Level C2 · Part One, prologue
The prologue that mocks prologues
Cervantes opens by apologising for the book he is about to be celebrated for, and every word of the apology is a weapon. This is irony built out of grammar rather than out of vocabulary: the modesty lives in the conditionals and in a metaphor engineered so that the son can be ugly.
The passage, exactly as Cervantes wrote it
Miguel de Cervantes, Part One, prologue. Public domain, and not adapted, shortened or modernised in any way.
Desocupado lector: sin juramento me podrás creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse. Pero no he podido yo contravenir al orden de naturaleza; que en ella cada cosa engendra su semejante. Y así, ¿qué podrá engendrar el estéril y mal cultivado ingenio mío, sino la historia de un hijo seco, avellanado, antojadizo y lleno de pensamientos varios y nunca imaginados de otro alguno
Idle reader, you can believe me without my swearing to it that I should have liked this book, being a child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most spirited and the wisest that could be imagined. But I have not been able to break the order of nature, in which each thing breeds its like. And so what can my barren and ill tended wit breed but the story of a son who is dry, shrivelled, whimsical and full of odd notions that nobody else ever thought of
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.
Lector desocupado: puedes creerme sin que lo jure que me habría gustado que este libro, como hijo de mi entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más elegante y el más inteligente que se pudiera imaginar. Pero no he podido contradecir el orden de la naturaleza, en la que cada cosa engendra a su semejante. Así que, ¿qué puede engendrar mi ingenio estéril y mal cultivado, sino la historia de un hijo seco, arrugado, caprichoso y lleno de ideas raras que nunca se le ocurrieron a nadie?
What changed, form by form
| In the text | Today | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Desocupado lector | lector desocupado | Adjective in front for weight. It also means idle in both senses. |
| quisiera | me habría gustado | Imperfect subjunctive doing the work of a polite conditional. |
| imaginados de otro alguno | imaginados por otro | De marking the agent, where today only por will do. |
| avellanado | arrugado, seco | Dried like a hazelnut. Used of faces. |
| antojadizo | caprichoso | Given to sudden whims. Still current. |
| ingenio | talento, inventiva | The key word of the book. It is in the title. |
The syntax
The whole thing turns on a rhetorical question with sino, and the answer is planted in the question. Notice the sequence of moods: quisiera, then fuera, then pudiera. Three subjunctives in a row hold the sentence at a distance, which is exactly what politeness in Spanish is made of.
What a Spanish reader hears
Every self deprecating word is doing the opposite of what it says. The metaphor of the book as a child is set up so that the child can be called dry and shrivelled, which no author believes of his own book, and hijo del entendimiento then sets up the later joke that this father is only a stepfather because the real author is Cide Hamete. A reader who takes the modesty at face value has been had, which is the point.
Where the course prepares you for this
- Saying what a word means and what a book is calledLesson 85The Visit to the Printing House