Dom Casmurro 6.45 · 6.45

The family jest — 'Agora é que elle vae namorar deveras' — ties horsemanship to courtship, as if a saddle were the natural next step toward a woman. The emphatic 'é que' and the doubled insistence of 'deveras' make the line teasing, the kind of thing relatives say to a boy on the edge of youth.

The joke is more knowing than it means to be. Bento is already in love with Capitú; the courting is not a future prospect but a present fact hidden from the jokers. Machado lets the household aim its wit slightly wide of the truth, which is his habitual comedy: the people around Bento are forever commenting on a life whose real center they cannot see. The quip lands as banter and reads, to us, as dramatic irony.

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