Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco:

Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611) con su Suplemento manuscrito

IN 1726 WHEN the first few pages of the Diccionario de Autoridades were being prepared, the academicians of the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) already considered the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española by Sebastián de Covarrubias to be the only lexicographical light available to guide them. They thus make this affirmation in the “Prologue” stating that, at that time

“la lengua española, siendo tan rica y poderosa de palabras y locuciones, quedaba en la mayor oscuridad [...] sin tener otro recurso que el libro de Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, que sacó a luz el año de 1611 Don Sebastián de Covarrubias”

[the Spanish language, being so rich and powerful in words and locutions, was left in the greatest obscurity (..) with no other resource except the book of the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, which Don Sebastián de Covarrubias brought out in the year 1611].

Those same academics also cautioned immediately that the Tesoro of Covarrubias was not exactly a “dictionary” and that its validity as a theoretical model was limited. Indeed, there is a world of difference between the Tesoro and the Diccionario de Autoridades (and modern lexicography). It is not just a question of the passing of 100 years, nor even the change represented by the work of a single man to the collaborative effort of a selected group patronized by an entire Royal Academy. It is also the partial abandonment of a pre-Enlightenment encyclopedic mentality converging with many other intellectual initiatives dating from the beginning of the 17th century (silvas, miscellanies, polyantheas... or the emblematic work of Covarrubias himself), that explores the origins of words and attempts to inquire as well into the moral sense – obviously transcendental – of the world and of language. Thus, the Tesoro of Covarrubias has an immense cultural appeal: we cannot read it as a mere repertory of Spanish words that are defined, commented, studied in terms of their etymology and interconnected, but rather as a literary monument that appears exactly at the midpoint of the Spanish Golden Age, the work of a man from the same generation as Miguel de Cervantes.

In spite of the unanimous acclaim, almost from the moment of its publication, of the numerous virtues of the Tesoro, its editorial fate has been impoverished. The princeps of 1611 is obviously incomplete and Covarrubias died in 1613, leaving behind a Suplemento that he had prepared for publication in manuscript form. In 1674, Benito Remigio Noydens published a second edition – divided into two parts preceded by Bernardo Alderete’s (or Aldrete) Del origen y principio de la lengua castellana –, in which he adds his own additional entries but ignores the Suplemento. From that point on, the Tesoro does not issue from the presses again until the 1943 edition by Martí de Riquer. Misfortune also doomed two early attempts at continuing and completing the work of Covarrubias to failure, those of Father Pablo Cenedo (Nuevo tesoro de la lengua castellana) and Juan Francisco Ayala Manrique (Tesoro de la lengua castellana), with the former lost and the latter incomplete. Nevertheless, the Tesoro’s deserved reputation as a lively and influential work is proven by its clear influence on several bilingual European dictionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries (Cesar Oudin, Lorenzo Franciosini, John Minsheu, John Stevens...). Its influence is especially evident in its almost exhaustive utilization in the great Spanish monolingual dictionary, the Diccionario de Autoridades.

The first task that a modern editor would have to confront is the coherent presentation of all the lexicographical material that Covarrubias wrote with the intention of publishing in a unitary manner. That is to say, to integrate into the pages of the Tesoro of 1611 the manuscript pages of the Suplemento which were rigorously edited and corrected and ready to go to print; pages which Covarrubias must have drafted almost simultaneously to those included in the book. This task has been executed perfectly in the edition by Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra. In addition, these editors undertook a second and more complicated task: reconfiguring, to the extent possible without falsifying the author’s original intent, the order and structure, at times labyrinthine, of the dictionary’s entries. The orthographical variations found in Covarrubias, as well as the simple typographical errors of the printers, who separated or joined words in a series of successive entries, comprised the greater part of the problem. Arellano and Zafra thus offer a carefully revised text, with the orthography modernized in order to facilitate the alphabetical ordering, but at the same time they conserve to the extent possible the primitive structure so as not to falsify the peculiar associative discourse characteristic of Covarrubias, similar, as we have already indicated, to that of a miscellany or silva. A double-formed system is utilized to this end: the original is kept in its original place, but the reader is referred to the modernized form. The edition is completed with the additions of Noydens, in appendix, plus a rich suite of illustrations that lend a visual support, at times absolutely indispensable for the correct understanding of some of the concepts or objects mentioned by Covarrubias.

It is obvious that this DVD, which includes the edition prepared by Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra, will greatly facilitate the consultation of the vast corpus compiled by Covarrubias. It also includes other basic materials: the complete photographic facsimiles of the editio princeps of 1611 and of the manuscript pages of the Suplemento, linked page by page with the transcription. The search interface that we have designed allows for a very sophisticated reading of the Tesoro, isolating such basic unities as language, refrains and proverbial phrases, etc.

Given our collaboration on the edition prepared by Arellano and Zafra in the revision of the Latin and Hebrew texts, in a SECOND EDITION of the DVD to be published soon, we will also provide the literally transcribed text of both the princeps and the Suplemento, which will allow access to the original spelling and organization. In this new transcription we undertake a complete annotation of the classical sources. And, given the fact that for Covarrubias Hebrew is the language from which others derive, and therefore he offers more than eight hundred Hebrew etymologies, in large part of his own invention, our collaborator and Hebrew specialist George Sajo has carried out an exhaustive annotation, commenting on the authentic meaning of the words and clarifying their sources, at times obscure and rabbinical, as well as the motives that Covarrubias may have had for including them.

We also provide a copious annotation of the rest of the sources of the Tesoro, and we publish the the most important Spanish lexicographical materials prior to the text by Covarrubias (Nebrija, Palencia, Alcalá, Aldrete, Venegas, López de Tamariz, Argote de Molina, García del Palacio, Guadix, Poza, Hidalgo, Rosal, Valverde...). And finally, we provide links to the Diccionario de Autoridades, in an edition that will appear in another CD by Studiolum that is already at an advanced stage of preparation.

If you key in the word «Covarrubias» in our bibliographical database, you will obtain an up-to-date and very complete list of critical references for this author, his Tesoro and his Emblemas morales.

Place your order: • Institutions: € 65 • Individual customers: € 45

Studiolum publishes this book on the DVD “Covarrubias: Tesoro de la lengua castellana”.