Barry Ife

Air travel in Cervantes

Cervantes often depicted the craft of writing in his works. In the prologue to Don Quijote, he portrays himself as uninspired, head in hand, staring at the empty page and wondering what to say. In the Novelas ejemplares he invites his readers to a game of billiards. Both images are serious and playful in different ways. In one, he appears to be self-deprecating, but is also underlining the creative control that comes from hard choices about what to write next. In the other, he stresses the ludic dimension of fiction, not to down-play its importance—‘horas hay de recreación’—but to emphasize that literature is a game of skill for more than one player. When these two images are superimposed, the result is a useful set of tools for understanding what Cervantes is trying to do in his fiction, and why he is so good at it. The notion of art as play is not new, but the image of the writer wielding his pen as a billiard cue—eyeing up angles, working out geometrical possibilities of character and situation, allowing for the nap of reader expectation—helps us to appreciate the skill, and experience the pleasure it brings. This paper will look at some of the trick shots he plays in Persiles y Sigismunda, discuss how he gets away with them and what they contribute to the rules of the game. Almost everything that follows is inspired by frequent re-readings of E. C. Riley’s classic study, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel.1 Few works of criticism stand the test of time as this book has. By looking at some of Cervantes’ more playful passages, this paper offers a modest celebration of the life and work of a brilliant and humane reader and critic whom we all miss very much. At the beginning of chapter 18 of book I of the Persiles, Cervantes holds a roll-call to keep track of the cast. The head-count shows a net gain of thirteen named characters from Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Poland and England. The deceased—for Cervantes regularly culls the cast to keep it to a manageable number—include a Portuguese nobleman and a Norwegian chambermaid. Many more characters—French, Lithuanians, Poles and a Scottish countess—will join before the pilgrims reach their objective. One often suspects that Cervantes has deliberately set himself the challenge of getting as many characters as possible, from as

Jack William Sage (1925–2018)

Professor Jack Sage, who died on 15March 2018, just eighteen days before his ninety-third birthday, was a central figure in British Golden-Age studies for over half a century and a loyal servant of his department and college (King’s College London) throughout his professional life. He was a passionate advocate of Spanish music and drama, always ready to share his expertise with leading professional musicians, actors and directors. Above all, Jack was a gifted and inspiring teacher. He was a modest, diffident man, much given to slipping away unnoticed from any kind of social gathering. At his funeral on 3 April, his family, friends, colleagues and former students sang their hearts out in love and admiration, calling on the Great Redeemer to feed this life-long agnostic with the bread of heaven and making sure that, for once, he did not ‘softly and suddenly vanish’. Jack William Sage was born on 2 April 1925 in Southampton. He was educated at Clark’s College and Taunton’s School, now Richard Taunton Sixth Form College. It is not entirely clear where and when he learned his Spanish, though we do know that he got his music from his father. Originally from Burnley, William Sage was a trumpeter in an Australian army band and found himself posted back to Europe during the First World War. Wounded and repatriated to Salisbury Plain, he married his nurse Nina and settled down to run an orphanage, with a band that included young Jack on the trumpet. How Jack went on from there to become such an authority on Spanish Renaissance music is another mystery. Much of it seems to have been self-taught, but no doubt marriage to a singer, Gaynor Lewis, in 1961, played its part. Jack was good at school, though better at arts than sciences. He went straight into the army in 1942 and, though he was not given a combat role, he did learn to drive and fix HGVs: a love of things mechanical stayed with him throughout his life. After his discharge in 1944, Jack studied for a War Office Diploma in Educational Psychology. He taught English and music in various schools across Hampshire, but lacked the appetite for classroom crowd control. In 1946 he enrolled at King’s College London and in 1949

‘Si no está mentirosa la letra’: Revisiting the Text of the 1492 Voyage

The journal, or Diario, of Columbus’s first voyage to America is probably the most important and certainly the most problematic Spanish travel book of all time. Almost everything we think we know about the 1492 voyage comes down to us from Columbus’s own pen but the authority of the journal as we now have it has been fiercely disputed. The original log book has disappeared and, even if we had it, it would still be difficult to interpret given that Columbus was convinced he was sailing an altogether different sea. The fifth centenary saw a deluge of studies on all aspects of Europe’s encounter with the New World but the reliability of the first eyewitness account remains fundamental. Now that a decade or more of dust has settled, the time seems right to pay another visit to this most unstable of texts, take stock of what we have learned, and ask what further work needs to be done. When Columbus set sail for the Far East in August 1492 he decided, in view of the significance of what he was about to attempt, to make a documentary record of the voyage: