Bidspirit auction | Heliodoro [de Émesa] – LA

Heliodoro [de Émesa] – LA HISTORIA DE LOS DOS LEALES AMANTES THEAGENES Y Chariclea. Trasladada de Latin en Romance, por Fernando de Mena vezino de Toledo. Vista y corregida por Cesar Ovdin. Paris. Pedro Le Mur. 1616. [4], 240 folios. 14 cm × 9 cm. B. - Third Spanish edition of Heliodorus of Emesa's Historia Etiópica — ou Teágenes e Cariclea — the first great novel that begins in medias res, and second printing of the translation by Fernando de Mena, physician and humanist of Toledo, made from Latin and compared with the Greek. Reviewed and corrected by César Oudin (c. 1560–1625), secretary-interpreter of the German, Italian, and Spanish languages ​​to King Henry IV of France and Louis XIII, and first translator of Don Quixote into French (1614); Oudin was also the editor of Cervantes' Galatea in Paris in 1611, and this edition of Heliodorus is part of his program to disseminate Spanish literature through the Parisian printing press of Pedro Le Mur. Heliodorus of Emesa (3rd or 4th century), a Phoenician from Emesa, a descendant of the Sun as he himself declares in the last verse of his work, wrote this novella in Greek in its ten books. The manuscript was rediscovered in 1526 in the library of King Matthias Corvinus in Buda and first printed in Basel in 1534. Translations quickly followed: into French by Jacques Amyot in 1547, into Latin by Stanislaus Warschewiczki in 1551, into Italian in 1556, and into English by Thomas Underdowne in 1569. The first Spanish version, anonymous and made from Amyot's French, appeared in Antwerp in 1554; the second, the work of Fernando de Mena and derived from Latin collated with Greek, was published in Alcalá de Henares in 1587, with this Parisian edition of 1616 being its second printing. The work exerted a formidable influence on European literature. Its narrative structure—the in medias res beginning, the alternation of voices, the secrets kept by the narrator—was imitated by Torquato Tasso in Jerusalem Delivered and by Miguel de Cervantes in The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda, which López Estrada defined as the Spanish version of the European literary ideal represented by Ethiopian History. Lope de Vega, Gracián, and Calderón also drew from this source. Jean Racine declared that Heliodorus's novel was his most beloved book and that he had read it so many times that he had memorized it from beginning to end. Contemporary parchment binding. Palau 112869.