Lazarillo De Tormes English

Lazarillo de Tormes (also known as The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities) was published in three Spanish cities in 1554 and has been in publication ever since.It is a picaresque novel characterized mainly by its use of satire.A picaresque novel contains a first-person narrator who is a picaro, a young boy who might be considered a rogue or born of low class. English Book from Project Gutenberg: The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes; his fortunes and misfortunes as told by himself Library of Congress Classification: PQ Addeddate.

The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities (Spanish: La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades[la ˈβiða ðe laθaˈɾiʎo ðe ˈtoɾmes i ðe sus foɾˈtunas i aðβeɾsiˈðaðes]) is a Spanish novella, published anonymously because of its anticlerical content. It was published simultaneously in three cities in 1554: Alcalá de Henares, Burgos and Antwerp. The Alcalá de Henares edition adds some episodes which were most likely written by a second author. It is most famous as the book establishing the style of the picaresque satirical novel.

Summary[edit]

Lázaro is a boy of humble origins from Salamanca. After his stepfather is accused of thievery, his mother asks a wily blind beggar to take on Lazarillo (little Lázaro) as his apprentice. Lázaro develops his cunning while serving the blind beggar and several other masters, while also learning to take on his father's practice.

Table of contents:

• Prologue
• Chapter* 1: childhood and apprenticeship to a blind man.
• Chapter* 2: serving a priest.
• Chapter* 3: serving a squire.
• Chapter* 4: serving a friar.
• Chapter* 5: serving a pardoner.
• Chapter* 6: serving a chaplain.
• Chapter* 7: serving a pardoner and an archpriest.

*(or treatise)

Importance as a novella[edit]

Besides its importance in the Spanish literature of the Golden Age, Lazarillo de Tormes is credited with founding a literary genre, the picaresque novel, from the Spanish word pícaro, meaning 'rogue' or 'rascal.' In novels of this type, the adventures of the pícaro expose injustice while amusing the reader. This extensive genre includes Cervantes' Rinconete y Cortadillo and El coloquio de los perros, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Its influence extends to twentieth century novels, dramas and films featuring the 'anti-hero'.

Prohibition[edit]

Lazarillo de Tormes was banned by the Spanish Crown and included in the Index of Forbidden Books of the Spanish Inquisition; this was at least in part due to the book's anti-clerical flavor. In 1573, the Crown allowed circulation of a version which omitted Chapters 4 and 5 and assorted paragraphs from other parts of the book. An unabridged version did not appear in Spain until the nineteenth century. It was the Antwerp version that circulated throughout Europe, translated into French (1560), English (1576), Dutch (after the northern, largely Protestant Seven Provinces of the Low Countries revolted against Spain in 1579), German (1617), and Italian (1622).

Lazarillo De Tormes English Chapter 3

Spanish first edition title pages in 1554 of Lazarillo de Tormes.

• Burgos, Juan de Junta

• Medina del Campo, Hermanos Del Canto

• Alcalá de Henares, Salcedo

• Antwerp, Martín Nucio

Literary significance and criticism[edit]

The primary objections to Lazarillo had to do with its vivid and realistic descriptions of the world of the pauper and the petty thief. The 'worm's eye view' of society contrasted sharply with the more conventional literary focus on superhuman exploits recounted in chivalric romances such as the hugely popular Amadís de Gaula. In Antwerp, it followed the tradition of the impudent trickster figure Till Eulenspiegel.

Lazarillo introduced the picaresque device of delineating various professions and levels of society. A young boy or young man or woman describes masters or 'betters' with ingenuously presented realistic details. But Lazarillo speaks of 'the blind man,' 'the squire,' 'the pardoner,' presenting these characters as types.

Significantly, the only named characters are Lazarillo and his family: his mother Antoña Pérez, his father Tomé Gonzáles, and his stepfather El Zayde. The surname de Tormes comes from the river Tormes. In the narrative, Lazarillo explains that his father ran a mill on the river, where he was literally born on the river. The Tormes runs through Lazarillo's home town, Salamanca, a Castilian-Leonese university city. (There is an old mill on the river, and a statue of Lazarillo and the blind man next to the Roman bridge [puente romano] in the city.)

Lazarillo is the diminutive of the Spanish name Lázaro. There are two appearances of the name Lazarus in the Bible, and not all critics agree as to which story the author was referring when he chose the name. The more well-known tale is in John 11:41–44, in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. The second is in Luke 16:19–31, a parable about a beggar named Lazarus at the gate of a stingy rich man's house.

