The Limping Devil - El Diablo Cojuelo

The novel The Limping Devil (El diablo cojuelo) was first published in Spain in 1641. The author of nearly two hundred dramas, Luis Vélez de Guevara was highly admired by his contemporaries, including Miguel de Cervantes and another prolific playwright of the time: Lope de Vega. It was this novel, however, that received the most widespread audience, and it was not due to Vélez de Guevara's own work. Instead, the French author Alain-René Lesage discovered the novel and decided to transform its action into a French adaptation: Le diable boiteux. The story of an ugly limping devil, and a young student, flying about the countryside and satirically commenting on the worst of its inhabitants became a best-seller in Lesage's hands, running through nine editions in its first four months alone, forty-two more by century's end, and is still published today. Lesage's version also became well known in English literary circles, with three translations and sequels, and a number of stage plays in England with references to a "Devil Upon Crutches" or a "Devil Upon Two Sticks." Even Charles Dickens refers to the novel in his The Old Curiosity Shop. The original work, Vélez de Guevara's Spanish text, however, has never been brought to light for the English-speaking world. It is that lacuna that we attempt to fill here, with a translation that is not only an accurate reading of the Spanish text, but one that attempts to vividly and fluently recreate the Spanish world of that time for the modern reader of English.

This bilingual edition includes both a translation by well known academics Robert Rudder and Ignacio López Calvo, and also the Spanish text, a foreword and numerous footnotes, both in English and Spanish, intended to help the modern reader grasp the full quality of this classical text.

Robert S. Rudder received his Ph.D in Spanish from the University of Minnesota in 1968, where he was also a lecturer. He has taught Spanish language and literature at UCLA and other universities in California, including California State University in Los Angeles, California Polytechnic University in Pomona, and Whittier College. He has written studies on figures such as Santa Teresa de Ávila, and on the picaresque genre. He has received several grants from the Spanish Ministerio de Cultura and the National Endowment for the Arts. His published works include a number of literary translations: The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes: His Fortunes and Misfortunes (Ungar, 1973), The Medicine Man (Rosario Castellanos: Latin American Literary Review Press, 2000), Solitaire of Love, (Cristina Peri Rossi: Duke University Press, 2000), Nazarin (Benito Pérez Galdós: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1997), The Forbidden (Pérez Galdós: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), Tales of the White Knight (Joanot Martorell: Svenson Publishers, 2013), The Orgy (Anthology of Latin American Plays: UCLA Latin American Center, 1974), City of Kings (Rosario Castellanos: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1992), La Celestina (Fernando de Rojas: Svenson Publishers, 2015), Intimate Disasters (Peri Rossi: Latin American Literary Review Press, 2014), Halma (Pérez Galdós: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), Afternoon of the Dinosaur (Peri Rossi: Svenson Publishers, 2014). Other works include The Literature of Spain in English Translation: A Bibliography (Ungar, 1975), The Paradox of Saint Teresa of Avila (Edwin Mellen, 2011), and Magic Realism in Cervantes (Arturo Serrano Plaja: University of California Press, 1970). His translations of Spanish and German writers (Federico García Lorca, Blas de Otero, Jaime Ferrán, Rafael Alberti, León Felipe, Ana María Matute, Wolfgang Borchert) have appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, Ivory Tower, Minnesota Review, Two Lines, Greenfield Review, Drama and Theater.

Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American literature at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of more than seventy articles and book chapters, as well as eight books on Latin American and U.S. Latino literature and culture: Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei Cultural Production (U of Colorado P., forthcoming); Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Tusán Literature and Knowledge in Peru (Arizona UP, 2014); The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru (U of Arizona P 2013); Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction: The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety (U of Arizona P 2011); Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture (UP of Florida, 2007); "Trujillo and God" Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (UP of Florida, 2005); Religión y militarismo en la obra de Marcos Aguinis 1963-2000 (Mellen, 2002); Written in Exile. Chilean Fiction from 1973-Present (Routledge, 2001). He has also edited the books Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion (U of Nebraska P., 2018); The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth. Co-edited with Christina Lux (Northwestern UP., forthcoming Spring 2018); The Humanities in a World Upside Down. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017); Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Salem Press 2017); Critical Insights: Roberto Bolaño (Salem Press, 2015), Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays (Palgrave, 2015), Magical Realism (Critical Insights) (Salem Press, 2014), Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South Dialogues between the Luso-Hispanic World and "the Orient" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012), Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007) and One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the "Oriental" in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009), and co-edited Caminos para la paz: literatura israelí y árabe en castellano (2008). He is the co-executive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World and the is the co-executive director of Palgrave Macmillan Book Series "Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia."