The Itching Parrot

THE patriot pamphleteer who signed himself The Mexican Thinker wrote the one novel (El Periquillo Sarniento) of his not very long life (1776— 1827) as a desperate experiment, partly to outwit the censorship by circulating advanced political and social ideas in a form that would not call official attention to them, partly to improve his destitute circumstances. On both counts the enterprise was a failure. His tale was suppressed after a mere beginning of eleven chapters, published in three installments in 1816, and it never appeared in a complete version until three years after his death, which took place in the most squalid circumstances imaginable. Since then it has had not fewer than a hundred millions of readers and become recognized as ‘The Novel of the past century, not only for Mexico but for all Spanish-speaking countries.’ (This characterization is from the altogether admirable biographical and critical introduction by Katherine Anne Porter.)

It is a lively picaresque novel of low life, chiefly in Mexico City; the vein is that of Guzman de Alfarache, with which, indeed, Lizárdi’s work was compared by an early admirer before a word of it saw print. The translation, from extremely colloquial Mexican Spanish, has been abridged by omission of the fantastic padding that Lizárdi achieved by incorporating most or all of his political pamphlets in the text. Its intrinsic claim on a general reader of English is perhaps neither less nor more than that of, say, Peregrine Pickle. More important to more readers at the present time will be its claim as a disclosure of the audience that accepts it as a perennial classic — the Spanish-speaking audience that, up to the late civil war in Spain, provided a market for the million and more copies a year that came from a single press in Barcelona.

W. F.