In contrast to the fancifully poetic language devoted to fantastic and supernatural events about unbelievable creatures and chivalric knights, the realistic prose of Lazarillo described suppliants purchasing indulgences from the Church, servants forced to die with their masters on the battlefield (as Lazarillo's father did), thousands of refugees wandering from town to town, poor beggars flogged away by whips because of the lack of food. The anonymous author included many popular sayings and ironically interpreted popular stories.

The Prologue with Lázaro's extensive protest against injustice is addressed to a high-level cleric, and five of his eight masters in the novel serve the church. Lazarillo attacked the appearance of the church and its hypocrisy, though not its essential beliefs, a balance not often present in following picaresque novels.

Besides creating a new genre, Lazarillo de Tormes was critically innovative in world literature in several aspects:

1. Long before Emile (Jean-Jacques Rousseau). Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) or Huckleberry Finn, the anonymous author of Lazarillo treated a boy as a boy, not a small adult.
2. Long before Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe), Lazarillo describes the domestic and working life of a poor woman, wife, mother, climaxing in the flogging of Lazarillo's mother through the streets of the town after her black husband Zayde is hanged as a thief.
3. Long before modern treatment of 'persons of color', this author treats sympathetically the pleasures and pains of an interracial family in his descriptions of life with his black stepfather and negrito half-brother, though their characterization is based on stereotypes.^[1]

Reference in Don Quixote[edit]

In his book Don Quixote, Cervantes introduces a gypsy thief called Ginés de Pasamonte who claims to be a writer (and who later in Part II masquerades as a puppeteer while on the run). Don Quixote interrogates this writer about his book:

'Is it so good?' said Don Quixote.

'So good is it,' replied Gines, 'that a fig for 'Lazarillo de Tormes,' and all of that kind that have been written, or shall be written compared with it: all I will say about it is that it deals with facts, and facts so neat and diverting that no lies could match them.'

'And how is the book entitled?' asked Don Quixote.

'The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte,' replied the subject of it.

'And is it finished?' asked Don Quixote.

'How can it be finished,' said the other, 'when my life is not yet finished?'

Social criticism[edit]

The author criticises many organisations and groups in his book, most notably the Catholic Church and the Spanish aristocracy.

These two groups are clearly criticised through the different masters that Lazarillo serves. Characters such as the Cleric, the Friar, the Pardoner, the Priest and the Archbishop all have something wrong either with them as a person or with their character. The self-indulgent cleric concentrates on feeding himself, and when he does decide to give the 'crumbs from his table' to Lazarillo, he says, 'toma, come, triunfa, para tí es el mundo' 'take, eat, triumph – the world is yours' a clear parody of a key communion statement.

In the final chapter, Lazarillo works for an Archpriest, who arranges his marriage to the Archpriest's maid. It is clear that Lazarillo's wife cheats on him with the Archpriest, and all vows of celibacy are forgotten.

In Chapter 3, Lazarillo becomes the servant of a Squire. The Squire openly flaunts his wealth despite not being able to feed himself, let alone Lázaro. This is a parody of the importance of having a strong image among the nobility.

Authorship[edit]

The identity of the author of Lazarillo has been a puzzle for nearly four hundred years. Given the subversive nature of Lazarillo and its open criticism of the Catholic Church, it is likely that the author chose to remain anonymous out of fear of religious persecution.

Lazarillo De Tormes English Translation

Neither the author nor the date and place of the first appearance of the work is known. It appeared anonymously; and no author's name was accredited to it until 1605, when the Hieronymite monk José de Sigüenza named as its author Fray Juan de Ortega. Two years later, it was accredited by the Belgian Valère André to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. In 1608, André Schott repeated this assertion, although less categorically. Despite these claims, the assignment of the work to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was generally accepted, until Alfred Paul Victor Morel-Fatio, in 1888, demonstrated the untenability of that candidate.^{[clarification needed]} The earliest known editions are the four of Alcalá de Henares, Antwerp, Medina del Campo, and Burgos, all of which appeared in 1554. Two continuations (or second parts) appeared – one, anonymously, in 1555, and the other, accredited to H. Luna, in 1620.

There has been some suggestion that the author was originally of Jewish extraction, but in 1492 had had to convert to Catholicism to avoid being expelled from Spain; that might explain the animosity towards the Catholic Church displayed in the book.^{[citation needed]} Apart from the chronological difficulties this hypothesis presents, Catholic criticism of Catholic clergy, including the Pope, had had a long and even reputable tradition that can be seen in the works of famous Catholic writers such as Chaucer, Dante or Erasmus.

