Read Azul... (prosa) in Spanish
Azul... (prosa) by Rubén Darío in the original Spanish, with our English translation beside every sentence and a dictionary on every word.
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The opening lines
How Azul... (prosa) begins
ES
¡Amigo! el cielo está opaco, el aire frío, el día triste.
Un cuento alegre.., así como para distraer las hermosas y grises melancolías, helo aquí:
Había en una ciudad inmensa y brillante un rey muy poderoso, que tenía trajes caprichosos y ricos, esclavas desnudas, blancas y negras, caballos de largas crines, armas flamantísimas, galgos rápidos y monteros con cuernos de bronce, que llenaban el viento con sus fanfarrias.
¿Era un rey poeta?
EN
Friend! the sky is overcast, the air cold, the day sad.
A happy tale... just to distract the beautiful and gray melancholies, here it is:
There was in an immense and brilliant city a very powerful king, who had capricious and rich clothes, naked slaves, white and black, horses with long manes, shining weapons, swift greyhounds and hunters with bronze horns, who filled the wind with their fanfares.
Was he a poet king?
As the reader shows it: the original Spanish and our English translation, sentence by sentence. The translation is ours — made to help you follow the Spanish, not as a literary edition.
Spanish books
What the reader gives you
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English beside every line
A slider shows as much of the English as you need — all of it, a hint, or nothing.
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Every word, explained
Tap a word for its meaning in context, its dictionary form and, for a verb, all of its forms — hablaba, hablé and habló all lead back to hablar.
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Grammar and sound
Grammar is highlighted in the sentence you are reading, and the book is read aloud in the Spanish accent you pick.
About the book
About Azul... (prosa)
The prose tales of Azul…, the book Rubén Darío published in Chile in 1888 and the one that opened Spanish-language modernism: a bourgeois king who sets a poet to crank a barrel organ, the fairy queen Mab and her veil of dreams, an empress made of porcelain. Rich, musical Spanish — a book to read slowly.
In the LangOrbit reader, Azul... (prosa) opens with the English translation alongside, a dictionary on every word and audio in a Latin American or Spanish voice. The words you save go into your daily Spanish lesson.
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Azul... (prosa)
Azul... (prosa) by Rubén Darío in the original Spanish, with our English translation beside every sentence and a dictionary on every word.
Read it in the readerNo signup to start. A free plan to keep reading; full access is paid.