A Escrava Isaura 2.76 · 2.76

This is the sentence the whole tragedy turns on, and Guimarães lets it pass in the flat language of a deed. 'Entregou a seo filho toda a administração e uso-fructo daquella propriedade, com toda a escravatura' — he handed his son the running and the profits of the estate, with all the slaves. Read the grammar of ownership and feel it close: the human beings appear as an item in the transfer, 'a escravatura', filed alongside 'mais acessorios', the other appurtenances — the tools, the stock, the fixtures. Isaura is inside that word. In this one legal breath she passes from the old Commander, indifferent, to Leôncio, who wants her; and the law that hands over the ploughs hands over the girl. The reader who has met Leôncio knows exactly what has just been signed away.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear 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:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I
• Dom Casmurro — Brazilian Portuguese