A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of Baltasar Gracián’s Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, made directly from the Spanish. No earlier English version was used as its basis; the Victorian translation was consulted only at a few places where the Spanish could be read two ways. The source is a public-domain digital transcription of the text first printed at Huesca in 1647, with the spelling modernized.

The Spanish title means “A Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence”: manual is a book to be held in the hand. English readers have known the book since 1892 as The Art of Worldly Wisdom, and that name is kept on the cover so the book can be found. Inside, Gracián’s key word prudencia is everywhere “prudence.”

The book opens with a short address to the reader by Gracián’s patron, Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, who presented it. Then come the three hundred aphorisms, numbered as in the original. Each aphorism is one paragraph, neither split nor merged, and its first sentence, the heading, stays at the head of the paragraph as Gracián set it. The division into four groups of seventy-five was made only for the table of contents.

Gracián keeps apart words that English tends to merge, and each is rendered one way throughout: prudencia prudence, cordura good sense, discreción discernment (not “discretion,” which now means keeping quiet), ingenio wit, genio temperament, gusto taste, juicio judgment. Desengaño, the great Baroque word for waking from illusion to see things as they are, is “undeceiving.” Sindéresis, the inborn power to judge rightly, keeps its old English form, synderesis.

Gracián speaks to no one in particular. His infinitives and third-person commands are given as imperatives or with “one” and “a man”; “you” appears only in Lastanosa’s address and in quotations. Spelling is American. The seventy-seven short notes, all the translator’s, identify persons, sayings, and wordplay the English cannot carry; none interprets.