Lazarillo de Tormes
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Title page of the 1554 edition |
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities is a Spanish
novel, published anonymously, 1554, in
Alcalá de Henares in Spain, and, in 1557, in
Antwerp, Flanders, then under Spanish rule.
Besides its importance in the Spanish literature of the
Golden Centuries,
Lazarillo de Tormes is credited with founding a literary genre, the
picaresque novel, so called from Spanish
pícaro meaning "
rogue" or "rascal". In these novels, the adventures of the pícaro expose injustice while amusing the reader. This extensive genre includes
Tom Jones by
Henry Fielding and
Huckleberry Finn by
Mark Twain, and shows its influence in
twentieth century novels, dramas, and films featuring the "
anti-hero".
Lazarillo de Tormes was banned by the Spanish Crown and included in the
Index of Forbidden Books of the
Spanish Inquisition; this was at least in part due to the book's anti-clerical flavour. In 1573, the Crown allowed circulation of a version which omitted Chapters 4 and 5 and assorted paragraphs from other parts of the book. (A complete version did not appear in Spain until the
Nineteenth Century.) It was the Antwerp version that circulated throughout Europe, in French translation (1560), in English translation (1576), in Dutch translation (1579) after Flanders went under Dutch rule (1578), in German translation (1617), in Italian translation (1622).
The
Sixteenth Century Toledo
town crier, Lázaro, tells the story of his rising from poverty. His mother, widow of a Spanish soldier and common-law wife of a Negro thief, apprenticed Lazarillo (in Chapter 1) to a wily blind beggar, the first of his many masters, described (after a
Prólogo) in seven chapters (
tractados) united only by the adventures of a determined, resourceful boy. Struggling to survive when the poor must try to serve their purported betters, Lazaro succeeds in marrying the mistress of a local churchman, who accepts the cover of a
Ménage à trois.
Lazarillo introduced the picaresque device of delineating various professions and levels of society. A young boy or young man or woman describing masters or "betters" ingenuously presented realistic details. But Lazarillo spoke of "the blind man," "the squire," "the
pardoner," presenting these characters as types. Significantly, the only names of characters in this book are those of Lazarillo, his mother (Antona Pérez), his father (Tome Gonzáles), and his stepfather (El Zayde), members of his family.
Table of contents "of His Fortunes and Adversities":#Prólogo#Tractado 1: childhood and apprenticeship to a blind man.#Tractado 2: serving a priest.#Tractado 3: serving a squire.#Tractado 4: serving a friar.#Tractado 5: serving a pardoner.#Tractado 6: serving a teacher.#Tractado 7: serving a bailiff.
Primary objections to
Lazarillo were to its vivid and realistic descriptions of the world of the pauper and the petty thief. This was in contrast to the superhuman events of
chivalric novels such as the classic from the previous century,
Amadís de Gaula.
Such objections to characters not being "high-born" continued to be made in the literature of other countries for centuries. It resulted in censorship of novels by
Pierre Beaumarchais, one of which was used for the operatic libretto of
The Marriage of Figaro by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And the 1767 premiére of the German drama,
Minna von Barnhelm, by
Gotthold Lessing as well as the 1830 premiére of the French drama,
Ernani, by
Victor Hugo caused riots simply because these dramas featured middle-class characters, not nobles or religious figures.
The name
Lazarillo is the diminutive of the Spanish name
Lázaro, after the
Lazarus in the
New Testament who was resurrected from the dead by Jesus. The
de Tormes comes from the river
Tormes. In the narrative, Lazarillo explains that his father ran a mill on the river where he was literally born on the river. The Tormes runs through Lazarillo's home town,
Salamanca, a Castilian university city. There is an old mill on the river Tormes and there is a statue of Lazarillo and the blind man next to the Roman bridge (or puente romano) of the city. Because of Lazarillo's first adventures, the Spanish word
lazarillo has taken the meaning of "guide", as to a
blind person, and in Spain a
seeing-eye dog is called a
perro lazarillo.
In contrast to the fancifully poetic language devoted to fantastic and supernatural events about unbelievable creatures and chivalric knights, the realistic prose of
Lazarillo described suppliants purchasing salvation from the Church to avoid hell, servants forced to die with masters on the battlefield (as Lazarillo's father did), thousands of refugees wandering from town to town, poor beggars flogged out by whips because of the lack of food. The anonymous author included many popular sayings and ironically interpreted popular stories.
The Prologue with Lazaro's extensive protest against injustice is addressed to a high-level cleric, and four of his seven masters in the novel served the church.
Lazarillo attacked the appearance of the church and its hypocrisy, though not its essential beliefs, a balance not often present in picaresque novels that followed.
The work is a masterpiece for its internal artistic unity. For example, as Lázaro's masters rise up the social scale (from beggar to priest to nobleman) so their ability to feed him diminishes; Lázaro leaves his first master, is thrown out by the second and is abandoned by the third.
The work is riotously funny, often relying upon slapstick humour (such as the young Lázaro leading his blind master to jump against a stone column, in revenge for his master banging his young servant's head against a stone statue); some of its funniest episodes are apparently based upon traditional material. But there is a deeper, more unsettling humour and irony here. Nothing is what it seems in this book: the blind beggar's public prayers are a sham and the nobleman's nobility is pure facade; and at the end of the book, Lázaro professes to have reached the pinnacle of success, but is little more than a cuckold living off the immoral earnings of his wife.
Besides creating a new genre,
Lazarillo de Tormes was critically innovative in world literature in several aspects:#Long before the
Emile (
Jean-Jacques Rousseau) or
Oliver Twist (
Charles Dickens) or
Huckleberry Finn the anonymous author of
Lazarillo treated a boy as a boy, not a small adult.#Long before
Moll Flanders (
Daniel Defoe),
Lazarillo describes the domestic and working life of a poor woman, wife, mother, climaxing in the flogging of Lazarillo's mother through the streets of the town after her black husband Zayde is hung as a thief.#Long before modern treatment of "persons of color", this author treats sympathetically the pleasures and pains of an interracial family in his descriptions of life with his black stepfather and
negrito half-brother.
The identity of the anonymous author of
Lazarillo has been a puzzle for nearly four hundred years.
In 1555, only a year after the first edition of the book, a sequel by an another anonymous author was attached to the original Lazarillo in an edition printed in
Amberes, Spain. This sequel is known as
El Lazarilo de Amberes. Lazaro leaves his wife and child with the priest, in
Toledo, and joins the Spaniard army in their campaign against the Moors. The ship carrying the soldiers goes down, but before his boat sinks Lazaro drinks as much wine as he can. His body remains so full of wine that there is no place for the water to enter him, and by that means he survives under the sea. Threatened by the
tuna fish there, Lazaro prays for mercy and is eventually metamorphosized into a tuna fish himself. Most of the book tells about how Lazaro struggles to find his place in the tuna fish society.
In 1620, another sequel by
Juan de Luna appeared in Paris. In the prologue, the narrator (not Lazaro himself but someone who claims to have a copy of Lazaro´s writings) tells the reader that he was moved to publish the second part of Lazaro´s adventures after hearing about a book which, he alleges, had falsely told of Lazaro being transformed into a tuna fish (this is obviously a disparaging reference to
Lazarillo de Amberes).
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Online copy with side by side Spanish and English translations.
