Dom Casmurro 12.7 · 12.7

Now the mind's turmoil is given a shape: confused voices pushing back against José Dias's speech. The denunciation has become an inner soundtrack the boy tries to drown out.

Machado will next let those voices surface as fragments — the very phrases the agregado used. The word 'discurso' half-mockingly dignifies José Dias's insinuation as a speech, and the voices 'repelling' it show a mind at war with a message it does not yet want to accept. The colon opens the floor to the refrain that follows, as if the boy's own head were quoting the accusation back at him against his will.

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