Spanish · Beginner
Read El capitán Veneno in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: Captain Poison
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón · 1881
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
El capitán Veneno by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was first published in 1881. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked beginner and filed under romance. It runs to about 21,300 words.
He hates women, children and kindness. They are about to nurse him back to health.
Madrid, 1848. Shots ring out in the streets as rioters clash with government troops. In the middle of the chaos, a furious army captain is wounded right outside the door of a quiet widow and her daughter, Angustias, who carry him inside and put him to bed.
They soon learn why his comrades call him "Captain Poison". Jorge de Córdoba is gruff, rude and proud, a sworn bachelor who insults his nurses, curses his doctors and declares he wants nothing to do with marriage or tenderness. But Angustias is calm, clever and not in the least afraid of him, and the captain finds his temper increasingly hard to keep up.
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's Captain Poison (1881) is a short, sparkling romantic comedy full of witty dialogue and warm humour. For generations it has been a favourite first novel for learners of Spanish.
- Author
- Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
- First published
- 1881
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Romance
- Length
- About 21,300 words
How it opens
La tarde del 26 de marzo de 1848 hubo tiros y cuchilladas en Madrid entre un puñado de paisanos que, al expirar, lanzaban el hasta entonces extranjero grito de ¡Viva la República!, y el Ejército de la Monarquía española (traído o creado por Ataúlfo, reconstituido por don Pelayo y reformado por Trastamara), de que a la sazón era jefe visible, en nombre de doña Isabel II, el Presidente del Consejo de Ministros y Ministro de la Guerra, don Ramón María Narváez.
Reading El capitán Veneno 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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Spanish and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
