Lazarillo of Tormes | Page 7

in its attacks: men are avaricious, materialistic unscrupulous infamous--and these vices are sometimes only very loosely connected with the church. But Luna wants us to know definitely that the church is like this, so his satire of the church is blunt and devastating. The Inquisition, he tells us plainly, is corrupt, brutal, and feared throughout all of Spain. Priests and friars are always anxious to accept a free meal, they have mistresses, and they are less principled than thieves. Lawyers and the entire judicial system are corrupt. The Spaniards, Luna tells us from his position of exile in Paris, are too proud to work, and they will become beggars rather than perform any sort of-manual labor. Lazaro himself is held up to us as a "mirror of Spanish sobriety." Apparently Luna's anger about having to leave Spain had no opportunity to mellow before he finished his novel.
Luna's Second Part of Lazarillo of Tormes is not the "First Part." But even so, it has its merit. Luna liked to tell stories, and he was good at it. Some scenes are witty and highly entertaining. When Lazaro meets his old friends, the bawd and the "maiden," at an inn, the action is hardly dull. The "quarter of kid" becomes the center of attraction from the time it appears on Lazaro's plate until he falls and ejects it from his throat, and it is used skillfully and humorously to tell us a great deal about each of the characters present.
Another scene worth calling to the reader's special attention is the chapter in which a feast is held that erupts into a brawl, after which the local constabulary arrives. Luna's account is a very close predecessor of the modern farce. Many of the elements seem to be present: a lack of reverence, a situation used for comic effects, the chase through many rooms to find the guests, the beatings that the constable's men are given by the pursued, being "breaded" in flour, "fried" in oil, and left out on the street where they run away, ashamed to be seen. It is as though we are catching a glimpse of the Keystone Cops, seventeenth-century style. And the variations from seventeenth to twentieth century do not appear to amount to a great deal.
University of California at Los Angeles December 1972 ROBERT S. RUDDER
Translator's Note
My translation of the first Lazarillo follows Foulche Delbosc's edition, which attempts to restore the editio princeps but does not include the interpolations of the Alcala de Henares edition. The translation of the first chapter of the anonymous sequel of 1555 follows at the end of the first part because it serves as a bridge between the first novel and Luna's sequel. For Juan de Luna's sequel, the modern edition by Elmer Richard Sims, more faithful to the manuscript than any other edition, has been utilized.
A word of thanks is due to Professor Julio Rodriguez Puertolas, whose own work was so often interrupted by questions from the outer sanctum, and who nevertheless bore through it all with good humor, and was very helpful in clearing up certain mysteries in the text.
The seventy-three drawings [not included in this electronic text] were prepared by Leonard Bramer, a Dutch painter who was born in 1596 and died in 1674. Living most of his life in Delft, he is best known for his drawings and for his illustrations of Ovid's writings and of other works of literature. The original drawings are in the keeping of the Graphische Sammlung in Munich.
R.S.R.

THE LIFE OF LAZARILLO OF TORMES, HIS FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES AS TOLD BY HIMSELF
Prologue
I think it is good that such remarkable things as these, which may never have been heard of or seen before, should come to the attention of many people instead of being buried away in the tomb of oblivion. Because it might turn out that someone who reads about them will like what he reads, and even people who only glance lightly through this book may be entertained.
Pliny says along these lines that there is no book--no matter how bad it is--that doesn't have something good in it. And this is all the more true since all tastes are not the same: what one man won't even touch, another will be dying to get. And so there are things that some people don't care for, while others do. The point is that nothing should be destroyed or thrown away unless it is really detestable; instead, it should be shown to everybody, especially if it won't do any harm and they might get some good out of it.
If this weren't so, there would be very few people who would write for only one reader, because writing is hardly a simple thing to do. But since writers go ahead with it, they want to be rewarded, not