El diablo cojuelo

A long time before Luis Vélez de Guevara wrote El Diablo Cojuelo, his sly and disbelieving character was already all over the world. He was alive in the Castillian folk culture, as well as in sorceresses' love spells. He had been “the first of those who arose in the rebellion in Heaven”; since the rest fell on top of him, he ended up in a bad way, as his name Cojuelo —limping— implies. Vélez de Guevara presents us with a game of broken mirrors after an initial warning — he is not the artificer of the text, but the translator of “a novel from another life”. Needless to say, that “other life” was and —almost four hundred years after— is this very one.

Jesús Gómez Gutiérrez / Aitana Galán