Francisco de Quevedo, the Spanish poet and satirist whose books were by far the most widely read in Spain in the 17th century, died unaware that his genius had created modern satire in Spanish, and that for the ensuing five centuries, as we now know, his name would be a household word wherever Spanish was spoken. Between 1605 and 1621, Quevedo wrote a sequence of five "Dreams" or "Visions" (Suenos y discursos ), in each of which he hilariously envisions Spanish society as populated by people rightfully condemned to Hell. These astonishingly witty and irreverent satires of contemporary Spanish culture, morality, prejudice, and religious fanaticism, were composed in a style so allusive, elliptical, and equivocal as to successfully entertain both those who barely understood their full range and import, and others who celebrated the poet's rebellious insinuations. Censorship prohibited the publication of such satire in its original form, but hundreds of copies were made by hand and circulated widely. In 1993, a critical edition of all of the surviving manuscripts was published. Today the Suenos are commonly read in modern editions of the first censored version, printed in 1627. The present book (La tradicion. . . ), compares this version with all of the 43 extant manuscripts, and for the first time identifies those groups of manuscripts from which the publishers of the first edition derived their text. This text can now be seen as a version not only censored, but corrupted successively by copyists and editors who did not understand Quevedo's satire, and did not hesitate to add entire clauses, omit others and transfer sentences from one place to another. The result is hardly what Spain's most famous satirist originally wrote.
About the Author:

Nació James O. Crosby en la ciudad de New York en 1924, y es ahora Catedrático Emérito de Español en la Florida International University, de Miami. A partir de 1952 ha estudiado la obra de Quevedo. Recibió becas nacionales y sus numerosos estudios y ediciones críticas de manuscritos originales se han publicado en España, Inglaterra, México y los EE.UU.

James O. Crosby was born in New York City in 1924, and is currently Emeritus Professor of Spanish at Florida International University in Miami. Since 1952 he has studied the works of Francisco de Quevedo, the top poet of Spain's Golden Age and the creator of modern satire in Spanish (1580-1645). Crosby was awarded national fellowships to study Quevedo, and his many literary studies and critical editions drawn from original seventeenth-century manuscripts have been published since 1955 in Spain, England, Mexico and the USA, and have been reviewed by some of the best scholars in the field.