittingly, never flashy. As with Don Quixote, the language and formal devices of Cervantes make the transition from Spanish to English with only minor shifts in tone and tenor. Relatively little is lost in translation, as it were.”—E. H. Friedman, Choice

Choice - E. H. Friedman

12/01/2016
Readers enter a different world in these novellas by Cervantes, the world of early 17th-century Spain. Honor is all, but virtue, emphasized in the female characters more than in the male, often means largely what is seen by the outside. In more than one tale, men seduce or rape, then abandon their lover or victim, but all is redeemed simply because they return at the end to wed them. These 12 tales are the first novellas to be published in Spain (1613), written by the country's greatest storyteller in the prime of his powers. In structure and content, the collection is sometimes unorthodox, alternating high tales of romance with vernacular descriptions of Spanish life and ending in a colloquy of two dogs talking about their masters. The prose is elegant, lively, and humorous. VERDICT This is the first translation of this essential book into English in years and infinitely superior to the one most of us grew up with. It will appeal most to students of the age and is a lovely addition and a pleasure to read.—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Library Journal

2016-10-01
Cervantes follow-up to Don Quixote, retold for a new generation of readers.Why exemplary? And why novels, when even the longest of these dozen stories is barely a novella, technically speaking? There are two broad reasons: the stories are compressed masterworks, containing great canvases and big ideas in just a few pages, and they all contain morals, if ones that may now seem a little fusty. Gypsies often come in for hard times. So do Jews and Muslims, but Cervantes great theme and rhetorical trick, no matter the ethnicity or religion of the players, is that humans are duplicitous and their ways suspect: What is this, traitor Al Pasha, that you, being a Muslimwhich means a Turkassault me as a Christian? So asks an indignant Ottoman, caught up in a moment of confusion in a tableau involving a kidnapped woman on the way to being delivered to the Great Lord in Istanbul though whether a virgin or not remains to be seen. Everyone pretty much tricks everyone else, spectacularly in the case of an unfortunate goof whose wife turns out to be a hooker who leaves him not just with bad vibes, but also an STD. Some of Cervantes stories verge on the fabulous and sometimes-surreal, as with one concerning a lawyer who imagines that he has been turned to glass, though even so, he protests, I am not so fragile that I go along with the tide of vulgar opinion, which is most often mistaken. The wisdom of crowds indeed. Cervantes stories are a pleasure, though even in Grossman's sure hands theyre a bit old-fashioned in content and tone: The dukesent many presents to Bologna, some so rich and sent in so timely and opportune a way, that although they could not be accepted to avoid the appearance that they were being paid, the time when they arrived facilitated everything. Late works from a font of so much subsequent literature; essential for students of literary history.

Kirkus Reviews