Dom Casmurro 9.94 · 9.94

The verdict falls with a rising force: not merely different from the drama but 'absolutamente diversa,' and worse, 'até contraria' — contrary to it, working against the poem it was written to serve. The music does not simply miss the words; it opposes them. Form has turned traitor to content.

Machado escalates through the adverbs — 'absolutamente,' 'até' — the way an aggrieved critic does, each intensifier tightening the indictment. Beneath the operatic quarrel lies the plainest metaphysical anxiety the book knows: that the world we experience runs contrary to whatever intended it, that the drama of a life and the meaning meant for it may point in opposite directions. Bento's whole retrospective labor is an attempt to make his drama answer to a single sense; the friends of the poet suspect, of creation itself, that it never 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