Spanish · Advanced
Read El conde Lucanor in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: Count Lucanor
Don Juan Manuel · 1335
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About the book
El conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel was first published in 1335. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under fantasy and historical fiction. It runs to about 78,600 words.
A count with a problem. A counsellor with a story. Medieval wisdom that still rings true.
Whenever Count Lucanor faces a dilemma (whom to trust, how to handle a rival, whether to accept a tempting offer) he turns to his wise counsellor Patronio. Patronio never answers directly. Instead he tells a story, and from it the count, and the reader, draw a lesson, summed up at the end in a couple of rhyming lines.
The tales range from Moorish kings to cunning foxes and from proud noblemen to clever tricksters. Among the most famous are the story of Don Illán, the magician of Toledo, who puts an ambitious dean to the test; the young man who tames a fierce bride; and the king fooled by weavers selling invisible cloth, the ancestor of "The Emperor's New Clothes".
Written by the Castilian prince Don Juan Manuel around 1335, Count Lucanor is a jewel of medieval European prose and a staple of Spanish schools.
- Author
- Don Juan Manuel
- First published
- 1335
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Fantasy, Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 78,600 words
How it opens
«Estando el año pasado en la corte de su Magestad, vino a mis manos este libro del conde Lucanor, que por ser de autor tan ilustre me aficioné a leerle, y comencé luego a hallar en él un gusto de la propriedad y antigüedad de la lengua castellana, que me obligó a comunicarlo a los ingenios curiosos y aficionados a las cosas de su nación; porque juzgaba ser cosa indigna que un Príncipe tan discreto y cortesano y de la mejor lengua de aquel tiempo, anduviese en tan pocas manos.»
Reading El conde Lucanor in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Spanish book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
