Dom Casmurro 9.1 · 9.1

The chapter that will give Dom Casmurro its most quoted idea—life as opera—begins not with the idea but with the man who carries it, and the first thing we learn of him is a lie he tells himself. 'Já não tinha voz, mas teimava em dizer que a tinha.' The voice is gone; he insists it is not. Machado sets the pattern of the whole figure in one clause: a ruined artist who refuses the ruin.

The verb 'teimava'—he persisted, he was stubborn—does the real work. It is not that the tenor is merely deceived; he insists, against the evidence, as an act of will. This small vanity matters, because the theory he is about to deliver, that all of life is staged music, will come from a man whose own performance has ended and who cannot admit the curtain fell.

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