Celestina

The racy and irreverent Spanish tragicomedy that is considered the first European novel-in a spirited new translation

A Spanish Romeo and Juliet, Celestina was published in 1499 and became Spain's first-ever bestseller. Readers thrilled to the salty character of Celestina and her world of prostitutes and black magic even as they mourned the fate of Calisto and Melibea, the young lovers she unites using her wiles as a seller of perfumes and potions. Fernando de Rojas's exhilarating mix of street wit, obscenity, and cultured rhetoric mark Celestina as a masterpiece: an original, explosive, genre-defying work that paved the way for the picaresque novel and for Cervantes.

Fernando de Rojas (c. 1470–1541) was born in La Puebla de Montalbán into a family whose Jewish forbears had been forced to convert to Christianity. He wrote Celestina in his mid-twenties before graduating from the University of Salamanca in 1500. He subsequently lived as a lawyer in Talavera de la Reina, where he died. In 1525 he defended his father-in-law against accusations by the Inquisition.
 
Peter Bush (translator) is an award-winning literary translator. His translations from Spanish include Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo and Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura, and from Catalan, A Not So Perfect Crime by Teresa Solana and The Last Patriarch by Najat El Hachmi.
 
Juan Goytisolo (introduction; 1931­­­–2017) was one of Spain’s most celebrated writers. A bitter opponent of the Franco regime, he found his early novels banned in Fascist Spain. In 1956 he moved to Paris, where he lived until 1996, when his wife, the writer Monique Lange, died; he then moved to Marrakech, Morocco, where he lived for the rest of his life. He championed such writers as Fernando de Rojas, the Archpriest of Hita, and Blanco White, who had been neglected by the Spanish academy. His most outstanding work in English translation includes two volumes of autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, and the trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. In 2014 he was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world.