Spanish · Intermediate
Read Aura o las violetas in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: Aura, or the Violets
José María Vargas Vila · 1887
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Aura o las violetas by José María Vargas Vila was first published in 1887. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 17,900 words.
A bunch of violets. A first love at fourteen. A wound that never quite heals.
On his widowed mother's estate, among giant forests and tropical valleys, the narrator grows up beside Aura, a pale, blue-eyed girl who shares his games, his mother's blessings and, as they grow older, his heart. On the eve of his departure for the capital, where he must begin his studies, they meet one last time in a grove the peasants call "The Violets", and she gives him a posy tied with strands of her hair.
After three lonely years at boarding school he comes home for the holidays, counting the hours. But Aura avoids his eyes, leaves his letters unanswered, and weeps in secret over a note that is not from him.
Published in 1887, Aura, or the Violets made the scandalous Colombian writer José María Vargas Vila a bestselling name across Latin America and was filmed in Colombia in 1924. Lush, melancholy and soaked in feeling, it is Romantic heartbreak in its purest form.
- Author
- José María Vargas Vila
- First published
- 1887
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance
- Length
- About 17,900 words
How it opens
Vosotras sabéis bien por qué publico estas páginas, vosotras fuisteis testigos de la insistencia con que la madre adorada, que acaba de abandonarnos, me suplicaba, en su correspondencia, me solicitaba, en su correspondencia, que las publicara, pues sólo conocía fragmentos de ellas. Listas estaban ya, para ver la luz, accediendo a su deseo, cuando el destino acaba de arrebatárnolas para siempre, sin que pudiera yo, ausente de la Patria, ni recibir su último suspiro, ni estrecharla por última vez contra mi corazón! Ya sus ojos no se posarán en estas líneas, ni sus labios repetirán las palabras en ellas escritas.
Reading Aura o las violetas in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Spanish feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
