The Mangy Parrot

Description

Repeatedly imprisoned for his printed attacks on the Spanish administration, Mexican journalist and publisher Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi attempted, in 1816, to make an end-run around government censors by disguising his invective as serial fiction. Lizardi's experiment in subterfuge quickly failed: Spanish officials shut down publication of the novel -- the first to be published in Latin America -- after the third installment, and within four years Lizardi was back in jail. The whole of The Mangy Parrot (El Periquillo Sarniento) went unpublished until after Lizardi's death -- and a decade after Mexico had won its independence from Spain. Though never before published in its entirety in English, The Mangy Parrot has become a Mexican classic beloved by generations of Latin American readers. Now, in vibrant American idiom, translator David Frye captures the exuberance of Lizardi's tale-telling as the author follows his narrator and alter ego, Periquillo Sarniento, through a series of misadventures that exposes the ignorance and corruption plaguing Mexican society on the eve of the wars for independence. Raw descriptions of colonial street life, candid portraits of race and ethnicity, and barely camouflaged attacks on colonial authority fill this comic masterpiece of world literature -- the Don Quixote of Latin America.

David Frye is Program Associate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan. Nancy Vogeley is Professor Emerita of Modern Languages, University of San Francisco.

"An accurate, fluent translation that preserves the literal meaning and spirit of the original without becoming obscure and tedious requires a fine way with the English language and considerable knowledge of late colonial Mexico and Mexico City. That is a tall order, and I think David Frye has performed a minor miracle in this translation. The voice of the picaresque protagonist, the juicy stories and ironies, the author's moral outrage at personal pretense, arrogance, greed, and social injustice come to life in English in ways that are remarkably faithful to the author's style, pace, and mordant wit. Here in full is Fernandez de Lizardi's Mexico City of the last years of Spanish rule, rich in social types, sights, sounds, smells, and feelings. The translator's notes are... numerous and valuable..." -- William Taylor, Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley. "The Introduction is intelligent and very helpful to an audience who needs to be led into the field, and not too cumbersome to prove heavy..." -- Diana Sorensen, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.