From a young age, students are encouraged to take notes and make annotations on the things they read—a skill that they will continue to use throughout the rest of their lives. This form of everyday writing, that helps them in their academic and professional performance, can at times also provide a scope for the use of everyday writing in much more personal endeavors such as refining language skills like reading comprehension and fluency in a language that is not their primary.
After purchasing a used copy of La Celestina in its original language in a bookstore in Jacksonville, Florida, USA—a primarily English-speaking country—, I became fascinated with the marginalia and annotations found in it. Despite the book being in Spanish, most if not all the annotations were written in English. Through a close examination of these, I have been able to draw some conclusions about the anonymous author. First, all marginalia are written in the same handwriting, implying that they were all made by the same person. Second, the presence of annotations that comment on character and plot points reflects that the author has a significant understanding of the Spanish language. This is then supported by the code meshing found in one of the annotations at the beginning of the book. Even so, the presence of annotations that serve as translation to specific words in the text shows that the author is still in the process of refining their fluency in Spanish.
While the same could be said about marginalia in any literary work read in a language that is not the reader’s primary, I believe the book in which these annotations can be found also serves to show the proficiency of the language in which the unknown author was in at the time they were made and how helpful these annotations were in the process of improving their Spanish language skills and their fluency. Written in sixteenth-century Spain, La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas contains a vocabulary very different and more complex from that of Spain today and more so of other Spanish-speaking countries. Despite being considered a novel, it is entirely written as dialogue. For this and many other reasons, the work remains as one of the most celebrated novels of Spanish literature, and "now, almost 520 years later, it is still being read (in Spanish and in diverse translations), discussed, studied, interpreted, and seen” (Fernández 16). As Rojas and Bruno explain it, “La Celestina, nombre por el que ha llegado a ser conocida, más comúnmente, la Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, es, probablemente, la obra literaria más importante de España, después del Quijote, y una de las más meritorias de Europa en su contribución al desarrollo del realismo literario” (13). Because of this contribution to the development of literary realism in Europe, it has become a staple in high school and university Spanish courses across multiple Spanish-speaking countries. Simultaneously, students have developed a love-hate relationship with it, similar to that with Shakespeare’s works in the USA. With such a complex work inspiring the annotations, it is no simple task for a non-native Spanish speaker to explore and understand the text.
Credits
Gabriela Laracuente Sanchez