Customer Reviews

La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades

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This edition, stemming from the time when learning a modern foreign language was still modeled after the traditional procedures employed by dons and thwackum-style masters in beating Latin or Greek into their charges' heads, presents a full and fair text of Lazaro, modernizing and regularizing the spelling, but changing the original in no other way that I can detect. The editors added a FULL vocabulary of the work, including even the most basic words, so that a beginner with a basic knowledge of the grammar could conceivably get through it, though it seems to me that any student should become reasonably comfortable with modern standard Spanish before they tackle something like Lazaro, direct as the Castillian literary style may have been in those days.
My criticism of this edition relates to confusion of the function of notes and vocabulary. There are lines and lines of notes at the bottom of each page, but the student will find that a very large part of this material is nothing more than the schoolmaster's instructions to the little brigands, who would really rather be carving up the desks, as to the elegant phraseology they should employ in manufacturing a finished translation: "translate as pluperfect", " 'since he had gotten a cold deal on a cold turnip'" etc etc etc. Explanations of historical and cultural information, giving the student something of the background the Spanish contemporary would have brought to the text would have been more helpful. And in fact, the editors do include some of this sort of stuff, but it's back in the vocabulary, along with entries such as "cumplir - to obey, comply with, behoove etc", and extremely limited.
So if you're looking for a mass of annotations that will explain what went into each episode and line of Lazaro, this isn't it. But at least it's an unadulterated text of a book that was terribly important in Spain, and, by some extension, the world. And people still read it. Both scholars and schoolchildren, when they aren't carving on desks (or whatever they do these days).

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