Spanish · Advanced
Read Historia de la vida del Buscón in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: The Swindler
Francisco de Quevedo · 1626
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About the book
Historia de la vida del Buscón by Francisco de Quevedo was first published in 1626. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 42,600 words.
Born to a thief and a witch, he has one dream: to become a gentleman.
Pablos of Segovia has little going for him. His father is a barber who picks his customers' pockets, his mother is rumoured to be a witch, and his uncle is the town executioner. Determined to rise above it all, he becomes the servant of Don Diego Coronel, a rich boy, and follows him first to the boarding house of the miserly Licenciado Cabra, where the pupils nearly starve, and then to the university of Alcalá, where cruel pranks await the newcomer.
Pablos soon learns that in this world only the sly survive, and he sets out to cheat, steal and bluff his way to the top.
Francisco de Quevedo's savage, hilarious The Swindler is a masterpiece of the Spanish picaresque, famous for its dazzling wordplay and its unforgettable portrait of hunger in Golden Age Spain.
- Author
- Francisco de Quevedo
- First published
- 1626
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 42,600 words
How it opens
Yo, señora, soy de Segovia. Mi padre se llamó Clemente Pablo, natural del mismo pueblo; Dios le tenga en el cielo. Fue, tal como todos dicen, de oficio barbero, aunque eran tan altos sus pensamientos que se corría de que le llamasen así, diciendo que él era tundidor de mejillas y sastre de barbas. Dicen que era de muy buena cepa, y según él bebía es cosa para creer. Estuvo casado con Aldonza de San Pedro, hija de Diego de San Juan y nieta de Andrés de San Cristóbal.
Reading Historia de la vida del Buscón 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.
