'I am much afraid of fairies'
Read the full text in our reader
E eu, que não sou mais do que um simples mortal, tenho muito medo de fadas, accrescentou o outro.
And I, who am nothing more than a simple mortal, am much afraid of fairies, added the other.
The second friend keeps up the mythological banter — a 'simples mortal' has good reason to fear 'fadas', fairies, who in folklore enchant and undo the men who love them. The joke closes the little ring of the gallants' talk on a note of mock self-protection, and it lightly reprises the chapter's real theme in fairy-tale dress: the beautiful stranger as a being of another order, dangerous to approach. The men treat this danger as charming fiction. The reader knows the danger is real but runs the opposite way — it is not the fairy who will undo the mortal, but the mortals' world, with its law and its hunters, that threatens to undo the woman they call a fairy. The whole comedy of the scene rests on this inversion the diners cannot see.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open A Escrava Isaura 10.56 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the A Escrava Isaura — 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:
A Escrava Isaura 10.56 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/10.56/