Juan Manuel's Tabardíe and Golfín

Juan Manuel's Tabardíe and GolfínAuthor(s): James BurkeSource: Hispanic Review, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring, 1976), pp. 171-178Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/472834 .

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JUAN MANUEL'S TABARDIE AND GOLFIN

D ANIEL Devoto recounts the various explanations which have been advanced for the term tabardie, applied in Don Juan

Manuel's Exemplum xx to the small pellets which the golfin fabri- cates with gold filings.' For Maria Goyri, tabardie is a word invented by the author.2 Gonzalez Palencia links it to tarba ardi, "polvo de tierra." A. Steiger says that the term derives from the Berber aberdi ("harapo, andrajo"). Devoto seems to agree that tabardie probably is related either to tarba ardi or aberdi, since he cites a term from the poetry of Aquileo J. Echeverria, basuriya, which means a magic dust used in witchcraft.

A more probable etymon for tabardie is the Arabic verb barada which means to file a piece of metal.3 Juan Manuel says "E aquel golfin tom6 9ient doblas et lim6las, et de aquellas limaduras fizo, con otras cosas que puso con ellas, gient pellas . . ." (p. 123). The pellas are the tabardies. Lerchundi in the glossary of his Cresto- matia ardbigo-espaiola lists barada as "lim6, gast6 limando." 4 Pedro de Alcalh in his Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua araviga explains "Lima para limar hierro" as mabrat or mabarit-both nouns based upon barada.6

1 Introducci6n al estudio de don Juan Manuel y en particular de "El Conde Lucanor" : una bibliografia (Paris, 1972), pp. 405-06.

2 J. M. Blecua in his edition of El Conde Lucanor (Madrid, 1969), agrees that Juan Manuel must have invented the term (p. 123). All further quotations from the Conde Lucanor will be taken from this edition.

8 H. Wehr, A Dictonary of Moden Arabic, trans. J. M. Cowan (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), p. 51.

J. Lerchundi and F. J. Simonet, Crestomatia ardbigo-espaola (Granada, 1881), p. 27.

1883; rpt. New York, 1928. As a reproduction of the original edition the text has no pagination. It is necessary to search for entries alphabetically ac- cording to the Spanish word.

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James Burke

The form tabardie must be based upon a verbal noun derived from either the second or fifth form of the basic triliteral verb barada. In both of these forms an initial ta- is prefixed to the first radical in the nominal derivative.6 The second form usually de- notes a more intense application of the basic meaning of the verb while the fifth is the reflexive of the second.7 I have found no trace of either the second or fifth derivative of barada meaning "to file" in Arabic dictionaries. If it existed, it must have meant "he filed forcefully" or "it was filed with force." The ending -ie of tabardie is most likely the Arabic adjectival -iyyun without tanwin. The relative adjective is regularly formed in Arabic by adding this ending to the noun.s

Whether Juan Manuel would have known the Arabic significance of this term or whether he might have been using a word commonly employed in regard to coins is an interesting point. Godefroy lists tabaris as "sorte de monnaie." 9 In the Old French Vie de Seint Josaphaz a character refuses to sell his soul: "Issi gainer mun puce- lage. / Nu frez, car nel vudreie mie / Por trestut l'or de Tabarie / Ke par la vostre fole mestrie / Fust ma flur si reflestrie." 10 The passage would be doubly significant if the word tabarie had become current in Romance as a term for false or counterfeit money.

There is evidence to suggest, however, that Juan Manuel was aware of the significance of tabardie and its etymon barada. Ex- emplum xx concerns whether Conde Lucanor should give an un- known man money in the hope of a ten-fold return. Patronio responds with the story of a king who liked to dabble in alchemy

6 W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language (London, 1874), I, 131-32. The second form verbal noun would be tabrid and the fifth tabarrud. The loss of the long i which occurs in tabrld when tabardie evolves and the switch of the accent to the last syllable may be explained by the fact that, in the Arabic of Andalusia and Morocco, the nisba (-iyyun) almost always carries the accent (see A. Steiger, Contribuci6n a la fon&tica del hispano-drabe y de los arabismos en el ibero-romdnico y el siciliano [Madrid, 1932], p. 77). It is still difficult to see why the i would have fallen out while an a was injected between the b and the r. Perhaps some kind of confusion developed between the two forms with the prefixed ta-. Tabarrud does have an a between the b and the r.

