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This chapter examines the history of translation in/of the picaresque novel in relation to the concepts of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1935) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1984), studying the systematic strategy of borrowing intertexts that may be said to have played an important role in the development of the picaresque novel in Spanish, French, and Portuguese as a heteroglossic genre. The first part discusses the theoretical framework and designates as intertexts the translated fragments inserted as episodes or intercalary short stories into Spanish, French, and Portuguese picaresque novels. The chapter contends that the identification of such (translated) intertexts allows picaresque novels from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries to be described as eclectic translations (Ringmar, 2007). The second section dialogues with previous critical works on Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35) that have demonstrated the presence of a strong component of translation in the making of the picaresque novel, first in Spanish (Berruezo, 2011) and later in French (Cavillac, 1984). The last section uncovers alien discourses within four picaresque novels published in Portuguese in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of three contemporary historical novels that use picaresque features to portray the experiences of Jews and conversos in Spain, Portugal, and colonial Latin America. Written during the last quarter of the twentieth century, these novels link the literary and political history of the picaresque genre and highlight an ideological struggle that was also tackled in the original picaresque novels invented in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These seminal works were written by Old and New Christians who had imagined the picaro as a converso. The historical fiction examined in this chapter are Tierra adentro (Inland, 1977) by Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes (The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes, 1983) by Moacyr Scliar, and 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla (1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezón of Castile, 1985) by Homero Aridjis.

This chapter argues that in the late seventeenth century, vagrancy statutes are in formal conversation with the picaresque novel as both genres begin to circulate transatlantically. It contextualizes Richard Head's 1665 novel The English Rogue — widely regarded to be the first picaresque novel written in English — in the rapid expansion of the Atlantic trade in bound servants. The chapter then proposes a new way of understanding the genre of the picaresque and its relation to the law. Scholars of early modern picaresque and its affiliated genres have long noted that the literary figure of the “rogue and vagabond” circulated in popular print before it became a legal category. However, in the late seventeenth century, as vagrancy law became an increasingly important tool for the management of impoverished populations and the distribution of these populations' labor across empire, the chapter reads picaresque not for the singular figure of the rogue, but for the way the genre's narrative structure allows for the conceptualization of populations and geographies.

This chapter discusses how Cervantes experimented with different narrative models popular in the sixteenth century, at times improving, parodying, imitating, and reinventing them. There were three main types of novels whose style and themes Cervantes could tap into: the romances of chivalry and the pastoral and picaresque novels.

The publication of Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554 marked a significant point in the development of European narrative. Paralleling its titular protagonist, this short work transgressed a number of boundaries. Lazarillo defies the conventions of the idealistic fiction of the time as it helps to define new forms of realism and advances toward the realist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As demonstrated in Don Quixote, Cervantes seems to have learned a valuable lesson from picaresque narrative (Lazarillo and its successor, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache) in terms of underscoring process along with product. This chapter focuses on early forms of the picaresque, the creation of a subgenre, the archetypal picaresque narratives (Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, and La vida del buscón), other picaresque narratives of Early Modern Spain, including feminine variations, the picaresque and realism, the picaresque and Cervantes, and the continuity of the picaresque.

The third chapter focuses on the picaresque novel. Although the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, the first work of this genre, remains anonymous, the specifics of this text have repeatedly been interpreted with the author’s assumed Jewish or converso belonging in mind. The chapter offers a new interpretation of its literary form based on an archival discovery. These historical documents open up a new perspective on the first passage of Lazarillo de Tormes: One possible reading of the account given by the first-person narrator at the beginning of Lazarillo is that of a parody of the “genealogical information” which those suspected of being judaizante and those who applied for the appointment to or retention of a public office (which also included the office of town crier) had to submit to the Inquisition authorities.