More than the truest of lovers
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e eu, melhor do que faria o mais terno e o mais leal dos amantes, te cercarei de todos os cuidados e carinhos, de todas as adorações, que sabe inspirar o mais ardente e inextinguivel amor.
and I, better than the tenderest and most loyal of lovers would, will surround you with every care and caress, every adoration that the most ardent, inextinguishable love knows how to inspire.
The sentence swells into pure operatic seduction — 'te cercarei de todos os cuidados e carinhos, de todas as adorações' — and the verb 'cercarei', I will surround you, undoes it from within. To surround is what an army does to a city; the same word he used for his 'longings' circling the jewel returns as the shape of his love. Every tenderness he lists is a wall. Guimarães builds the villain's most lyrical line out of the vocabulary of a siege, so that the beginner can hear, under the music, the closing of a ring.
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A Escrava Isaura 9.58 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/escravaisaura/9.58/