I. La jitanilla
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Twelve Golden Age novellas for C2
Exemplary Novels Novelas ejemplares
Miguel de Cervantes, 1883
Miguel de Cervantes’s collection of twelve novellas, first published in 1613, complete and not an adaptation, with the author’s own prologue. In the catalog it is C2: about 181,400 words and 49 words per sentence on average. 13 chapters, from La jitanilla to the Coloquio de los perros; the text is the 1883 edition printed in Leipzig by F. A. Brockhaus, with the old spelling of that edition (jitana, nacion, á).
- C2
- 181 359 words
- 30-50 hours
Will this text hold?
C1
Earlier
At C1 sentences of about 49 words, up to 88 in El amante liberal, old forms and the spelling of the 1883 edition (jitana, nacion, á) will slow you down.
C1C2
This text
You can manage it at C2: read one novella at a time, starting with the lightest, La señora Cornelia or La ilustre fregona, and translate the long periods whole.
Check this passageThe average sentence has 49 words, the longest among the catalog’s Spanish books: Don Quixote has 43, Paradise Lost 38, and the C1 books 17 to 26. Only one word in fourteen has 9 letters or more, as in Don Quixote, so the obstacle is not vocabulary but the long periods, with clauses chained by colons and semicolons and a word order modelled on Latin. The novellas differ: La señora Cornelia runs at about 31 words per sentence and La ilustre fregona at about 39, while El amante liberal reaches about 88. The old spelling of the edition adds work too. Hence C2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 181 359
- words
- 49
- words in an average sentence
- 30-50
- hours of reading
- 1883
- F. A. Brockhaus
F. A. Brockhaus, 1883. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
Twelve stories of love, honour, deceit and wit, which Cervantes calls exemplary because each can teach something. In La jitanilla a young nobleman joins a band of gypsies for the sake of the beautiful dancer Preciosa; in Rinconete y Cortadillo two young runaways fall in with the thieves’ brotherhood of Seville; El licenciado Vidriera follows a student who, after a potion, believes he is made of glass and answers everyone with sharp wit; in El celoso extremeño an old man locks his young wife away; in the Coloquio de los perros two dogs of a Valladolid hospital gain speech for one night and tell the lives of their masters. How the stories end is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Novelas ejemplares
III. Rinconete y Cortadillo
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Choose an underlined word.
Reading the old spelling
This 1883 edition writes jitana for today’s gitana, nacion and podia without accents, and á for the preposition a. Corrientes y molientes á todo ruedo is a set phrase meaning “out-and-out, thoroughgoing”. Jubilada, “retired”, is a joke: the old woman is a veteran in “the science of Caco”, the mythical thief. In the long first sentence find the verbs first (nacen, críanse, estudian, salen), then the rest falls into place.
Vuesa merced and the speech verbs
Vuesa merced is the old polite “you”, a form of vuestra merced, the ancestor of usted. The two ragged boys address each other with grand titles (señor gentilhombre, señor caballero), which is the joke. Watch where the speech verb sits: in “Mi tierra, señor caballero, respondió el preguntado, no la sé” it cuts into the sentence, so read the line without it. Frontero means “facing”.
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
In the opening sentence of La jitanilla, “Parece que los jitanos y jitanas solamente nacieron en el mundo para ser ladrones: nacen de padres ladrones, críanse con ladrones, estudian para ladrones, y finalmente salen con ser ladrones corrientes y molientes á todo ruedo”, translating the whole sentence in Reader shows how the clauses pile up toward the verdict.
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 complete collection, not an abridgement: Cervantes’s prologue and all twelve novellas, from La jitanilla to the Coloquio de los perros, first published in 1613. The text comes from Project Gutenberg, the 1883 edition printed in Leipzig by F. A. Brockhaus for the Colección de Autores Españoles. It keeps the old spelling of that edition (jitana, nacion, á); the dedication and the editor’s notes are left out.
Is there an audiobook?
Exemplary Novels has no audiobook on MovaReader: here the text is read on screen. The translation appears when you tap a word, and you will need it most for old words such as embelecos or frontero and for the old spelling.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most in the long periods, such as the first sentence of La jitanilla: “Parece que los jitanos y jitanas solamente nacieron en el mundo para ser ladrones…”; the whole book averages 49 words per sentence. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole book takes about 30-50 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. The twelve novellas run from about 5,000 words (El casamiento engañoso) to over 23,000 (La jitanilla and the Coloquio de los perros), so one novella makes an evening or two.
Where does the text get easier?
The novellas differ more than the parts of one novel. La señora Cornelia is the lightest, at about 31 words per sentence, then La ilustre fregona at about 39 and El licenciado Vidriera at about 42; El amante liberal is the hardest, at about 88. A good start is La señora Cornelia or La ilustre fregona.
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 to the book every evening where you left off. Each of the 13 chapters, the prologue and the twelve novellas, also opens from the contents on this page, for example La ilustre fregona.