Dom Casmurro 1.26 · 1.26

The other half of the name gets its gloss: 'Dom veiu por ironia, para attribuir-me fumos de fidalgo' — the 'Dom' came by irony, to lend me the airs of a nobleman. 'Dom' is a lordly title; hung on a reclusive commoner it is a sneer, mock-ennobling the man to mock him — as if to say, look at this grand hermit giving himself airs, 'fumos de fidalgo', the smoke of nobility in his head. And the crucial word is 'ironia', irony, which Bento names as the maker of his very title. It is the master key to the book. Dom Casmurro is the most ironic of novels, narrated by a man whose every statement may mean its opposite, whose 'I bear no grudge' and 'I was not angry' and 'she loved me' must all be weighed for the irony that coined his name. He has told us, in the first chapter, exactly how to read him — 'por ironia' — and then dares us to remember it three hundred pages on, when the ironies are no longer about a nickname but about whether we can believe a word he says.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I