Author: ROBLES (Isidoro de):
Title: Varios Prodigios de Amor. En onze novelas exemplares, nuevas, nunca vistas, ni impressas. Las cinco escritas sin una de las letras vocales ; y las otras de gusto, y apacible entretenimiento. Tercera impression. Añadidos, y emmendados tres casos prodigiosos. Compuestas por diferentes autores, los mejores ingenios de España. Recogidas Por Isidro de Robles, natural de esta Coronada Villa de Madrid.
Description: Madrid En la Imprenta da Agustin Fernandez..., 1709. Small quarto, 200 x 140 mms., pp. [xii], 288, annotations dated 1800 on rear paste-down end-paper, contemporary vellum, rather creased and dried, and slightly soiled, but an inoffensive binding. This is a remarkably early example of lipogrammatic literature. A lipogram is "a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided. Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms" (Wikipedia). As early as the 1820s, Robles's Varios Prodigios de Amor was regarded as not only a remarkable technical achievement, but also a specimen of writing which exemplified the lexical wealth of Castilian Spanish itself. As the bibliographer Vincent Salva said of Robles's book: "No work affords more ample proof of the inexhaustible richness of the castilian language than the present. To write five novels, in prose and verse, under the strict condition of excluding from each of them one of the five vowels of the alphabet, and to accomplish this task in such a manner that the reader does not at first sight perceive the scheme or the fetters with which the author had surrounded his pen, could only be done in a language extraordinarily rich in words and phrases" (A Catalogue of Spanish and Portuguese Books, with Occasional Literary and Bibliographical Remarks by Vincent Salva [London, 1826], pp. 181-2). Six years later, the critic Thomas Roscoe agreed, and elaborated, stating that Robles published Varios Prodigios de Amor -- meaning "Love's Many Wonders" -- but "attributed the work, from some whim, to different authors, whom he characterises as the best minor writers. It is remarkable, moreover, for containing five novels, each of which displays the peculiar humour of the author and his age, by dispensing with the use of one of the five vowels in each of the five tales. It at the same time served to show the richness and flexibility of the Castilian tongue in as much as the reader is not aware of the slightest alteration or embarrassment in the style, not even discovering the absence of so necessary an ingredient in good composition" (Thomas Roscoe, The Spanish Novelists: A Series of Tales, from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, Translated from the Originals, with Critical and Biographical Notices [London, 1832], Vol. 3, pp. 161-2). OCLC locates copies in Harvard, Ohio State, and Universityh of Wisconsin Milwaukee; one in Bibliotheque National de France

Keywords: fiction continental printing literature


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