7Wright, Grammar, pp. 31, 37. 8 Wright, Grammar, pp. 169-70. 9 F. Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue franCaise (1880-1902; rpt.

Nendeln-Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1969), vii, 614. 10 T. J. S. Rutledge, "A Critical Edition of La Vie de Seint Josaphaz," Diss,

Toronto 1973, ii, 209 (11. 1892-1896).

172 Hj, 44 (1976)



"Tabardie" and "Golfin"

and who was not "de muy buen recado" (p. 123). The swindler teaches the king to make gold using tabardies which contain gold filed from true doblas. Once the king is thoroughly involved, the golfin declares that he will have to return to his own land to obtain more tabardies, the essential ingredients in the money-making process. The king provides him with the necessary travelling ex- penses "et mont6 muy grand aver" (p. 125).

The exemplum does not end with the king's awareness that he has been deceived. Juan Manuel continues with a postscript in which certain subjects of the king list the attributes of their neigh- bors. The king is placed among those "de mal recado" (p. 126). Upset by this, he declares that he has indeed made a mistake, but that if the golfin should return, he would suffer for his crimes. The men answer that if the golfin were to come back, they would give him the king's place on the list.

Barada, meaning "to file," is a linguistic double of a much more common Arabic verb which means "to be or become cold." 1 From this basic idea in Arabic of "coldness" 12 there derives a secondary meaning of slowness, silliness and stupidity. Blanchere interprets the tenth form of barada as "to think someone tiresome, gross, stupid." The Hava Dictionary gives the sixth form tabdrada as meaning "to show coldness, to act slowly, to be a dull man." 13

Lerchundi confirms this use in the Arabic of Spain as he lists the tenth form "juzg6 o tuvo a alguno por frio o inepto (frigidium existimavit)." 14 Corominas believes that the use of the word frio to mean "sin gracia ni agudez, soso" in the Golden Age may depend upon the influence of the Arabic barada.'s He mentions the Spanish albardan "buf6n, necio" to demonstrate that the force of the Arabic root was not lost in Old Spanish. Pedro de AlcalA lists birida as meaning "desd6n" and birid, burrad as "desdonado." Thus it seems likely that Juan Manuel is indulging in word play with tabardie. It implies in one sense the false pellas, while in another the king's lack of recado.

1 Wehr, Dictionary, p. 51. 2 See R. Blanchbre, Dictionnaire Arabe-FranCais-Anglais (Paris, 1967), i,

518. 13 J. Hava, Arabic-English Dictionary for the Use of Students (Beirut, 1921),

p. 21. 14 Crestomatia, p. 27. 16 J. Corominas, Diccionario crtico-eimol6gico de la lengua castellana (Madrid,

1954), II, 578.

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James Burke

Still further possibilities of ingenious linguistic ploys exist in the exemplum. The king learns the truth when he goes to the home of the golfin to encounter "un arca gerrada." He opens it and finds the following brief letter. "Bien creed que non a en 1' mundo tabardie; mas sabet que vos he engafado, et quando yo vos dizia que vos faria rico, devi6rades me dezir que lo feziesse primero a mi et que me creeriedes" (p. 125). Hava gives the second form of barada as meaning "he confirmed his claim": barrada haqqahu.'1 Salmon6 defines this form as meaning "he was proved incontestable (right)."17 The Munjid also gives this meaning forbarradaand relates it to the fourth form of the verb thabata which means "to assert as valid or authentic, confirm, corroborate," etc.'8

It should also be noted that the radicals of this verb b, r, and d are almost the same as the root of Spanish verdad. Occasionally the Hispano-Arabs picked up a Romance term and used it without realizing that they were employing a loan word. Pedro de AlcalA for example gives an Arabic garga bayda for Spanish garga blanca. The first word has obviously been borrowed from Romance while the second is Arabic baida-the normal feminine of the objective abyad "white." It is thus possible that the Romance stem meaning "true" could have reinforced Juan Manuel's inclination to use barada with this implication.

