Rojas F. ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’: The Dark Side of the Carnivalesque in Sendebar (1253) [Digital Resource] // Vox medii aevi. 2021. Vol. 2(9). P. 39–59. URL: https://voxmediiaevi.com/2021-2-rojas

DOI: 10.24412/2587-6619-2021-2-39-59

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Felipe E. Rojas

PhD in Romance Languages and Literature (Spanish) from the University of Chicago
Associate Professor of Spanish at West Liberty University (West Virginia, U.S.A.)
felipe.rojas@westliberty.edu
https://westliberty.academia.edu/FelipeRojas

‘The Devil Made Me Do It’: The Dark Side of the Carnivalesque in Sendebar (1253)

Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us that time alters humor and generations lose context. The purpose of this article’s ‘re-reading’ of Sendebar (1253), a thirteenth-century translation from Arabic to Castilian, is to unveil a form of laughter that often goes unnoticed, as audiences struggle to meaningfully contextualize how a framed-tale collection of situations and characters from the East was understood in thirteenth-century Iberia. Bakhtin considers laughter to be fundamentally philosophical, resulting in a confrontation between the truth of the world and its parts. An example of this comedic aspect can be found in Sendebar. My study posits that the devils’ function in two tales primarily entertains readers, in spite of the stated purpose of the translator to instruct his audience through misogynistic storytelling. Finally, this study will close with a brief comparison of the Castilian translation and the older Arabic texts in order to contend that Sendebar’s translators were conscious of the comedic impacttheir diablos (devils)had on their target audience. The devil provides an early example of what Bakhtin conceptualizes as the laughter of the grotesque, low-bodily stratum, in the overarching context of the woman/step-mother’s embodiment of a corruption to power in Sendebar.
Keywords: carnivalesque; devil; grotesque body; laughter; Medieval Iberia; Sendebar; translation