Juan Valera y Alcala-Galiano (1824-1905), one of nineteenth-century
Spain's most respected authors, lived an international life-a
career in the diplomatic service, with postings to more than a half
dozen countries in Europe and the Americas. Cosmopolitan, cultured,
and urbane, Valera was fluent in a number of languages and read
widely in all of them. A serious student of his own and foreign
literatures, he wrote novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and
literary criticism, in addition to carrying on a voluminous
correspondence with several of his fellow Spanish writers and
friends. The unifying thread of his work is "art for art's sake,"
that is, beauty as the end and purpose of inspiration and
creativity, a stance he commented on at some length in his
introduction to the 1886 Appleton English translation of his first
novel, Pepita Jimenez (1874), the tale of a young seminarian who
falls in love with a young widow. Commander Mendoza (1877) tells
the story of Don Fadrique Lopez de Mendoza, a man of seafaring
adventures and a deist in the mold of the eighteenth-century
philosophes, and Dona Blanca Roldan de Solis, a woman of unbounded
pride and a Catholic driven by religious fanaticism, neither of
which traits prevented her from having had an adulterous affair as
a young woman in Lima, Peru, with Don Fadrique. The conflict that
plays out in Commander Mendoza, with both principals now back in
Spain, centers on the Commander's discovery of the marriageable
daughter that he did not know he had, and it turns into a contest
of wills that effects changes in both of them as the fate of their
daughter hangs in the balance. Rich in characterization and
exploration of human foibles, it is a work that continued to stand
high on the list of Valera's favorites, for in 1885 he wrote in a
letter to a friend: "What would please me would be to continue
writing novels like Pepita Jimenez and Commander Mendoza." Robert
Fedorchek is a professor emeritus of modern languages and
literatures at Fairfield University (Connecticut). He has published
fifteen books of translations of nineteenth-century Spanish
literature, including three other novels by Juan Valera. He has
also translated numerous fairy tales by Valera, Antonio de Trueba,
Cecilia Bohl de Faber, and Concha Castroviejo for Marvels &
Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. Susan McKenna is an assistant
professor of Spanish at the University of Delawa where she
specializes in nineteenth-century Spanish literature. She is the
author of Crafting the Female Subject: Narrative Innovation in the
Short Fiction of Emilia Pardo Bazan.
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