Dom Casmurro 9.34 · 9.34

The cosmic quarrel finds its stage at a prize-giving. Heaven holds a school ceremony, medals are handed out, and Satan is passed over — the whole Fall condensed into an awards day. Machado keeps the register scrupulously small and academic, so that the origin of evil sounds like the resentment of a student who watched the wrong names called to the podium.

The comedy is real, but so is the insight underneath it. So much human bitterness begins exactly here, in the moment of the list read aloud, the recognition given to someone else. The tenor's fable proposes that the discord running through all existence started as an artist's sense of being unjustly ranked. It is a homely, deflating account of damnation, and it fits a novelist who never let a grand emotion stand without showing the petty, all-too-recognizable grievance beating inside it.

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