Juan Ruiz: The Book of Good Love

I'm not really sure how to approach writing about this book.  In fact, I almost feel like I haven't really read it at all.   According to at least one scholar (Spanish literary historian Salceda Ruiz), The Book of Good Love is among "the most beautiful, most humane, and most profoundly moral that literature has ever produced."  What I read, therefore, must have been some other book, because I found it stilted, unfocused and clumsy. Whether a translation can actually capture the spirit of the original is a subject worth considering in any medium, but I feel like a translation into verse is especially suspect. The translator, Elisha Kane, is to be credited for tackling such a task at all, of course.  English rhymes are so scarce compared to those in Spanish, I can only assume that the often forced nature of the end product was unavoidable.  Nonetheless, while he seemed to capture the story and humor of the original, I would be hard pressed to find a single passage that I would describe as "beautiful".  Whether the original was poetic in any way, I may never know, and that leaves me feeling a little dissatisfied.  Unless I plan on learning 14th century Spanish, however (spoiler: I do not), I will have to be content with what I can only assume is a smudged mimeograph of a masterpiece.