Volume 37, Number 6 · April 12, 1990
A Picaresque Hero
By Jonathan D. Spence
The Travels of Mendes Pinto
by Fernão Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz
University of Chicago Press, 663 pp., $49.95
Pinto's Travels, written in Portugal between 1569 and 1578, is a crazed, dreamy, fascinating, elliptical book. Mendes Pinto lived and traveled extensively in Asia during the years 1537 to 1558, and the Travels is his attempt to come to grips with those experiences, and the fantasies and reflections that accompanied them. The huge, rambling manuscript was finally published in 1614, thirty-one years after Pinto's death, and enjoyed an immediate success. A fussily emended Spanish edition appeared in 1620, a complete French translation in 1628, and an abbreviated English one in 1653. Pinto's own title for his book was The Peregrinations, and that seems to say something different from Travels. 'Travels' sounds either purposeful or at least touristic, whereas 'Peregrinations' can begin and end anywhere, can change purpose and goal constantly, or indeed lack them altogether.
Review, 4456 words
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