: ''Aleman is sometimes used to refer to German.'' Mateo Alemán y del Nero (September 15471615?) was a Spanish

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

and writer.

Biography

Alemán was born in

Seville Seville (; es, Sevilla, ) is the capital and largest city of the Spanish autonomous community of Andalusia and the province of Seville. It is situated on the lower reaches of the River Guadalquivir, in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula ...

, Andalucía, where he graduated from the University in 1564. He later studied at

Salamanca Salamanca () is a city in western Spain and is the capital of the Province of Salamanca in the autonomous community of Castile and León. The city lies on several rolling hills by the Tormes River. Its Old City was declared a UNESCO World Herit ...

and Alcalá, and from 1571 to 1588 held a post in the treasury; in 1594 he was arrested on suspicion of malversation, but was speedily released. According to some authors, he was descended from Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism after 1492, and one of his forebears had been burned by the

Inquisition The Inquisition was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy, conducting trials of suspected heretics. Studies of the records have found that the overwhelming majority of sentences consisted of penances, ...

for secretly continuing to practice Judaism. In 1599, he published the first part of ''

Guzmán de Alfarache ''Guzmán de Alfarache'' () is a picaresque novel written by Mateo Alemán and published in two parts: the first in Madrid in 1599 with the title , and the second in 1604, titled '. The works tells the first person adventures of a ''picaro'', a ...

'', a celebrated

picaresque novel The picaresque novel ( Spanish: ''picaresca'', from ''pícaro'', for "rogue" or "rascal") is a genre of prose fiction. It depicts the adventures of a roguish, but "appealing hero", usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corru ...

which passed through no less than sixteen editions in five years; a spurious sequel was issued in 1602, but the authentic continuation did not appear until 1604. In 1571, Alemán married, unhappily, Catalina de Espinosa, and was constantly in money difficulties, being imprisoned for debt at

at the end of 1602. In 1608, Alemán emigrated to America, and is said to have carried on business as a printer in Mexico, where he is assumed to have remained for the rest of his life. His ''Ortografía castellana'' (1609), published in Mexico, contains ingenious and practical proposals for the reform of Spanish spelling. Nothing is recorded of Alemán after 1609, but it is sometimes asserted that he was still living in 1617.

Works

In addition to the works already mentioned, Alemán is the author of a life (1604) of St. Anthony of Padua, and versions of two odes of Horace bear witness to his taste and metrical accomplishment. His most famous work, however, is ''

'', which was translated into French in 1600, into Italian in 1606, into German in 1615, into English in 1622 by

James Mabbe James Mabbe or Mab (1572–1642) was an English scholar, translator, and poet, and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was involved in translations from Spanish, notably of the Picaresque novel by Mateo Alemán, ''Guzmán de Alfarache'', in ...

, and into

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

in 1623.

References

;Attribution * Endnotes: ** **

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Aleman, Mateo Spanish novelists Baroque writers Spanish Baroque people Spanish Golden Age 1547 births 1610s deaths Writers from Seville Spanish people of Italian descent Spanish people of Jewish descent University of Alcalá alumni University of Salamanca alumni University of Seville alumni People imprisoned for debt Spanish male dramatists and playwrights Spanish male novelists 16th-century Spanish dramatists and playwrights 16th-century Spanish novelists 16th-century Spanish writers 16th-century male writers 17th-century Spanish dramatists and playwrights 17th-century Spanish novelists