La celestina

La emoción, la belleza, el sentido trágico y al mismo tiempo grotesco de las grandes pasiones humanas hallan en La Celestina una de sus más intensas expresiones. El «loco amor» de Calisto y Melibea, enhebrado con los hilos de una «bruja», Celestina, culmina fatalmente con la muerte de ambos. Fernando de Rojas es capaz de contarnos esta historia con una habilidad insospechada, que ata al lector a un texto poderoso y magnífico y que obra el milagro de llenar de pasión la lectura misma.

Esta edición incluye una introducción que contextualiza la obra, un aparato de notas, una cronología y una bibliografía esencial, así como también varias propuestas de discusión y debate en torno a la lectura. Está al cuidado de Santiago López-Ríos, profesor de literatura española de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.


English Description

In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed west and stumbled on an unknown continent that came to be called America. Seven years later a book was published in Spain that instantly became a national best seller, running through more than one hundred editions in the following century. It was so popular that, as one well-respected scholar has said: There could have been no one who was capable of reading who did not read La Celestina.” It is amusing to imagine that Columbus and his men, after returning to their homeland, very likely read this book or attended public readings of it. And that likelihood only increases when we remember that the explorers of the western coast of this New World were avid readers of other Spanish works, and named a large body of land after a fictional region found in another novel of that same time, calling it California.”
La Celestina, published anonymously in 1499, in later editions revealed the author as one Fernando de Rojas, a descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity and student at the University of Salamanca, who tells us that he found” the first act and completed the rest of it during fifteen days of vacation from his studies. It first appeared with sixteen acts, and later with twenty-one, the additional acts being written at the request of the author’s friends. Rojas finished his studies and became a lawyer in the nearby town of Talavera. He married, had several children, eventually became Lord Mayor of the town, and died in 1541. To our knowledge he never wrote another work.
Written during the rich flowering of the Renaissance, La Celestina contains not only references to figures of Greek and Roman culture, but also shows the influence of courtly literature. Alongside this, and towering over this, is a plot that carries with it tragedy of the type found later in Romeo and Juliet, along with ribald comedy. There is, for instance, the hilarious scene where the shy servant, Parmeno, addresses the prostitute, Areusa, with courtly phrases: My lady, God keep your charming presence.” And she replies in the same tone: Gentle Sir, I bid you welcome.” All this just before he hops into bed with her. Later the stable-boy, Sosia, acts much the same way with this same prostitute that he sees as a very beautiful woman. He describes his meeting with her: bless me but I was ready to give it to her two or three times. Except that I was overcome with shame When she moved around, she gave off a smell of musk perfume, while I stank of the manure I had on my shoes.” Centurio, the cowardly braggart, explains to the girls the entire repertoire” of swordplay (seven hundred and seventy types of death”) that he could use to take revenge on Calisto, and as soon as they leave, he finds a way to do nothing at all. And then come the tragic elements that begin with the murder of Celestina, the beheading of Calisto’s servants, the accidental death of Calisto, and Melibea’s speech to her father before she leaps to her own death on the stones below.