El estudiante de Salamanca by José de Espronceda: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

It is past midnight in Salamanca, the city “famed in arms and letters” on the river Tormes, the hour when, old stories say, the dead leave their graves. Swords clash and a dying cry rings out; a cloaked man, sword still in hand, crosses the narrow Calle del Ataúd, the Street of the Coffin, lit only by the lamp before an image of Christ. So we meet Don Félix de Montemar: a rich, noble, handsome student, gambler, brawler and blasphemer, who courts women and forgets them the next day.

The second part belongs to Elvira, the innocent girl who believed him. Abandoned, she wanders a moonlit garden at night and, her mind already gone, pulls the petals off flowers, throws them into the river and sings her sorrow. Before dying of love she regains her reason and writes Don Félix a farewell letter: she asks for neither love nor pity, only that he read these lines and forget her forever.

The third part is a short scene written as a play. In a smoky gambling den six men are playing cards when Don Félix arrives and stakes a chain and a lady’s portrait in a jeweled frame. Then a cloaked stranger walks in: Don Diego de Pastrana, Elvira’s brother, back from Flanders to avenge her. Don Félix mocks him and they leave to fight. The fourth and longest part brings Don Félix back to the Street of the Coffin, where a lady veiled in white kneels in prayer before the crucifix.

Espronceda published parts of the poem from 1837 and the complete text in 1840, in his book Poesías. It runs to 1,704 lines in four parts, one of them written as a play. It takes the Don Juan legend, the seducer who defies heaven, and adds motifs from popular tradition: the lover driven mad, the ghostly dance, the vision of one’s own funeral and the woman who turns into a skeleton. It is a peak of Spanish Romanticism, with a rebel hero who, unlike Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio, never repents.

It is still read for its music. Espronceda changes meter from scene to scene, setting lines of barely two syllables beside lines of eleven and twelve. At the start the lines shrink like footsteps fading away (“El ruido / cesó, / un hombre / pasó…”, “The noise / stopped, / a man / passed by…”), and at the end they thin out until they die in a “leve, / breve / son” (“a light, brief sound”). With its mix of terror and mockery and its ending of skulls and corpses, it is perfect reading for All Saints’ and Day of the Dead nights.

José de Espronceda was born in Almendralejo on 25 March 1808 and died in Madrid on 23 May 1842, aged only thirty-four. A radical liberal, he lived in exile in Portugal, England and France, and is regarded as the most representative poet of early Spanish Romanticism.

He wrote songs that generations of Spanish schoolchildren have learned by heart, such as the “Canción del pirata” (“The Pirate’s Song”), and the philosophical poem El diablo mundo (1841), left unfinished, which includes the “Canto a Teresa.” He died of diphtheria two months after taking his seat as a member of parliament.