Padre Isla and Goya

For many years, students in this country learned their Spanish from Padre Isla in one of the school editions or adaptations of Gil Blas de Santillana, that were reprinted again and again from the beginning of this century.' We might ask why we should have read this translation of Lesage's novel rather than any one of the Spanish picaresque novels from Lazarillo to the Busc6n, or some of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares, or even the true picaresque story of the Vida of Torres Villarroel, almost a contemporary of Gil Blas, since the Spanish autobiography came out in 1743 and the French novel between 1715 and 1735. This question would, however, lead to a great many others, such as why Spanish characters, whether literary or real, the Cid or Figaro, for example, are far better known in French versions than in Spanish, and why what is generally known and thought about Spanish life, art, and music, derives from foreign rather than from national interpretations. It is a fact, in any case, that when most people speak of Spanish music, they usually have in mind compositions by Russian and French musicians, and that Gil Blas is far better known than his Spanish prototypes. To the reader of Gil Blas today, even in its altered Spanish version of Padre Isla, it seems surprising, not that Lesage managed to create his novel out of such diverse borrowed and original elements, but that his travesty of the Spanish novel was so convincing that Spaniards and others passionately defended the thesis that it had been translated or adapted from an original Spanish source.2

Art · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Historical Influence and Diplomacy

• On literary bullshit

  Nil Santianez•Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies•2018

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