I. Libro primero
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A pastoral novel in prose and verse for C2
La Galatea La Galatea
Miguel de Cervantes, 1922
Miguel de Cervantes’s first novel in its complete text, a pastoral romance of 1585 in six books, not an adaptation. In the catalog it is C2: about 119,300 words and 51 words per sentence on average. Shepherds on the banks of the Tagus talk, sing and plead in love; roughly a quarter of the text is verse, the rest is prose.
- C2
- 119 285 words
- 20-33 hours
Will this text hold?
C1
Earlier
At C1 the long periods are the obstacle: sentences of fifty words and more, old forms such as trujeron and mesmas, and verse with inverted word order that asks for patience.
C1C2
This text
You can manage it at C2: read one book at a time in sessions, translate single words, and use whole-sentence translation for the long periods and the shepherds’ songs.
Check this passageThe average sentence has 51 words, longer than in Don Quixote (43), Persiles (48) or the Exemplary Novels (49), which are also C2 in the catalog. Prose passages are built from long periods with clause inside clause, and about a quarter of the text is verse, whose commas and colons string many lines into one long sentence. One word in fourteen has 9 letters or more (7.0%), so the vocabulary is not the main barrier; the sentence length is. By book the average runs from about 41 (Book III) to about 59 (Book IV), so no book is easy. Hence C2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 119 285
- words
- 51
- words in an average sentence
- 20-33
- hours of reading
- 1922
- Calpe
Calpe, 1922. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
On the banks of the Tagus the shepherd Elicio loves the shepherdess Galatea, and so does his rival Erastro, while Galatea’s father has plans of his own for her. Around this triangle other lovers pass: Teolinda is searching for her lost Artidoro, the friends Timbrio and Silerio tell how love and friendship tangled them in Italy and across the Mediterranean, and the poet-shepherds Tirsi and Damón sing and give counsel. How the loves turn out is not revealed here.
Compare two places
One sentence, over a hundred words
The whole passage is a single sentence. Find its spine first: Esto cantaba Elicio (“this is what Elicio sang”), and everything else hangs on it. Midway the sentence turns to Galatea and her quality, tan alto y subido entendimiento, que... (“so high and lofty an understanding that...”). Old forms are easy once you know them: trujeron is trajeron, mesmas is mismas, and parecérsela stacks two pronouns after the verb (“to resemble her”). The accent in fué is just the 1922 spelling of fue.
If she were so unlucky...
Teolinda will end her days in solitude si fuese tan corta de ventura que... alguna nueva no supiese: both verbs are in the imperfect subjunctive (“if she were so unlucky as to learn nothing of her beloved”). Demanda here is her quest, the word the chivalric romances use for a search. Fenecer is a bookish verb for “to end”. Ofreciéndole Galatea de enviar uses ofrecer de + infinitive, which today is simply ofrecer + infinitive.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
€1 a month
The first prose sentence of Book I runs to about 125 words, Esto cantaba Elicio, pastor en las riberas del Tajo, con quien Naturaleza se mostró tan liberal cuanto la fortuna y el amor escasos...: translating the whole sentence in Reader shows where the main clause runs under its asides.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Spanish books C1 Earlier Don Quixote El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha Another book by the same author C2
All books at this level
Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not a learner’s abridgement: Miguel de Cervantes’s complete La Galatea, all six books with his dedication to Ascanio Colonna and the prologue Curiosos lectores. The novel first appeared in 1585 in Alcalá de Henares; the reader follows the 1922 Calpe edition (Colección Universal, Madrid), the scan listed on Spanish Wikisource, which keeps forms such as mesmo and trujeron. Prose and verse are kept as printed. The text was taken from the text layer of the scans and cleaned by hand and by script, so a few recognition slips may remain.
Is there an audiobook?
La Galatea has no audiobook on MovaReader: here the book is read on screen. The translation appears when you tap a word, and you will need it most for old forms and bookish words such as trujeron, fenecer or demanda.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. In this book it helps most with the long periods and the verse, for example Esto cantaba Elicio, pastor en las riberas del Tajo, con quien Naturaleza se mostró tan liberal cuanto la fortuna y el amor escasos. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole book takes about 20-33 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. The six books are long, from about 17,000 to 22,000 words each, so plan each one over several evenings.
Where does the text get easier?
Not much, but it is uneven. Book III is the lightest at about 41 words per sentence and Book VI follows at about 44; Books I and II run at 56 and 51, and Books IV and V are the densest at about 59 and 57. About a quarter of the text is verse, where the lines are short but the word order is freer than in prose.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can come back every evening where you left off. Any of the six books also opens from the contents on this page, for example Book IV.