Spanish · Beginner
Read Marianela in Spanishwith every sentence explained
Benito Pérez Galdós · 1878
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Marianela by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1878. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked beginner and filed under romance and young adult. It runs to about 50,400 words.
He has never seen her face. She hopes he never will.
In the mining country of Socartes, in northern Spain, lives Nela: a small, frail orphan girl whom everyone treats as a stray, and who believes herself ugly and worthless. Yet every day she becomes the eyes of Pablo, the blind son of a wealthy landowner. Walking him through fields and ravines, she describes the world in words full of poetry, and Pablo falls in love with the beautiful soul he imagines.
Then a famous eye surgeon, Teodoro Golfín, arrives in the valley, and it seems Pablo might be able to see after all. For everyone it is wonderful news. For Nela, it is the most frightening thing in the world.
Benito Pérez Galdós' Marianela (1878) is his most widely read short novel and a classic first "real" novel for learners of Spanish. Moving and clearly written, it has been filmed several times and still breaks hearts.
- Author
- Benito Pérez Galdós
- First published
- 1878
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Romance, Young Adult
- Length
- About 50,400 words
How it opens
Se puso el sol. Tras el breve crepúsculo vino tranquila y oscura la noche, en cuyo negro seno murieron poco a poco los últimos rumores de la tierra soñolienta, y el viajero siguió adelante en su camino, apresurando su paso a medida que avanzaba la noche. Iba por angosta vereda, de esas que sobre el césped traza el constante pisar de hombres y brutos, y subía sin cansancio por un cerro en cuyas vertientes se alzaban pintorescos grupos de guinderos, hayas y robles. (Ya se ve que estamos en el Norte de España.)
Reading Marianela 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.