If Juan Manuel is playing with the meaning of barada, it helps us to view the final portions of the exemplum as artistic and aesthetic necessities. He could have simply ended the story by having the golfin vanish. The king would have eventually realized that he had been deceived. But Patronio takes pains to establish the truth of the situation and to show that the king's foolishness was recorded.

Why does Juan Manuel use the device of the arca cerrada? The idea of the "enclosed truth" does reflect the golfin's dissimulation, that he "se queria encobrir" (p. 124). It should be noted that this covering-up is a lie to compound a lie. The golfin is pretending that he does not know alchemy-"et que lo non sabia" (p. 124)-in order to arouse the king's curiosity and to imply that he has the wisdom

'6 Arabic-English Dictionary, p. 29. 17 A. Salmon6, An Arabic-English Dictionary on a New System (London, 1890),

I, 37. '8 Luwis Ma?luf, Al-Munjidfi al-lughah wa-al-adab wa-al-culum (Beirut, 1960),

p. 44. The same meaning can be found in the medieval encyclopedic dictionary of the Arabic language of Ibn Manzur, the Lisan al-cArab (Beirut, 1955), xn, 86. Ibn Manzur lived from 1232-1311.

174 HR, 44 (1976)



"Tabardte" and "Golfin"'

of humility and the humility of wisdom. Of course he knows nothing of the subject. The golfin's pretence of hidden knowledge, his fine clothes, and his warning that "deste fecho non fiasse [de omne] del mundo nin aventurase mucho de su aver" (p. 124) pre- pare the king for the trick. The golfin performs his experiment using the tabardies, which contain within them gold, and convinces the king completely.

Corominas says that the word golfin derives from a figurative use of the word delfin-a fish whose habits might imply slipperi- ness.19 The word would obviously have had to have undergone radical transformation to yield golfin. The case which Corominas presents in support of this theory is very convincing. There is, however, an Arabic etymon which might be associated with golfin. This is the verb ghalafa (the first radical is the voiced, glottal con- stricted) which means to cover or envelop.20 There is a noun form ghulfa which would yield the stem golfin Old Spanish, but it has the specialized meaning "foreskin or prepuce."21 Lerchundi lists the verb as "encerr6, guard6" and in the second form with the very interesting meaning "cubrid (una pared con una estera)." 22 The idea of a false covering, often in the concrete sense of a material, is a commonplace of medieval literature and occurs time and again in various forms throughout the Conde Lucanor.23 The word golfin is found in a very interesting context in stanza 393 of the Libro de buen amor. Juan Ruiz accuses Don Amor of falseness:

Fazes commo golhin en tu falsa manera: ataleas de lexos e cagas la primera, al que quieres matar ssacas los de carrera, de logar encobyerto sacas gelada fiera.24

Raymond Willis translates the last line "from concealment you 19 Diccionario, i, 739. 20 Wehr, Dictionary, p. 681. E. A. Elias, Modern Dictionary Arabic-English

(Cairo, n.d.), p. 425. 21 For example Arabic ghurfa "room," which has the same radicals save for an

r in the place of the 1, yields Old Spanish algorfa "cSmara" (R. Dozy and W. H. Engelmann, Glossaire des mots espagnols et portugais derives de l'arabe [Leyden, 1869], p. 127).

22 Crestomatia, p. 289. 23For example, Exemplum xxxI: "De lo que contesci6 a un rey con los

burladores que fezieron el pafio." 24 Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, ed. M. Criado de Val and E. W. Naylor

(Madrid, 1965), p. 108.

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James Burke

spring a savage ambush." 26 The translation which is normally given for golfin, "maleante, malhechor," parallels one sense of the word burlador, "he who does evil by deceit or trickery." 26 The possibility, then, exists that semantically golfin is a kind of back- formation from a stem which basically means "to conceal." He who conceals very often does it in order to commit evil.

Pedro de Alcal& lists a derivative of ghalafa, the noun galf, as "''grossedad, necedad." This usage probably derives from a sense of the Arabic verb which sees the heart as veiled and covered and thereby incapable of comprehension. Freytag carries the listing qalbun aclafu which he explains as "stolida mens, ut nil intelligat aut teneat." 27 The idea implied is that of the occulta cordis of the medieval European philosopher in reverse.

