Spanish · Advanced
Read Las fuerzas extrañas in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: Strange Forces
Leopoldo Lugones · 1906
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About the book
Las fuerzas extrañas by Leopoldo Lugones was first published in 1906. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under fantasy, horror and science fiction. It runs to about 43,000 words.
A rain of fire over a doomed city. A chimpanzee who might learn to speak. Horses that rise against their masters.
In 1906, long before Borges, the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones published a book of stories in which science, myth and the supernatural collide. His narrators are scientists, mystics and obsessive amateurs who push too far into the unknown, and the strange forces they awaken do not go quietly back to sleep.
In "Yzur", a man buys a chimpanzee from a bankrupt circus, convinced that apes once spoke and can be taught again. In "The Rain of Fire", a survivor of Gomorrah calmly describes the day burning copper began to fall from a clear sky. In "The Horses of Abdera", the pampered horses of a Thracian city turn on the people who spoil them, and in other tales a man's shadow becomes a monkey and music becomes visible light.
A pioneer of Latin American fantasy and science fiction, Strange Forces closes with Lugones' own playful "cosmogony" of the universe.
- Author
- Leopoldo Lugones
- First published
- 1906
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Fantasy, Horror, Science Fiction
- Length
- About 43,000 words
How it opens
No éramos sino tres amigos. Los dos de la confidencia, en cuyo par me contaba, y el descubridor de la espantosa fuerza que, sin embargo del secreto, preocupaba ya á la gente.
El sencillo sabio ante quien nos hallábamos, no procedía de ninguna academia y estaba asaz distante de la celebridad. Había pasado la vida concertando al azar de la pobreza pequeños inventos industriales, desde tintas baratas y molinillos de café, hasta máquinas controladoras para boletos de tranvía.
Reading Las fuerzas extrañas 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 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.
