Talk:Libro de los juegos

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Books

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Name

Is this correct Spanish? Shouldn't it be los Juegos? Or is it in old Spanish which doesn't have matching genders like the Spanish of today? And "Libros" is "Books", not "Book". -- Zoe

Somebody corrected it already. AN

Merge

I would like to propose that Seven-sided backgammon be merged here. The article is very short, a substub even, and it by far most notable in the context of this manuscript. —ptk✰fgs 07:02, 12 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. It's also hard to see how the Libro de los juegos article itself can be all that substantial without some more detailed description of what the book itself says. Stellmach 18:29, 13 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Expansion

I've added an image under {{PD-art}}, and supported some of the claims here with a reference. I'm looking for more references at the moment, in order to expand this article, and hopefully merge in the seven-sided backgammon stub. —ptk✰fgs 20:05, 13 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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Is the Libro really just a translation?

Currently the article, both in the lede and elsewhere (particularly §Literary context), emphasizes the book's status as a translation from Arabic. No doubt this is true of at least parts of it, but by my lights this is a deceptive oversimplification. Indeed it is my sense that, while chess problems and legendary game etiologies were definitely a thing (and therefore susceptible to translation), books of playable instructions for games were not really a thing before Alfonso.

The lede claim cites Burns (1990)^[1] but this appears to be a general survey of Alfonso's cultural influence, rather than a textual history of this particular ms. Burns states:

"A major component of his work, indeed the indispensable tool, was intensive further absorption of Islamic culture by translation, adaptation, and influences." [emphasis mine]
"Alfonso also had the most celebrated book on games--Chess, Dice, and Backgammon (Libra de ajedrez, dados y tablas)--translated, bountifully illustrated, and revised to improve it over the original and even over the genre in Islam or the West." [non-titular emphasis mine] This seems like it must be the source of the citation: it was the only specific and germane passage I found in the cited chapter.

Even these quotes from the cited source suggest that "a Castilian translation of Arabic texts" (the current lede assertion) is too strong. I've quickly perused a couple other sources:

Reviewing Gollady (2001):^[2]

Her notes do not contain the words "translation" or "translated".
"After the rules, follow one hundred three chess problems identified by experts like Murray as being mostly of Arabic origin; only twenty are original." This is basically correct. Murray (1913: 570) says "The original collection is unmistakably Muslim." He finds all but 19 (if I've interpreted his counts correctly) in "Muslim" (presumably Arabic) mss. But note that his "unmistakably Muslim" originals refer only to the roughly 70-80 (repetitions make counting hard) chess problems -- not to the Alfonso ms. as a whole.
"It is here in the Libro de las Tablas that Alfonso shows personal touches, with the game called Emperador because he, meaning Alfonso the Emperor, created it."
"Understanding the symbolic meaning [... will ...] answer the question as yet unaddressed by modern scholarhship, 'Why did Alfonso X, el Sabio write a book of games?' " [emphasis mine]

Murray (1951) says:^[3]

"The first and most important of these works is a manuscript ('Alf.') which was compiled by direction of King Alfonso X of Casile in 1283 and deals at length with the games played in Spain." [emphasis mine]

So my sense is that, while parts of the Libro are certainly translated from Arabic, the book as a whole is a more original production than is currently suggested by the article. Sorry to complain rather than to be BOLD, but ideally someone better versed than me in the literature might attack this problem. Cheers. Phil wink (talk) 16:05, 26 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Phil, thank you for such a well researched post. I had reviewed Gollady’s thesis yesterday to try to assess the same question and came to the same conclusion as you. Including the conclusion that I am not yet quite sure how to amend the article, other than it needs significantly more nuance than it is currently showing.

I do feel it is important to contextualize the huge amount of translation that Alfonso sponsored, and that this work – or at least the editions which have come down to us – seems to be a hybrid text as you say. Onceinawhile (talk) 17:59, 26 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose an initial cut might be something like "Some passages (for example, the majority of the chess problems) are known to be translations from Arabic sources; other passages may be translations, adaptations, or original compositions (as is the entry for the tables game Emperador)." ... with citations of Gollady and Murray for the chess problems, and Gollady for Emperador. But I don't really have a good citation for the middle bit, and of course if scholarly opinions can be found for other passages, so much the better. Phil wink (talk) 23:20, 26 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Robert I. Burns, "Stupor Mundi," in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Robert I. Burns (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990): 1–13.
^ Sonja Musser Golladay (9 March 2001). "Los libros de acedrex dados y tablas by Alfonso X, el Sabio". Archived from the original on 8 September 2006.
^ Murray, H. J. R. (1951). A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 2.

[Burns-1] Robert I. Burns, "Stupor Mundi," in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Robert I. Burns (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990): 1–13.

[2] Sonja Musser Golladay (9 March 2001). "Los libros de acedrex dados y tablas by Alfonso X, el Sabio". Archived from the original on 8 September 2006.

[3] Murray, H. J. R. (1951). A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 2.

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