A translation from the Spanish into English of the play by JosÉ de Espronceda y Delgado. The translation is by Robert M. Fedorchek and the introduction is by Michael Iarocci. This is number 9 in Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monograph's Serie de traducciones crÍticas.
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What to say of the rebel who fears neither God nor the devil, and who would challenge the Almighty to a duel? Such a man is don FÉlix de Montemar, the Student of Salamanca, a "second don Juan Tenorio" and profligate descendant of the first don Juan Tenorio dramatized so memorably by Tirso de Molina in The Trickster of Seville (El burlador de Sevilla, 1630).
We might say that he is the literary incarnation of JosÉ de Espronceda y Delgado (1808-42), the greatest of the Spanish Romantic poets, the champion of liberty who gave voice to dissidents and loners on the fringes of society. In rousing verses and stirring refrains Espronceda sings of the individual in "The Pirate's Song" (La canciÓn del pirata), "The Beggar" (El mendigo), "The Song of the Cossack" (El canto del cosaco), and "The Executioner" (El verdugo). And in his long unfinished epic poem of six cantos--the seventh is but a fragment--"The Devil World" (El diablo mundo), he offers illusion and disillusion, a wide-ranging vision that encompasses the many extremes of the human experience.
On the world's stage, however, the lion's share of the poet's everlasting fame may just possibly rest on "The Student of Salamanca" (El estudiante de Salamanca). The protagonist don FÉlix de Montemar--a student in title only--seduces and then abandons genteel, tender-hearted doÑa Elvira, who in her final moments writes to him of her trampled, unreciprocated love. After killing her brother, don Diego, who had sought to avenge his sister, don FÉlix will come upon a ghostly white ethereal apparition that he follows through shadowy streets only to witness don Diego's and his funeral procession. And it is after he scoffs at his own obsequies that he begins a phantasmagorical descent from which there is no escape.
"The Student of Salamanca" is the second of the three universally recognized don Juan figures in Spanish literature, and all of them are concerned--to varying degrees--with God and salvation or damnation. Tirso's refuses to repent and faces divine wrath; JosÉ Zorrilla's don Juan (Don Juan Tenorio, 1844), who also witnesses his own funeral procession, will repent, know God's mercy, and be saved through doÑa InÉs's love for him; what don FÉlix will know is the embrace of a livid skeleton, and instead of the music that Zorrilla's don Juan hears as his life ebbs, don FÉlix will hear an altogether different sound.
