A Escrava Isaura 2.82 · 2.82

The double negative does gentle, exact work: 'não pôde deixar de conceber' — she could not help but conceive it. Malvina's love for Isaura is not a decision or a duty; it is involuntary, a thing that simply happened to a good heart in the presence of a lovable girl. And the sentence, tender as it is, keeps its truthful noun to the last: 'pela captiva Isaura' — for the captive Isaura. Even here, in the warmth of new affection, the fact does not dissolve. She loves her, and she owns her; the tenderness runs across the line of property without abolishing it. That unresolved gap — real love inside real bondage — is the ache the whole novel is built on.

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