Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado Don Pablos, ejemplo de vagabundos y

Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y VillegasProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
234K words
Chapters
24

Tags

Foreign Language Books Foreign Literature Fate and FortuneTrampUrban UnderclassComplex HumanitySocial CritiquePicaresque NovelSatirical StyleSpanish Golden Age

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado Don Pablos, ejemplo de vagabundos yAuthor: Quevedo, Francisco de, 1580-1645,Language: Spanish, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: May 10, 2010

Editor's review

Historia de la vida del Buscón is a landmark picaresque novel by the Spanish Golden Age writer Francisco de Quevedo. It follows the poor young Pablo as he drifts through the lower reaches of society, swindling and being swindled, suffering one setback after another. Quevedo's prose is extraordinarily dense, layering irony, puns, and grotesque metaphors so that the work is at once social satire and linguistic experiment. The pleasure of reading lies in the narrator's wit and self-mockery and in its gallery of street-level characters; the difficulty lies in the allusions, slang, and syntax of seventeenth-century Spanish. Project Gutenberg's public-domain Spanish edition is easy to search and read alongside a translation, making it suitable as a primary text for courses in Spanish literature and for readers interested in the picaresque tradition. Read it with an annotated edition or a translation at hand: grasp the plot first, then return to savor the verbal ingenuity.

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Reading tips

  1. Start with a plot summary or introduction to sort out the characters and the direction of the chapters, then move into the original text.
  2. Keep an annotated Spanish edition or a reliable translation at hand; mark allusions and slang as you go and look them up in batches.
  3. Read chapter by chapter; after each section, retell the narrator's tricks and their outcomes, and identify the targets of the satire.
  4. On a second pass, focus on the language: copy out metaphors and ironic sentences to appreciate the density of Baroque prose.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24

FAQ

Can I read this book without any Spanish? The original is in seventeenth-century Spanish and is quite difficult; without any Spanish, reading the original directly will be very hard going. Start with a Chinese or English translation to grasp the story, then consider reading selected passages alongside the original. If your goal is language study, begin with short chapters and use an annotated edition to gradually get used to the syntax and vocabulary.
What is the novel mainly about? It takes the form of a picaresque novel: the narrator, Pablo, is born poor and attaches himself to a series of masters, moving through the lower strata of society and using every trick to survive, yet repeatedly coming to grief. His first-person account brings together a social gallery, satirizing hypocrisy, snobbery, and class prejudice while displaying the narrator's wit and self-mockery.
Why is the language so hard to read? Quevedo's prose is known for its dense metaphors, puns, irony, and grotesque imagery, and its syntax is often deliberately convoluted—a Baroque experiment in language. Add seventeenth-century slang, allusions, and period context, and modern readers feel the distance; an annotated edition and a translation side by side will noticeably reduce the difficulty.

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About the author

Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas Author · Spanish · 1580–1645

Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645) was a noble poet and satirist of the Spanish Golden Age, born Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas. He is known for the picaresque novel La vida del buscón (1626) and the dream visions collected as Sueños. His works often depict the survival of lower-class vagabonds and satirize the social scene, in an ornate, elaborate style marked by sharp, biting irony; he is a leading figure of conceptismo. The library holds four of his works, including La vida del buscón and English translations of the Visions of Quevedo, commonly classified under inspirational growth. His writing, distinguished by epigrams, puns, and ingenious conceits, has had a lasting influence on later Spanish-language literature. As public information is limited, biographical details are omitted here, with emphasis placed on the themes and style of his works.