Beschreibung:

LAGUNA, DANIEL ISRAEL LOPEZ. Espejo fiel de vidas que contiene los Psalmos de David en verso. London: [n.p.], 5480 [1720]. Title with vignette showing King David playing the harp, engraving allegorical frontispiece representing a hieroglyph or baroque riddle, alluding to the title (Espejo fiel de vidas = True Mirror of Life), and in the preliminaries another allegorical engraved plate with a letter-riddle, all by the Sephardi artist Abraham Lopes d'Oliveira. 4to, old reverse calf. Kayserling, 55. Roth, Marrano Typography, 11,12; Den Boer, Catalogue [...] Ets Haim/Livraria Montezinos, n. 384. Sold not subject to return. VERY RARE. Famous rhymed version of the Psalms in Spanish. The author, Daniel Israel Lopez Laguna was born in Portugal. As a child he was taken to Peyrehorade, in the south of France. Later he went to study in Spain, were he was arrested by the Inquisition. After being released, he managed to escape the Iberian Peninsula and settle in Jamaica, where he openly professed Judaism and was naturalized in 1693. His paraphrase of the Psalms in a variety of Spanish verse is an impressive literary achievement. It was published with the help of his patron Mordecai Nunes de Almeida, in 1720. The book was conceived, however, during Lopez Laguna's imprisonment, and was the fruit of 23 years' labor. In a number of psalms, the author adopted the psalmist's voice to express his own anguish and sufferings caused by the Inquisition. In laudatory poems in Spanish, Portuguese, English and Hebrew, prefacing the volume, the translation was enthusiastically welcomed by some 20 personalities belonging to London's Sephardic literary life. Most noteworthy are the contributions by women such as dona Sara de Fonseca Pina y Pimentel, Manuele Nunes d'Almeida, mother of the mecenas and dona Benvenida Cohen Pimentel. Both the Jewish Enclyopaedia and the Encyclopaedia Judaica mention that after the publication of this book, Laguna "returned to Jamaica, to his wife and three sons David, Jacob and Isaac, and died there". Neither his name nor the names of his wife and their three children are mentioned in the book The Jews of Jamaica. Tombstone inscriptions 1663-1880 (Jerusalem: 1997). In the same book, however, three tombstones are registered with the name "Laguna" and date from 1727, 1743 and 1743/1744.