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Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León (Montevideo 1947) is a novelist, short story writer and critic of Spanish American literature. As of 1992 he has dedicated himself exclusively to becoming a professional writer (Cordones-Cook 104).1 His novel Maluco: la novela de los descubridores (1990) has gone through eleven printings, been translated into twelve languages (including an English edition called Five Black Ships: A Novel of the Discoverers), and been awarded numerous literary prizes, which include the 1990 Premio Blanes de Oro (Montevideo), awarded annually for an Uruguayan book that has achieved national and international recognition; the 1990 Premio Latinoamericano de Narrativa (Mexico), awarded annually for the best novel published in Latin America; a second-place finish in the 1991 "Romulo Gallegos" Premio de Novela competition; and the prestigious 1990 Casa de las Américas Premio de Novela (Cuba), whose jury lauded the novel for its: "tratamiento de un tema universal resuelto con notable profesionalismo en el que destaca la estilización del lenguaje de las crónicas del descubrimiento, el agudo sentido del humor, el alto vuelo imaginativo, con los que logra trascender la recreación de una época para convertirse en un texto de honda significación contemporánea..." (Ctd. Cordones-Cook 103-104 and Acevedo 1187).
Maluco re-creates Ferdinand Magellan's voyage around the world (1519-21) and is narrated retrospectively from the vantage point of the expedition's buffoon, Juanillo de Ponce.2 Responding to official accounts of the voyage as recorded in Peter Martyr's Decades (1526) and Antonio de Pigafetta's Relación del primer viaje en torno del mundo (1527), Juanillo addresses and submits his own version to Charles V of Spain, encloistered at the monestary in Yuste. in order to receive a pension that Phillip II had suspended after the King discovered that Juanillo was criticizing the official history of the voyage.3 Critics of the novel have focused on the marginal status of the buffoon and the appropriation of discursive forms from the sixteenth century to subvert the official history of the voyage. In her dissertation on the rewriting of the discovery and conquest of the New World in a selection of Spanish American novels, Viviana Plotnik argues that marginal figures are the key element of a strategy to contest discourses of power as embodied in the chronicles of the Indies. Moreover, she posits that...