I. El sueño del Juicio Final
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Satirical dreams of Golden Age Spain, B2
Los Sueños Sueños y discursos
Francisco de Quevedo, 1916
Francisco de Quevedo’s Sueños y discursos: the five satirical dreams in full, not an adaptation, from Julio Cejador’s 1916-17 edition. In the catalog it is B2: about 43,600 words and 21 words per sentence on average. Five pieces, from the Last Judgment to a vision of Death; the longest are the Sueño del infierno and the Sueño de la muerte, about 13,800 and 14,700 words.
- B2
- 43 580 words
- 7-12 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the sentences of about 21 words are manageable, but the point of the satire hides in puns, lists and period forms (della, dióme, vuecelencia), and the trades and offices of 17th-century Spain (escribano, alguacil, corchete) have to be looked up as you go.
B1B2
This text
You can manage it at B2: the dreams are told in a clear first person, with short dialogues and long lists of types of sinners, and you will translate single words as the jokes and the old forms come up. The longest pieces, the third and the fifth, are better read a few pages at a time.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the sentences and old forms read freely, and you can enjoy the wordplay itself; what still slows you down is the world around it: the Latin verses and the references to people, offices and customs of Quevedo’s Spain.
Start readingThe average sentence has 21 words, and 7.3% of the words have 9 letters or more, about one in fourteen. That is longer than The Three-Cornered Hat (18) and just under El Buscón (23), Quevedo’s own novel, but well below Lazarillo de Tormes in the 1554 edition (30), and far from the 9.9% of long words where the catalog’s C1 begins. The five pieces are even: about 24 words per sentence in the first (the two prefaces included), 22 in the second, 21 in the third and the fourth, 19 in the last. The work comes from elsewhere than sentence length. It is conceptismo, Quevedo’s way of packing a joke into an antithesis or a double meaning (“parece entendido y es mentecato”: he seems learned and is a fool), and it is 17th-century Spanish: della and dél for “of her” and “of him”, dióme and admiróme with the pronoun after the verb, vuecelencia for “Your Excellency”, trades that no longer exist (escribano, alguacil, corchete), and Latin verses quoted in the middle of the page. Hence B2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 43 580
- words
- 21
- words in an average sentence
- 7-12
- hours of reading
- 1916
- Ediciones de La Lectura
Ediciones de La Lectura, 1916. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
A narrator falls asleep five times and walks through five dreams about a Spain turned inside out. In the first the trumpet of the Last Judgment sounds and the dead rise from their graves, hurrying to hide from their own eyes, tongues and hands: notaries, doctors, judges and innkeepers each come before the tribunal. In the second he meets a licentiate who is trying to drive a demon out of a man, and the demon turns out to know more about the officers of the law than anyone. In the third the road splits into a narrow way of virtue and a broad road to hell, which fills with every trade and rank. In the fourth an old man called Desengaño (Disillusion) takes him down the main street of the world, named Hipocresía, to see a funeral and its mourners from outside and from inside. The fifth, the Sueño de la muerte, begins with the narrator brooding on death in his confinement and slips into a dream in which the dead speak more truth than the living. How the dreams end, and what the narrator makes of them, is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Sueños y discursos
IV. El mundo por de dentro
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Choose an underlined word.
Pronouns after the verb, and della
Dióme risa and admiróme la Providencia put the pronoun after the verb, as bookish Spanish did in the 17th century: dióme is me dio and admiróme is me admiró. Della is simply de ella (“of it”, here “of the soul”), and desta, dél and dellos work the same way. Once you see the pattern, these forms stop looking like new words. Then notice the joke: the notary wants to say the soul is not his, “por descartarse della”, to get rid of it like a bad card.
Seems and is: how the joke is built
Quevedo’s satire runs on a contrast between parecer (to seem) and ser (to be): “parece entendido y es mentecato”. Each short portrait states the mask and then pulls it off in the last clause, often with a verb pair or a list. When a sentence is long, find the parece and the es first, and the rest of the list falls into place. This is conceptismo: a joke packed into one turn of the phrase.
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 Juicio Final, “Riérame si no me lastimara a otra parte el afán con que una gran chusma de escribanos andaban huyendo de sus orejas” (I would laugh if the eagerness of a great rabble of notaries running from their own ears did not grieve me elsewhere) hides a conditional in an old verb form: translating the whole sentence in Reader keeps the joke from getting lost.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Spanish books B1 Earlier El Buscón Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado don Pablos Another book by the same author B2
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: the five sueños in full, with Quevedo’s own dedications and prefaces, in the order of the traditional five: the Juicio Final, the Alguacil endemoniado, the Infierno, the Mundo por de dentro and the Sueño de la muerte. They were written between 1606 and 1622 and first printed together in Barcelona in 1627 as Sueños y discursos. The reader follows Julio Cejador’s edition for the Clásicos Castellanos series (Ediciones de La Lectura, Madrid, 1916, with the Mundo por de dentro from the second volume, 1917); the editor’s introduction and notes are left out and the note numbers removed.
Is there an audiobook?
Los Sueños 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 period and trade words such as barajados, aciago or envainadas.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. Here it helps most in long sentences full of lists and asides, such as “Riérame si no me lastimara a otra parte el afán con que una gran chusma de escribanos andaban huyendo de sus orejas”. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole book takes about 7-12 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. The five chapters run from about 4,100 words (the second) to about 14,700 (the last), so the longer ones are best read a few pages at a time.
Where does the text get easier?
It stays fairly even: sentences average about 24 words in the first chapter (the two prefaces included), 22 in the second, 21 in the third and the fourth, and 19 in the last, the Sueño de la muerte. The verse and Latin quotations in the first and last chapters are short and can be skipped without losing the thread.
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 where you left off. Any of the five chapters also opens from the contents on this page, for example chapter IV, the Mundo por de dentro.