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Cadalso, Jose de. Lugubrious Nights. An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Romance.

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Cadalso, Jose de. Lugubrious Nights. An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Romance. Translated from the Spanish with an Introduction by Russell P. Sebold. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. 86pp.

Russell P. Sebold's elegant edition and translation of Jose de Cadalso's Noches lugubres (1771) is a welcome contribution to 18th-century European literary studies that will increase awareness about the place and importance of 18th century Spanish literature in the development of European Romanticism. Often considered an oddity in Spanish literary history (its genre and movement affiliation are hard to catalogue), this dialogued prose poem, divided into three sections corresponding to the three nights in which the action (or lack thereof) takes place, focuses entirely on the cosmic grief of its protagonist, Tediato, crazed with pain after the death of his young lover. For three nights Tediato tries to recover her corpse from the grave with the aid of Lorenzo, a pitiful gravedigger. He wants to take the body to his home and then commit suicide,...

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