Sueños y discursos by Francisco de Quevedo: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

There are five pieces, each with its own dedication or mocking preface to the reader. In “El sueño del Juicio Final” (The Dream of the Last Judgement) the narrator falls asleep reading about the end of the world and sees a youth blow the trumpet: the dead climb out of their graves looking for their arms and eyes, and before God’s throne come a miser who reads the Commandments his own way, a pie-maker accused of passing off cat as hare and, at last, Judas, Muhammad and Luther.

In “El alguacil endemoniado” (The Possessed Constable) the narrator walks into the sacristy of San Pedro, where Licentiate Calabrés, a hypocritical cleric, is exorcising a constable. The devil objects: “No es hombre, sino alguacil” (“He is not a man, he is a constable”), and explains that devils live in constables “por fuerza y de mala gana” (“by force and unwillingly”); then he describes how Hell lodges poets, lovers, kings and judges. In the “Sueño del infierno” (Dream of Hell) the narrator finds two paths: the right one narrow and full of thistles, the left one broad, with coaches, parties and inns at every step. He takes the second and enters Hell “por una puerta como de ratonera, fácil de entrar y imposible de salir” (“through a door like a mousetrap, easy to get in and impossible to get out”).

“El mundo por de dentro” (The World from Inside) changes the scene: an old man with venerable white hair and clothes in tatters, Disillusion, leads the narrator to the world’s main street, called Hypocrisy, and shows him what lies behind a funeral, a widow’s weeping and a beautiful woman. In the “Sueño de la muerte” (Dream of Death), dated from prison, Death herself, young on one side and old on the other, takes the living narrator to visit the dead, who complain about the sayings the living hang on them: Juan de la Encina, the King Who Went Mad, Pero Grullo, the duenna Quintañona or the soul of Garibay.

Quevedo wrote the dreams over many years: the letters and dedications attached to them are dated 1608, 1612 and 1622, and the book was printed in Barcelona in 1627. The censors had stopped him publishing the first ones in 1610. It is Baroque prose: conceptist wordplay, allegory and an extraordinarily rich vocabulary, all aimed at satirizing every trade and rank of Spanish society in his day.

It is still read for its ferocious humour: the tailor who asks “¿Qué pude hurtar yo, si andaba siempre muriéndome de hambre?” (“What could I have stolen, if I was always starving to death?”), the poets damned because of their rhymes, the petty noble boasting of his patent of nobility. Beside the laughter runs a serious morality about worldly honour, hypocrisy and death, because “ningún hombre muere de repente” (“no man dies suddenly”). Readers should know that his mockery also extends to races, nationalities and physical defects, which critics put down to Quevedo’s own obsessions.

Francisco de Quevedo was born in Madrid on 14 September 1580 and died in Villanueva de los Infantes on 8 September 1645. A poet, prose writer and politician of the Spanish Golden Age, master of conceptismo and rival of Luis de Góngora, he also wrote the picaresque novel La vida del Buscón (The Swindler).

He was a knight of the Order of Santiago and suffered several banishments and imprisonments; the last, in the monastery of San Marcos in León, lasted until 1643.