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Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition áLVAR NúñEz CABEzA dE VACA Translated by dAVId fRYE Edited by ILAN sTAVANs New York: Norton, 2013 223 pp.
The Norton Critical Edition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relacíon is the latest mark that the work has entered the American literary canon. The Relacíon, first published in 1542, then again in 1555, tells of three hundred Spanish conquistadors sailing to the west coast of Florida; traveling the peninsula by foot; being separated from their ships; building makeshift boats to sail the Gulf of Mexico; being stranded on Galveston Island; dwindling to four survivors, three Spanish gentlemen and an African slave; living as captives; traveling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific; surviving as faith healers; and having mixed feelings upon arriving in Mexico, where Native Americans, companions and saviors during the Spanish survivors' travels, are being enslaved. It is no wonder that the nonfiction Relacíon has been called novel-like. As Ilan Stavans points out in his introduction to this Norton Critical Edition, it is a forerunner of American narratives of self-discovery, of self-invention, and of magic realism (x-xi). It is a complex and fascinating story, so there is little wonder why Cabeza de Vaca's text has become central among early European writings about North America. The question becomes, then, where does the Stavans and Frye version fit among classroom-oriented editions of Cabeza de Vaca's work.
To begin, anthropologist David Frye's new translation of the Relacíon works well. When I first taught the text in 1991, the only affordable translation was historian Cyclone Covey's problematic Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America (New York: Collier, 1961), which rearranged material, putting events in their "proper" order, and interjected square bracketed explanatory notes throughout. Covey's edition is still widely available and used in classrooms, reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press in 1983, and republished as The Journey and Ordeal of Cabeza de Vaca: His Account of the Disastrous First European Exploration of the American Southwest (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003). Since the early...