Novel
Lazarillo de Tormes
Anonymous · 1554
Opening lines
Pues sepa V.M. ante todas cosas que a mí llaman Lázaro de Tormes, hijo de Tomé González y de Antona Pérez, naturales de Tejares, aldea de Salamanca.
Your Worship must know, then, before all else, that I am called Lázaro de Tormes, son of Tomé González and Antona Pérez, natives of Tejares, a village near Salamanca.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Lázaro, born on the banks of the Tormes near Salamanca into a poor family, loses his father, accused of theft and then dead in the war. His mother entrusts him to a blind beggar, who mistreats him and teaches him cunning. He then enters the service of a priest of Maqueda, even more miserly, who keeps his bread locked in a chest, and then of a squire who is poor and proud of his rank. He tells his own life in the first person, in the form of a long letter.
Context
Four editions of 1554 survive, printed at Burgos, Antwerp, Alcalá de Henares and Medina del Campo; the Medina del Campo copy was discovered in 1992, walled up in a house in Barcarrota, and an earlier edition probably existed. The book appeared without an author's name, and the attributions proposed since the seventeenth century remain disputed. Placed on the Index by the Inquisition for its anticlerical tone, it circulated in Spain, from 1573, only in an expurgated version, and the full text did not reappear there until the nineteenth century. It was translated into French as early as 1560 and into English in 1576.
Who it is for
A short narrative, in chapters that each follow a master, in a sixteenth-century language, to be read in an annotated edition.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the founder of the picaresque novel, a genre whose influence extends to the modern novel.