Read Azul... in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Azul... by Rubén Darío was first published in 1888. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under fantasy.

A greedy king, a deaf satyr, a ruby born in a laboratory. Welcome to Rubén Darío's world of blue.

Published in Valparaíso in 1888, when Darío was just twenty-one, Blue... is a slim book that changed writing in Spanish. This edition gathers its prose tales and sketches. In "El rey burgués" a starving poet is put to work cranking a music box in a rich king's garden. In "El velo de la reina Mab" the fairy queen visits four penniless artists in their attic. In "El fardo" an old dockworker remembers the son he lost.

Ancient Greece, fairy tale, Paris salons and the streets of Chile sit side by side, and the book opens with the famous letters in which the Spanish novelist Juan Valera praises the young Nicaraguan's French-flavoured elegance.

Lush, musical and full of colour, these pages launched modernismo, the movement that renewed literature across Latin America and Spain.

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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Spanish book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.