Lazarillo De Tormes Summary

Documents recently discovered by the Spanish palaeographerMercedes Agulló support the hypothesis that the author was, in fact, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza.^[3]

Sequels[edit]

In 1555, only a year after the first edition of the book, a sequel by another anonymous author was attached to the original Lazarillo in an edition printed in Antwerp, Low Countries. This sequel is known as El Lazarillo de Amberes, Amberes being the Spanish name for Antwerp.

Lázaro leaves his wife and child with the priest, in Toledo, and joins the Spanish army in their campaign against the Moors. The ship carrying the soldiers sinks, but before it does, Lázaro drinks as much wine as he can. His body is so full of wine that there is no place for the water to enter him, and by that means he survives under the sea. Threatened by the tuna fish there, Lázaro prays for mercy and is eventually metamorphosized into a tuna himself. Most of the book tells about how Lázaro struggles to find his place in tuna society.

In 1620, another sequel, by Juan de Luna, appeared in Paris. In the prologue, the narrator (not Lázaro himself but someone who claims to have a copy of Lázaro's writings) tells the reader that he was moved to publish the second part of Lázaro's adventures after hearing about a book which, he alleges, had falsely told of Lázaro being transformed into a tuna (obviously a disparaging reference to Lazarillo de Amberes).

Adaptations[edit]

• 1617: a play Spaansche Brabander by Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Bredero.
• 1959: a film adaptationEl Lazarillo de Tormes, film director César Fernández Ardavín.
• 1987: a loose film adaptation The Rogues, film director Mario Monicelli.
• 2001: a film adaptation Lázaro de Tormes, film directors Fernando Fernán Gómez, José Luis García Sánchez.
• 2015: animation adaptation, El lazarillo de Tormes, film director Pedro Alonso Pablos.

Non-literary influence[edit]

Because of Lazarillo's first adventures, the Spanish word lazarillo has taken on the meaning 'guide', as to a blind person. Consequently, in Spanish a guide dog is still informally called a perro lazarillo, as it was called before perro guía became common.

References[edit]

1. ^'Aproximación socio-histórica al fenómeno afro-cultural en el cuento 'Barlovento', de Marvel Moreno: Estereotipos y discriminación (Parte I)', Dinah Orozco Herrera, La casa de Asterión, ISSN0124-9282, Volumen V – Número 20, Enero-Febrero–Marzo de 2005.
2. ^Miguel de Cervantes (1605). 'Chapter 22'. Don Quixote. Translated by John Ormsby (1885). Retrieved 2008-12-29.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
3. ^'El Lazarillo no es anónimo (Spanish)'. El Mundo. Retrieved 11 March 2010.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

Further reading[edit]

• Anon, Lazarillo de Tormes, in: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, Trans. Michael Alpert. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.
• Benito-Vessels, Carmen, and Michael Zappala, Eds. The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue's Tale. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press / London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994.
• Fiore, Robert L. Lazarillo de Tormes. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
• Maravall, José Antonio. La Literatura Picaresca desde la Historia Social (Siglos XVI al XVII). Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1987.
• Parker, A. A. Literature and the Delinquent: the Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe: 1599–1753. Edinburgh University Press, 1967.
• Sicroff, Albert A. 'Sobre el estilo del Lazarillo de Tormes', in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Vol 11, No. 2 (1957).

External links[edit]

• Audiobook in Spanish from LibriVox.
• Audiobook in English Translation from LibriVox.

These two groups are clearly criticised through the different masters that Lazarillo serves. Characters such as the Cleric, the Friar, the Pardoner, the Priest and the Archbishop all have something wrong either with them as a person or with their character. The self-indulgent cleric concentrates on feeding himself, and when he does decide to give the 'crumbs from his table' to Lazarillo, he says, 'toma, come, triunfa, para tí es el mundo' 'take, eat, triumph – the world is yours' a clear parody of a key communion statement.

In the final chapter, Lazarillo works for an Archpriest, who arranges his marriage to the Archpriest's maid. It is clear that Lazarillo's wife cheats on him with the Archpriest, and all vows of celibacy are forgotten.

In Chapter 3, Lazarillo becomes the servant of a Squire. The Squire openly flaunts his wealth despite not being able to feed himself, let alone Lázaro. This is a parody of the importance of having a strong image among the nobility.

