Read Juvenilia in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Juvenilia by Miguel Cané was first published in 1884. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under young adult. It runs to about 82,500 words.

Icy cloisters, dreadful soup and The Three Musketeers read by lamplight: a schoolboy's life in 1860s Buenos Aires.

Miguel Cané was still a grieving boy when, right after his father's funeral, he asked to be sent as a boarder to the brand-new Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, housed in a cold old seminary. Years later, as a writer and diplomat, he looked back on those days with humour and tenderness.

Here are the terrible meals and endless study hours, the night he discovered Dumas, the class rascal Corrales and his ingenious traps for stealing grapes and bottles, the strict masters the boys loved to torment, and the summer holidays at the Chacarita country house, with carefully planned raids on the orchards of the neighbouring "Basques". Above them all stands Amédée Jacques, the brilliant French director who changed his pupils' lives.

Juvenilia is one of Argentina's best-loved memoirs and a school classic. This edition also includes Prosa ligera, Cané's lively essays and travel sketches.

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.