Lionel Friedman has shown that medieval man viewed himselt as dual, homo interior, homo exterior.28 The medieval author generally portrays the homo exterior. Claudio Guill6n believes that in the Renaissance for the first time writers feel the need to explain the "inner man" as a psychological reality unto itself.29 For a medieval man to understand inner feelings and motivations it was necessary for him to interpret and judge those surface signs, facial expressions and other externals, which faithfully mirror the interior reality. Lazarillo de Tormes learns from his blind master that ocular vision is basically a very poor device for ascertaining the inside truth. Juan Manuel in the fourteenth century seems to have under- stood the same point.

In Exemplum xx the king is deceived because "non era de muy buen recado." Blecua defines the word recado as "cautela, dis- creci6n" (p. 123). Covarrubias gives a more interesting definition which links the term to the process of vision: "Recato, el estar

26 Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, ed. R. S. Willis (Princeton, 1972), st. 393, p. 112.

26 Cf. Sebastian de Covarrubias, who defines the word as "el engafiador mentiroso, fementido, perjudicial" (Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espanola, ed. M. de Riquer [Barcelona, 1943] p. 247).

27 G. W. Freytag, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Halle, 1830), II-iv, 290. E. W. Lane says that ghulfu is applied to the heart, "as though it were covered . . . so that it does not learn . . . or covered from hearing and accepting the truth" (An Arabic-English Lexicon [London, 1863], vi, 2284).

" See "Occulta Cordis," RPh, 11 (1957-58), 103-19. "9 See "Metaphor of Perspective," in Literature as System: Essays Toward the

Theory of Literary History (Princeton, 1971), pp. 306-07.

176 HB, 44 (1976)



"Tabardte" and "Golfin"

sobre aviso y cuydado, no se fiando de todos. A dste llamamos recatado, y como no sea con pusilanimidad, es de hombres muy prudentes y avisados" (p. 898). Both prudente and avisado are words related to the mode of visual understanding as Covarrubias makes clear with the following examples: "El principe Frederico no tenia mAs de un ojo, y por alabar su prudencia solfan dezir sus vasallos: Plus Fredericus uno oculo videt, quam caeteri principes duobus" (p. 885). "Avisar algunos quieren se aya dicho de la palabra visus, porque con los ojos del entendimento se vee y se advierte, y tambi6n con los corporales" (p. 169). Juan Manuel's king can see only with his corporal eyes and is unable to convey inward the information received and analyze it correctly. The golfin covers the truth by cleverly presenting outward signs which the king cannot understand as lies.

The golfin's covered heart masks his true intentions. At the same time his condition would, in accordance with one meaning of the Arabic verb ghalafa, prevent him from understanding what the truth is. If Juan Manuel were aware of this meaning, then his golfin ultimately would fall into that favorite medieval and renaissance category: the trickster tricked, the engineer hoisted on his own petard. Don Juan succeeds in deceiving everyone, not realizing that the master and father of all deceit was simply biding his time. Or, as Juan Ruiz put it, "aquel es engafiado quien coyda que engafia" (p. 103).

Juan Manuel's use of etymology would seem to parallel the kind of linguistic approach which Leo Spitzer finds in Don Quijote: "The creator must see that the world, as it is offered to man, is susceptible of many explanations, just as names are susceptible of many etymologies; individuals may be deluded by the perspectives ac- cording to which they see the world as well as by the etymological connections which they establish." 30 In Exemplum xx the perspective of the reader in regard to the two major figures is very subtly altered if he takes into account the shifts in meaning of the terms tabardie and golfin. The polysemous value of the words illuminate a number of contingent realities for both king and golfin. The use of Arabic in this manner to create a more subtle ingenio implies that either Juan Manuel himself knew this language fairly well or that he sought advice from someone who did. It is difficult to imagine

30 "Perspectivism in Don Quijote," in Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (New York, 1962), p. 50.

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178 James Burke HR, 44 (1976)

that he could have employed such a rudimentary vocabulary as the one compiled by Raimundo Martin.31 Certainly such etymological play indicates that, just as scholars sought scientific, philosphical, and moral wisdom in Arabic culture, Juan Manuel looked for a mirror of reality in the shifting nuances of Arabic vocabulary.

JAMES BURKE

University of Toronto 81 Vocabulista in Arabico, ed. C. Schiaparelli (Florence, 1871).



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Juan Manuel's Tabardíe and Golfín