Authorship[edit]

The identity of the author of Lazarillo has been a puzzle for nearly four hundred years. Given the subversive nature of Lazarillo and its open criticism of the Catholic Church, it is likely that the author chose to remain anonymous out of fear of religious persecution.

Lazarillo De Tormes English Translation

Neither the author nor the date and place of the first appearance of the work is known. It appeared anonymously; and no author's name was accredited to it until 1605, when the Hieronymite monk José de Sigüenza named as its author Fray Juan de Ortega. Two years later, it was accredited by the Belgian Valère André to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. In 1608, André Schott repeated this assertion, although less categorically. Despite these claims, the assignment of the work to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was generally accepted, until Alfred Paul Victor Morel-Fatio, in 1888, demonstrated the untenability of that candidate.^{[clarification needed]} The earliest known editions are the four of Alcalá de Henares, Antwerp, Medina del Campo, and Burgos, all of which appeared in 1554. Two continuations (or second parts) appeared – one, anonymously, in 1555, and the other, accredited to H. Luna, in 1620.

There has been some suggestion that the author was originally of Jewish extraction, but in 1492 had had to convert to Catholicism to avoid being expelled from Spain; that might explain the animosity towards the Catholic Church displayed in the book.^{[citation needed]} Apart from the chronological difficulties this hypothesis presents, Catholic criticism of Catholic clergy, including the Pope, had had a long and even reputable tradition that can be seen in the works of famous Catholic writers such as Chaucer, Dante or Erasmus.

Lazarillo De Tormes Summary

Documents recently discovered by the Spanish palaeographerMercedes Agulló support the hypothesis that the author was, in fact, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza.^[3]

Sequels[edit]

In 1555, only a year after the first edition of the book, a sequel by another anonymous author was attached to the original Lazarillo in an edition printed in Antwerp, Low Countries. This sequel is known as El Lazarillo de Amberes, Amberes being the Spanish name for Antwerp.

Lázaro leaves his wife and child with the priest, in Toledo, and joins the Spanish army in their campaign against the Moors. The ship carrying the soldiers sinks, but before it does, Lázaro drinks as much wine as he can. His body is so full of wine that there is no place for the water to enter him, and by that means he survives under the sea. Threatened by the tuna fish there, Lázaro prays for mercy and is eventually metamorphosized into a tuna himself. Most of the book tells about how Lázaro struggles to find his place in tuna society.

In 1620, another sequel, by Juan de Luna, appeared in Paris. In the prologue, the narrator (not Lázaro himself but someone who claims to have a copy of Lázaro's writings) tells the reader that he was moved to publish the second part of Lázaro's adventures after hearing about a book which, he alleges, had falsely told of Lázaro being transformed into a tuna (obviously a disparaging reference to Lazarillo de Amberes).

Adaptations[edit]

• 1617: a play Spaansche Brabander by Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Bredero.
• 1959: a film adaptationEl Lazarillo de Tormes, film director César Fernández Ardavín.
• 1987: a loose film adaptation The Rogues, film director Mario Monicelli.
• 2001: a film adaptation Lázaro de Tormes, film directors Fernando Fernán Gómez, José Luis García Sánchez.
• 2015: animation adaptation, El lazarillo de Tormes, film director Pedro Alonso Pablos.

Non-literary influence[edit]

Because of Lazarillo's first adventures, the Spanish word lazarillo has taken on the meaning 'guide', as to a blind person. Consequently, in Spanish a guide dog is still informally called a perro lazarillo, as it was called before perro guía became common.

References[edit]

1. ^'Aproximación socio-histórica al fenómeno afro-cultural en el cuento 'Barlovento', de Marvel Moreno: Estereotipos y discriminación (Parte I)', Dinah Orozco Herrera, La casa de Asterión, ISSN0124-9282, Volumen V – Número 20, Enero-Febrero–Marzo de 2005.
2. ^Miguel de Cervantes (1605). 'Chapter 22'. Don Quixote. Translated by John Ormsby (1885). Retrieved 2008-12-29.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
3. ^'El Lazarillo no es anónimo (Spanish)'. El Mundo. Retrieved 11 March 2010.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)

Further reading[edit]

• Anon, Lazarillo de Tormes, in: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels, Trans. Michael Alpert. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969.
• Benito-Vessels, Carmen, and Michael Zappala, Eds. The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue's Tale. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press / London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994.
• Fiore, Robert L. Lazarillo de Tormes. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
• Maravall, José Antonio. La Literatura Picaresca desde la Historia Social (Siglos XVI al XVII). Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1987.
• Parker, A. A. Literature and the Delinquent: the Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe: 1599–1753. Edinburgh University Press, 1967.
• Sicroff, Albert A. 'Sobre el estilo del Lazarillo de Tormes', in Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, Vol 11, No. 2 (1957).

