March 01, 2004

Introduction

This weblog will post daily individual entries from Baltasar Gracián y Morales, Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia. A favorite of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Gracián’s little book is well worth reading slowly and pondering carefully. I hope to post the occasional sonnet from Gracián’s era, but that will only be once or twice a month.

I am not a Hispanist, and my translations will be plain inelegant prose, for those who (like me) can read Spanish, but not well enough to dispense with the English entirely. I’m doing this partly to improve my Spanish by tackling a very difficult text.

Several English translations have been published, but none, I think, is on the web. I am consulting various editions and translations and have more on order. So far, I have found these two the most useful:

  1. Baltasar Gracián, The Oracle, A Manual of the Art of Discretion, ‘Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia’, The Spanish text and a new English translation, with critical introduction and notes by L. B. Walton, London, J. M. Dent, 1953. Very useful, and apparently irretrievably out of print.
  2. The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián, A Pocket Oracle, translated by Christopher Maurer, Doubleday, 1992. This was a New York Times bestseller, and is still in print. Maurer did a sequel, A Pocket Mirror for Heroes, Doubleday 1996, which translates large portions of two other treatises of Gracián, El Héroe and El Discreto, along with bits of his allegorical novel, El Criticón. My only complaint is that he does not give page references to the Spanish for those who may wish to look it up.

The Spanish text of Oráculo Manual is on-line here (archaic spelling), and here (so far only the introductory matter, plus chapters 1-10 and 101-110).

I plan to post each day’s entry shortly after midnight eastern time, so it will be available before breakfast to readers in North America and Western Europe. Out-of-town trips will necessitate occasionally skipping a day or double-posting, but I will keep to the one-per-day schedule, which means that the last post of 300 will be Christmas Day. Of course, if anyone wishes to contribute towards buying me a laptop so I can post while out of town, I will be extremely grateful.

Unlike most weblogs, this one is arranged top-down, with the latest post at the bottom. This seems more appropriate to a literary corpus. Regular readers will be able to jump straight to the latest entry, or the latest unread entry, by using the calendar at the top of the right-hand column.

Comments are open. Please try to contribute something useful. Those that are rude, inane, or irrelevant will be deleted without apology or explanation. I am looking for literary, historical, exegetical, and interpretative questions -- and answers.

I have numbered the sentences and larger clauses for easy reference. It will be less confusing if commenters are specific and write things like ‘What does sentence 3 mean?’ or ‘Doesn’t this contradict 17.2?’

Readers may also wish to take a look at the other Lanx Satura weblogs in the right margin. More will be added in time.

Posted by Michael Hendry at March 1, 2004 12:00 AM
Comments
I suppose your Spanish got better? Anyway, pretty nice idea to improve your language skills providing help to others at the same time. Posted by: Helen, translator at August 20, 2004 04:27 PM