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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
Just before Zayas places Lisis in the narrator's chair to tell the last tale and close her collection, she comments, in Boyer's translation, “In this sad age, there is no real pleasure; we’re coming closer and closer to the end, like the person who travels and journeys day after day and ends up back where he began his journey” [En esta penosa edad, no le hay [gusto] cumplido, porque nos vamos acercando más al fin, como el que camina, que andando un día una jornada, y otro día otra, viene a llegar al lugar adonde enderezó su viaje]. Much as I wish that were what Zayas wrote, it is not. In the Spanish original, her traveler walks the distance he can cover one day after another to reach his destination, not to go back to where he started. I like Boyer's translation because it seems to me that all the stories in the Desengaños are essentially variations on the first one. Zayas gave a title only to the first desengaño, “Her Lover's Slave,” as if all the others are also “Her Lover's Slave,” stories of women enslaved or killed by their lovers. Moreover, looking at the two volumes together, many of the tales are variants of Jacinta's experience in N. 1, of the eventual failure of love and refuge in a convent, sheltered among other women from the dangerous love of men. As Boyer translates Zayas's comment, she would be directing us back to the start of her work, which could very well be her prologue to the Novelas, in which she defends the worth and rights of women.
Her opening salvo in that prologue is a challenge:
Who doubts, my reader, that you will be amazed that a woman has the audacity not only to write a book, but to send it for printing, which is the crucible in which the purity of genius is tested… . Who doubts … that there will be many who attribute to madness this virtuous daring to bring my scribblings into light, being a woman, which, in the opinion of some fools, is the same as an incapable thing.
[Quién duda, lector mío, que te causará admiración que una mujer tenga despejo no sólo para escribir un libro … es lo mismo que una cosa incapaz.]
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