Novel
Cartas marruecas
Not translated into English
José Cadalso · 1789
Opening lines
He logrado quedarme en España después del regreso de nuestro embajador, como lo deseaba muchos días ha, y te lo escribí varias veces durante su mansión en Madrid.
I have managed to remain in Spain after the return of our ambassador, as I had wished for many days, and I wrote to you about it several times during his stay in Madrid.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from textos.info
Synopsis
Gazel, a young Moroccan who has come to Spain in the suite of an ambassador, travels the country and describes its customs in letters to his old master who has remained in Morocco, Ben-Beley. A learned Spaniard, Nuño Núñez, serves as his guide and in turn writes to the other two. Over the ninety letters, the three correspondents compare Spain with the other nations of Europe, examine its education, economy and customs, and ask themselves what the country has been and what it has become.
Context
The manuscript was submitted to the censors in October 1774, but the author did not obtain permission to publish it. The book appeared only in 1789, posthumously, serialised in the Correo de Madrid, then in volume form in 1793, from Sancha. Seven manuscript copies are known, none in his hand, a sign that it had circulated beforehand. It is often compared to Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, whose device it takes up, but to examine Spain.
Who it is for
An epistolary novel made up of short letters in the tone of essays, exchanged between three correspondents, two Moroccans and a Spaniard.
Prizes and reception
Several Spanish critical editions have followed one another, from that of Dupuis and Glendinning in 1966 to that of Jesús Cañas Murillo in 2016.