Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The figure of Inés de Castro in the Golden Age has inspired several romances, mostly in Spanish. This work describes the general panorama and the cycle they constitute and then it focuses on one of the late texts, a poem published by a Portuguese Sephardi in Amsterdam in 1688, which also survived in the oral tradition, through musical and satirical versions in Spain and Latin America.

Reseña de Manuel Gutiérrez Estévez. El incesto y sus símbolos en el romancero oral. Madrid: CSIC. 2019.

De la pluma al internet, coordinado por Christoph Müller y Ricarda Musser, tiene como punto de partida el panel homónimo del XLI Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana (IILI), realizado la Universidad Friedrich Schiller en Jena (Alemania) durante el 19 y 22 de julio de 2016. El libro recopila diez artículos escritos por especialistas, cuyo propósito es indagar en los medios de comunicación populares desde el siglo XIX hasta finales de la primera mitad del siglo XX en México, Chile y Colombia, a los que se suma tangencialmente Brasil.

In December 2019 the 1983 volume Autos de Navidad en León y Castilla was republished and immediately, in the first days of 2020, the unpublished work entitled Autos de Reyes en León y Castilla that its authors, Joaquín Díaz and José Luis Alonso Ponga, were unable to include in the aforementioned deluxe edition. We asked them about this important ethnographic and literary work on which both have continued to work overtime as researchers and disseminators. We are also interested in the fact that this beautiful work has been a springboard for other researchers and in the interest that these publications and other outstanding works of the popular Christmas literary corpus may now arouse.

This work analyzes the three known versions of a fable, which has not been assigned a specific entry in the international indexes of folktales. According to the three parallels of the story, a lion threatens a farmer with devouring him, unless he feeds it constantly. When the protagonist runs out of food, a fox offers it’s help to get rid of the feline, in exchange for some chickens. Thanks to the help of the trickster, the man manages to kill the lion, but instead of rewarding the fox, he gives it a bag full of dogs. Two versions of this folktale were documented in North Africa, in different variants of Berber, and the third was recorded, in Mayan language, in the Mexican Yucatan. In this study, the three parallels of the story are compared, and their links with other traditional stories are analyzed. The findings show that, many times, the keys to fully understanding oral stories are in extremely distant cultures and very remote regions.

In the Libro de los engaños the Infante faces a process where he is sentenced to death for the false sayings of his stepmother. However, in the initiatory process of learning wisdom, he has been instructed by his teacher to be silent for seven days. Unable to defend, he is only able to remain silent and, apparently, awaiting a final sentence that decides his fate. Through the label of the «translator hero», and which can possibly be found in ATU’s very extensive «Clever man» category, it is possible to reflect with better tools that the Infant is not deactivated in the courtly intrigue, but on the contrary, is deciphering the signs of providence and human fortune, to show that he is the wisest in the kingdom at the end of the days to perform the test of silence.

This study aims to compare the folktale known as The Basil Maiden (ATU 879) with its literary versions, especially those addressed to children.

Reseña

The corpus of ballads on Ksar-el-Kebir is relatively small, considering the wide impact the battle had in other ways. Only ten extant, printed and manuscript. They show all the nuances and even the thematic evolution that characterize the numerous prose accounts of the events, following the political needs as they changed. Most of them are from 1592-1595, after the long silence that followed the battle, when it was not politically acceptable to discuss problematic issues, such as the reasons for the debacle, the courage of the participants, the alleged survival of the king. Neither he or his nobility could be criticized, as Phillip II needed them to administer his new kingdom. Once his power consolidated, the Flores started to print ballads that touch all these questions, albeit without clearly answering any of them. The death of the king is never pronounced, but suggested in many ways, and his memory saved as that of a courageous yet imprudent young warrior. By the turn of the century, after a succession of Sebastian impostors and the growth of Sebastianism as a support system for nationalistic resistance, chronicles and balladry produce the death of the king and even his corpse.

This text is a book review of Ni con pluma ni con letra.