Level C1 · Part One, Chapter 11
The long sentence: Cervantes and the periodic style
A single sentence that holds a negation, a relative clause, a parenthesis and an imperfect subjunctive, and does not resolve until the last five words. This is the shape of formal Spanish prose in 1605, and once you can see the frame it stops being difficult.
The passage, exactly as Cervantes wrote it
Miguel de Cervantes, Part One, Chapter 11. Public domain, and not adapted, shortened or modernised in any way.
Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquéllos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados, y no porque en ellos el oro, que en esta nuestra edad de hierro tanto se estima, se alcanzase en aquella venturosa sin fatiga alguna, sino porque entonces los que en ella vivían ignoraban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío.
Happy the age and happy the centuries which the ancients called golden, and not because gold, so prized in this our age of iron, was got in that fortunate one without any effort at all, but because those who lived in it did not know these two words, yours and mine.
The same thing in Spanish as it is written today
Read the two side by side. What has changed between them is the syllabus of this level.
Feliz edad y siglos felices aquellos a los que los antiguos llamaron dorados, y no porque en ellos el oro, tan valorado en esta nuestra edad de hierro, se consiguiera sin ningún esfuerzo, sino porque entonces los que vivían en ella no conocían estas dos palabras: tuyo y mío.
What changed, form by form
| In the text | Today | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| a quien los antiguos | a los que los antiguos | Quien with a plural antecedent. Today quien is singular only. |
| pusieron nombre de dorados | llamaron dorados | A set phrase for naming, now gone. |
| se alcanzase | se alcanzara | Imperfect subjunctive, and both endings are still correct. |
| en aquella venturosa | en aquella edad venturosa | The noun edad is left out and the adjective carries it. |
| ignoraban | no conocían | Ignorar meaning simply not to know, without the English sense of ignoring. |
The syntax
The frame is no porque ... sino porque, and everything else hangs inside it. The negated reason takes the subjunctive, se alcanzase, because it is being denied. The affirmed reason takes the indicative, ignoraban. That contrast of mood inside one sentence is the single most useful thing to notice at this level.
What a Spanish reader hears
He is reciting a set piece of Renaissance rhetoric about the golden age, and he is reciting it to goatherds who are eating acorns and do not follow a word. Cervantes gives him a genuinely beautiful speech and a completely wrong audience, and the comedy is in the gap rather than in the words.
Where the course prepares you for this
- Discourse markers and the formal registerLesson 49Arms and Letters