Spanish · Intermediate
Read Tristana in Spanishwith every sentence explained
Benito Pérez Galdós · 1892
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós was first published in 1892. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 52,500 words.
A young woman who wants to be free. An ageing seducer who wants to keep her.
In Madrid's humbler streets lives Don Lope Garrido, an ageing gentleman who once broke hearts all over the city and still lives by his own peculiar code of honour. When the girl's parents die, he takes in their orphaned daughter, Tristana, and soon makes her his lover as well as his ward.
But Tristana is no one's possession. Clever, restless and full of dreams, she longs to study, to earn her own living, to become a painter or an actress, anything that would make her independent. When she meets Horacio, a young painter, the walls of Don Lope's house begin to feel like a cage.
Short, sharp and strikingly modern, Tristana is one of Benito Pérez Galdós's boldest novels about a woman's freedom, famously filmed by Luis Buñuel in 1970 with Catherine Deneuve.
- Author
- Benito Pérez Galdós
- First published
- 1892
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Romance
- Length
- About 52,500 words
How it opens
En el populoso barrio de Chamberí, más cerca del Depósito de Aguas que de Cuatro Caminos, vivía, no ha muchos años, un hidalgo de buena estampa y nombre peregrino; no aposentado en casa solariega, pues por allí no las hubo nunca, sino en plebeyo cuarto de alquiler, de los baratitos, con ruidoso vecindario de taberna, merendero, cabrería, y estrecho patio interior de habitaciones numeradas. La primera vez que tuve conocimiento del tal personaje y pude observar su catadura militar de antiguo cuño, algo así como una reminiscencia pictórica de los tercios viejos de Flandes, dijéronme que se llamaba D.
Reading Tristana 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.
