Spanish · Intermediate
Read El espejo de la muerte in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: The Mirror of Death
Miguel de Unamuno · 1913
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
El espejo de la muerte by Miguel de Unamuno was first published in 1913. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 43,500 words.
A girl who watches herself fade in the mirror. Two old men who tear the world apart every night. A soul too meek to get into heaven.
In Miguel de Unamuno's stories, ordinary people — a young woman wasting away in springtime, a bachelor who lives only for hunting and cards — suddenly come face to face with the great questions of love, death, faith and who we really are.
In the title story, Matilde grows thinner by the week while her fiancé drifts away and everyone insists it is nothing. In "The Scissors", two retired men meet nightly in a café to vent their bile, one secretly loathing his friend's dog, the other his friend's daughter. And in "Juan Manso", a man so mild he never took sides politely gives up his place in the queue for heaven — again and again, for centuries.
First collected in 1913, The Mirror of Death offers short, sharp and bittersweetly funny tales: perfect bite-size reading from one of Spain's great thinkers.
- Author
- Miguel de Unamuno
- First published
- 1913
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 43,500 words
How it opens
¡La pobre! Era una languidez traidora que iba ganándole el cuerpo todo de día en día. Ni le quedaban ganas para cosa alguna: vivía sin apetito de vivir y casi por deber. Por las mañanas costábale levantarse de la cama, ¡a ella, que se había levantado siempre para poder ver salir el sol! Las faenas de la casa le eran más gravosas cada vez.
Reading El espejo de la muerte 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.
