Lazarillo de Tormes (Dual-Language)

My daughter is taking a Spanish Lit course and was going to be reading this book. I first purchased what I believed to be a good translation but because of the age of the book, there is a lot of vocabulary which is not easily translated. This edition is very popular with other classmates and I ordered a copy. She loved it. It includes many vocabulary hints and explanations, and definitions along-side the text. Very useful for a student.... (And she tells me it is a fun read as well)

and mine was Simplicius Simplicissimus. But if I'd needed a second choice, it might have been Lazarillo de Tormes, the most resilient and resourceful rogue (pícaro) in Spanish literature. The Tormes River runs (crawls, actually) below the ancient walls of Salamanca. A highway now spoils the opposite bank, but a low-maintenance path lets university types jog along the stream most of the year, and gypsies often camp there during August and September, the fair months. You can rent a canoe in Salamanca, get the operator to shuttle you some miles upstream, and paddle down to the city. With the oldest university in Spain, Salamanca is the party town of Spain during the winter. Architecturally, it ranks with Segovia as the most beautiful Renaissance city in Iberia; all the palaces and convents are built of a lovely warm ochre stone quarried locally. Little Lazarus (Lazarillo) was born in the middle of the River Tormes, in a mill operated by his father, whose sly habit of stealing grain got him arrested and sent to fight the Moors. He never returned. Lazaro's mama moved into the city and started doing laundry and other services for university students. Eventually she found an 'opportunity' for her boy, as the guide/servant of a blind beggar, a crafty but stingy rogue who taught Lazarus everything he needed to know about roguery. Even today, a guide for the blind is called a "lazarillo," and that's not the only word or image that survives in the Castillian language taken from this classic picaresque novella. Written sometime half way between "La Celestina" and "Don Quixote" - in the 16th Century Golden Age of Spanish literature, art, music, architecture, and colonial plunder - "Lazarillo de Tormes" is as iconic for Spaniards as "Huckleberry Finn" for Americans, and equally funny. No author has been firmly identified, but the likeliest candidate is a disgruntled friar named Juan de Ortega, since the book is both clearly knowledgeable about church ritual and plainly skeptical about church sanctity. Three pirated editions of it were published in the year 1554. In 1559, sales were boosted magnificently when the book was banned by the Inquisition. It has never been out of print since. Numerous sequels and continuations have been attached to Lazarillo, but none of them have captured the salty tang of the original, a patent demonstration of just how finely written the original is. This is a dual-language edition, intended for intermediate learners of the Spanish language. The translation is 'not half bad' though it lacks the coy, ironic 'formality' of the original. The word 'formal' in Spanish carries a special sense of being opportunistically proper, and that's exactly what Lazarillo aspires to be, as his means of survival -- the smoothest rogue in the pack. Modern spellings and punctuation have been applied to the Spanish text, making it far more available to readers with even a single good year of college study. Even if your Spanish is limited to 'burrit

All I can say is that I never would have believed that this story (short and not so sweet) was written in the 1500s! Truthfully, not much has changed as far as "the church" and "the nobility" are concerned. There is a reason this little story has endured and it is because the world's problems, like the world's fashions, instead of petering out and dying, seem to recycle themselves for the sake of posterity (lest we forget). Like Voltaire's "Candide," this short story offers a scathing social commentary paired with an expert knack for dark comedy. I literally laughed outloud all the way through. The abuses of young "Lazaro" are unfortunate but irresistable...and not without truth. This is a two to three hour read at most. You have absolutely nothing to lose. If you have a good sense of humor and do not take the "powers that be" too seriously, you would be a fool not to give it a try.

Esta gran novela que inicio la litaratura picaresca es un excelente libro el cual pienso que todos los jovenes deberian leerlo, trata de un muchacho llamado Lazaro el cual fue criado cerca al rio Tormes (DE alli su nombre) y que durante sus aventuras con diferentes amos aprende nuevas e importantes enseñanzas, es muy interesante ver como lazaro reflexiona sobre sus actos. Recomiendo muchisimo este libro

Nobody knows for sure who wrote this early novel. But we should be glad he did. This book takes the form of an autobiographical tale, where Lazaro de Tormes tells his misadventures. He is a street-boy, an orphan in constant risk of starvation in a poor Spain, where the richess of the New World never trickled down to the poor inhabitants not connected to the Conquest.Lazarillo, then, makes a living -if you can call that to make a living- as servant to different miserable characters who exploit and abuse him. But he is anything but a fool. Lazaro is always on the move to cheat and deceive his masters, if only to be able to put something into his stomach and avoid starvation. His adventures are not nice, but brutal. Be it with a blind master, or an avaricious and poor priest, Lazaro is always having funny and hysterical adventures. The best thing about the book is Lazaro's attitude: deep inside, the guy is a winner, not a loser, and he is willing to do anything to go up in life, as far as he can, which is not much: he ends up marrying a priest's mistress (check the mock at the Church) and landing a job which required him to accompany prisoners to their execution (not the nicest of jobs, but at least he got a salary). The adventures are hilarious, the character unforgettable by any means. Besides, you can get a good glimpse at the state of Spanish society at the time, but never forget that, even in rich societies, miserable people abound, and the Lazarillos are still out there, in the streets, living day by day, having adventures not funny at all. Good literature with a great social landscape.