Tirant lo Blanch

Authorship and composition

Tirant lo Blanc was written between 1460 and 1464 by Valencian knight Joanot Martorell. The place of composition remains unclear, for the whereabouts of the author during his last years of life are unknown: a hypothesis suggests that, upon the death of Alphonse the Magnanimous, the author returned to Valencia and wrote the novel there; another one claims that Martorell wrote it in Barcelona when he joined the court of Charles, Prince of Viana during his rebellion against his father (a theory which befits the dedication of the book to Prince Ferdinand of Portugal); finally, another hypothesis identifies the author with a knight named "Joan Martorell" living in Dénia at the time of composition.

The book was published posthumously in València in 1490, in Nicholas Spiendeler press. The manuscript had been pawned by Martorell to Martí Joan de Galba as a pledge for the repayment of his debts, and Galba himself self-attributed co-authorship of the work in its colophon. Galba's contribution to the final manuscript is still an object of debate among modern scholars.

Themes

Compared to books of the same time period, it lacks the bucolic, platonic, and contemplative love commonly portrayed in the chivalric heroes. Instead the main character is full of life and sensuous love, sarcasm, and human feelings. The work is filled with down to earth descriptions of daily life, prosaic and even bitter in nature.

Language and style

Tirant lo Blanc is a lengthy novel that presents a wide variety of registers and styles. Characters alternate a rhetorical and a colloquial style, a trait that could derive from the fact that the novel was written to be read out aloud. Much of the colloquial style is reinforced by the frequent use of Catalan phraseology, often extracted from other texts in the form of intertextuality.

The lexicon in the first three parts of Tirant is significantly more archaic than the lexicon in the last two parts and the colophon, a fact that has been used to argue in favour of a double authorship of the novel. When it comes to dialectal variation, the lexical choices by Martorell alternate, throughout the entire novel, between Valencian and general Catalan geosynonyms (for example, “alqueria” and “mas”; in English “hamlet”), with a slight preference for Valencian forms as long as they were also present in the formal register used by the Royal Chancillery of the Crown of Aragon.

Influence

Tirant lo Blanch is one of the most important books written in Valencian. Written by Joanot Martorell in the 15th century, the Tirant is an unusual chivalric novel in its naturalistic and satirical character, which also appears to have a strong autobiographic component. It tells the feats and adventures of Knight Tirant lo Blanc from Brittany. At times, it parallels the life and adventures of Roger de Flor, the main leader of the mercenary Company of Almogàvers, which fought in Asia Minor and Greece, both for and against the Emperor of Byzantium. This historical resemblance is evident in the description of events occurring around Constantinople and the defeat of Sultan Mehmed II "the conqueror". While Roger de Flor's almogàvers had the upper hand in the region, the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a huge shock to Christian Europe, marking an end to the Byzantine Empire that Martorell's contemporaries wished to change. In writing his novel, Martorell perhaps rewrote history to fit what he wanted it to be - which in a way makes it a precursor of the present-day genre of alternate history.

The Spanish text of Don Quixote praises the book, in Chapter 6 of Part I, because of certain characteristics of Tirant lo Blanch – characters with unlikely or funny names such as Kirieleison de Montalbán, the presence of a merry widow, the fact that in the book knights eat, sleep, and die in their beds having made a will, and the title can be understood as "Tirant the Blank", lacking a major victory to put on his shield – the book is quite different from the typical chivalric romance. These aspects make the book exceptional, and made Cervantes state that "por su estilo", which can be translated "because of its style" but more likely means "in its own way", the book is "a treasure of enjoyment and a gold mine of recreation" ("un tesoro de contento y una mina de pasatiempos"), the "best book in the world." It is an (unintentionally) funny book, and Cervantes liked funny books, believed the world needed more of them, and wrote his own in Don Quixote. Cervantes saw this 100-year-old book as the crown jewel of his library.

Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa called Tirant lo Blanc the first example of a "total novel", that is, a novel intended to entirely create its own reality, and compared Martorell to the likes of Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy or Faulkner, among others.

Translations and adaptations

Translations

The book has been translated into several languages including French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Finnish, German, Dutch, Swedish and Chinese. There is also an adaptation in modern Catalan.

Although many Spanish books were translated into English in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was not until the late 20th century that Tirant lo Blanc was first translated into English, as an abridged version, by David H. Rosenthal (1983, 1996), and later as The White Knight: Tirant lo Blanc (Project Gutenberg), translated by Robert S. Rudder (1995). Tirant lo Blanc: The Complete Translation (Catalan Studies, Vol 1), translated by Ray La Fontaine (February 1994), is currently the only unabridged English translation of the novel but it is out of print.

Film adaptation

The plot of the 2006 film adaptation is based on the later part of the adventures of Tirant and events leading to his involvement in Constantinople and afterwards.