I wish to express at the outset my admiration for those who have set their hand to rendering this problematical Spanish text into English. The Burlador presents many problems, both in the original Spanish and, even more so, in any attempt to find equivalences for its linguistic registers and metrical schemes in a rather differently structured language. There is probably no need to elaborate on the differences in form and manner of expression that separate the two languages in question. Anyone who knows both will be aware of most of them.

In order to limit the scope of the undertaking, it has seemed prudent to refer to only two translations. The choice of these two had to be somewhat arbitrary, and it has come down to those to which I have been most recently exposed. It was my good fortune to have my own edition of the Burlador used as a playtext by an amateur (but otherwise highly professional) company in Oxnard, California, known as Teatro de las Américas. The performances took place at the Petit Playhouse on Heritage Square in Oxnard between 25 February and 26 March 2006. To make the play accessible to a monolingual English-speaking audience also, the company decided to project supertitles above the stage, and the version they chose for this purpose was Gwynne Edwards's The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest. This turned out to be a felicitous solution for all concerned, but, watching the performance, while also keeping track of the supertitles to the extent possible, it struck me that there were interesting discrepancies between what I was hearing from the actors and seeing projected in the space above them.

One reason that occurred to me immediately was that Edwards was obviously following an edition prepared by Américo Castro, having no other recourse, for all practical purposes, at the time he prepared his version, around 1986. (Indeed, he reproduces one of Castro's editions on facing pages of his translation, and that is the Spanish text I quote here.)