External links[edit]

• Audiobook in Spanish from LibriVox.
• Audiobook in English Translation from LibriVox.

Lazarillo de Tormes is an anonymous picaresque novel written at the beginning of the 16th century which tells the story of a young boy of humble origins who works for different men in different planes of society. Lazarillo de Tormes was the first picaresque novel and the one that invented the genre.

Argument of Lazarillo de Tormes

Through a letter Lázaro sends to someone not specified in the novel, he tells his story: a boy from a very humble family, born in the Tormes river in Salamanca, who is placed in the service of a blind man after the death of his father.

First part of Lazarillo de Tormes

Lázaro evolves from a naive little boy into a young man with survivor instincts. He works for many different men, and each of his jobs has a separate chapter in the book:

1. Prologue
2. Chapter (or treatise) 1: childhood and apprenticeship to a blind man
3. Chapter 2: serving a priest who starves him; he's discovered robbing a loaf of bread while the clergyman slept and he's beaten and fired.
4. Chapter 3: serving a ruined squire who is too proud to beg so he eats from the morsels Lázaro gets from begging.
5. Chapter 4: serving a friar who never stopped at the convent and who makes Lázaro walk so much he breaks the soles of his shoes.
6. Chapter 5: serving a pardoner who tricks people into buying bulls. Lázaro is part of the scheme, in which the pardoner arguments that anyone who thinks a bull is worth nothing must be possessed by the Devil.
7. Chapter 6: serving a chaplain, spreading water through the city. This job pays enough that Lázaro can gather some savings, with which he buys some old but nice clothes.
8. Chapter 7: serving a constable, although this job is short-lived because Lázaro finds it too dangerous. He goes on to work as a crier thanks to the help received by an archpriest who also gives him a house and his maid to wed, with the aim of stopping the rumors that said he was bedding his housemaid. However, after the wedding the rumors continue and Lázaro is the laughing stock of the village. At the end of the letter he says he's found happiness, even if he had to lose his honor to gain it.

Second part of Lazarillo de Tormes

A second part came out, also anonymous, came out around 1555. This one didn't have the success the first part did, because instead of maintaining the style of the first part, the author tells the story of how Lázaro turns into a tuna, and all the adventures he runs into while being a fish. At the end of this second part, Lázaro is captured in a net and turns back into a human.

There was another second part to the Lazarillo de Tormes, written by Juan Luna and published in 1620. Juan Luna was a Toledan Protestant who lived in Paris and gave Spanish language courses. When he read the second part of Lazarillo, he was so angry that he decided to write a better sequel. This second part was a success in Spain, where it was reprinted 4 times, and in FRance, where 7 different translation where available before the end of the 17th century.

Lazarillo de Tormes: The picaresque novel

The great achievement of the Lazarillo de Tormes is the creation of a new genre: the picaresque novel. The picaresque novel is a parody of the ideal narrative of the Renaissance: epics, romances, sentimental novel, pastoral novel... The contrast between these books and the social reality generated the 'anti-novel', in which the main characters are real depictions of people: the impoverished noblemen, the disinherited, the marginal converts, etc. in clear contrast with the knights and bourgeois that live in another plane of reality.

The characteristics of the picaresque novel are:

• The main character is a rascal with a very low social status, an ideal counterpoint to the chivalrous knights of the Renaissance. He wants to gain a higher status but to do so he has to use illegitimate procedures like cons and lies.
• False autobiography structure: These novels are always written in first-person narrative, as if the main characters was writing about his own adventures. He plays a double role in the narration: actor and narrator.
• Determinism: Even though the rascal's aim is to better his social position, he always fails. This is why the structure of the picaresque novel is always open, there's no possible evolution for the story.
• Moralizing and pessimistic ideology: Every picaresque novel is narrated from a final perspective of disillusion; it could serve as an example of how deviant behavior is always punished, no matter what happens.
• Satiric intention and itinerant structure: Society is heavily critiqued in the picaresque novel as the rascal moves through the different social planes, working for an archetype of each social class. The rascal is a privileged spectator who is able to see the hypocrisy of each is his bosses.
• Realism, and even naturalism when describing some of the most disagreeable aspects of society.