Professor uncovers hidden history in obscure text

Step into the office of Jacques Lezra, professor of English and Spanish, on the seventh floor of Helen C. White Hall, and you feel you are standing in an unusual used bookstore. Confined by crowded shelves of musty paperbacks, you can’t imagine how someone fit them all into the small room.

Among these texts you’ll find a photocopied version of the 400-year-old manuscript, the “Suplemento al Tesoro de la Lengua Castellano, o Espanola.” The original Tesoro is the first European and monolingual vernacular dictionary. Sebastian de Covarrubias, an enigmatic Spanish church official who flourished at the close of the 16th century and beginning of the 17th century, compiled the manuscript between the 1590s and 1609, but died before completing the “Suplemento” in 1612.

The original early 17th century manuscript, which has sat virtually untouched in the National Library of Spain for centuries, has finally been published, thanks to the work of Lezra and his colleague, Georgina Dopico-Black, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University.

The text that Covarrubias finished before his death is what Lezra and Dopico-Black prepared for publication in the present day.

“It’s quite unlike a dictionary we’d see today,” says Lezra, adding that Covarrubias included jokes, fables and personal touches that make both texts “weirdly autobiographical.”

“He had no model for a kind of lexicographical objectivity,” he says. “For him, writing the dictionary was a new thing.”

Lezra has used the original document often in his academic research, and references within it to an additional appendix eventually led him to the more obscure “Suplemento.”

“The [Tesoro] itself is something of enormous use and notoriety for someone who studies 16th-century Spain,” he says. “But very few places until recently have cited the supplement at all. It was actually seeing this beautiful document that pushed us [to get it published].”

Lezra and Dopico-Black spent four years preparing the manuscript form of the “Suplemento” for publication, and Polifemo, a leading press in Madrid, released the book in May 2001. The text includes a full version of the supplement, a 100-page biography of Covarrubias, and essays by the two professors that describe and interpret the differences between the two parts of the dictionary and the cultural significance of the “Suplemento” itself.

Lezra says these differences provide insights into the shifting historical and psychological situation in Spain, which may have actually driven Covarrubias to write the manuscript.

From 1609 until about six months before he died, Covarrubias gathered opinions about the Tesoro from colleagues and intellectuals. From these assessments, Covarrubias writes in an entry in the “Suplemento,” he determined that the first part of the dictionary did not contain enough information about Spanish history, the nation’s kings or popes.

But Lezra says the historical context in which Covarrubias wrote the “Suplemento” tells a different story.

The policies of three Spanish kings from 1548 until 1609 reflected a desire to assimilate the marginal ethnic and religious groups of Spain into mainstream society, such as the North African-descended Moriscos and the Sephardic Jews. Covarrubias played a direct bureaucratic role in this process as an envoy to the border kingdom of Valencia. Entries in the Tesoro that cite works by Spain’s non-majority cultures reflect these policies.

“The Tesoro falls under the notion of plurality, or a humanistic concept of the state,” says Lezra.

But, by 1608, the expulsion of the Morisco population became the policy of Spain, representing a complete reversal in what the nation was trying to accomplish a few decades before. This new policy toward a more orthodox and exclusionist state is reflected in the supplement, Lezra says. For example, the supplement had fewer references to Moriscos and non-Spanish peoples.

In this way, the Tesoro and the “Suplemento” are not only academically, but also personally significant to Lezra, who was born in Madrid and whose father is a Sephardic Moroccan. Lezra lived in Madrid until he was 13 and then moved with his family to Venezuela, where he attended school for a few years. He finished high school in New Hampshire.

Lezra then attended Deep Springs College, an alternative two-year humanities college and working ranch located in a desert valley in California where he spent mornings milking cows and afternoons studying literature. He finished his bachelor’s degree, as well as his Ph.D., in comparative literature at Yale and taught as an assistant professor. He came to UW–Madison in 1993.

What’s in store for Lezra’s future academic pursuits? He now has a contract to do a completed version of the entire dictionary, with the Tesoro and the “Suplemento” combined, that will take up the next few years.

In addition, there is evidence in the “Suplemento” that Covarrubias also wrote a second appendix. Lezra hopes to complete the spotty biography of Covarriubias and, in the process, do enough detective work to find the additional supplement. Unfortunately, he says, he can’t spend as much time on it as he’d like.

“I’ll give it three years,” he says. “If I can’t find it, someone else will have to.”