If Leopardi's Zibaldone was the publishing event of this year, then this first English translation of Bernardim Ribeiro's seminal Portuguese classic in 400 years must have been the event of 2012. I finally got around to reading it and found that its deceptively simple chivalric contents belie the confounding and even bewildering effect of it all. Though capably enough described as "the first Iberian pastoral romance" that doesn't begin to capture the strangeness and remoteness of the text, a synthesis of so many genres then existing independently. It lingers in the mind in part because it's "ahead of its time" in respect to its treatment of psychology and gender and its overall metaphysical density, in some ways I think forging new terrain that does register as recognizably "modern" (the story within a story format leads to a kind of coiled rabbit hole of inescapable reflections). Also, of course, there is the inevitable sense of cultural remove in the emphasis on obscure, but highly developed notions of chivalric love; these will seem remote or foreign to many of us, especially in terms of their often directly unacknowledged but always present implications, circulating through and enriching the entire text in ineffable ways. But I also think that the literary structure and form of the book, in combination with all of the above, really does develop wholly new avenues for thought. It may bear a superficial resemblance to One Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales but this is a unique sui generis work all its own, breaking ground and pointing the way both for ideas and literary possibilities in the years to come.