Horacio Quiroga
Born in Salto, Uruguay, on the last day of 1878; died in Buenos Aires in February 1937. He spent his working life in Misiones, the strip of subtropical forest wedged between Brazil and Paraguay where nearly everything he wrote is set, and «Cuentos de la selva» (1918) — the eight tales below — he wrote for his own children.
That is why they are the shelf a beginner in Spanish can actually finish. A story written for a child has short sentences and concrete nouns, and these have both; but they were not written down to anybody, which is the difference between this shelf and a graded reader. Nothing here is simplified, retold or invented.
The eight tales
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences |
|---|---|---|---|
| Las medias de los flamencos free | The Flamingos’ Stockings | 1401 | 101 |
| La tortuga gigante first scene free | The Giant Tortoise | 1710 | 99 |
| La gama ciega | The Blind Doe | 1870 | 132 |
| El loro pelado | The Plucked Parrot | 1882 | 149 |
| La abeja haragana | The Lazy Bee | 2032 | 177 |
| Historia de dos cachorros de coatí y de dos cachorros de hombre | The Story of Two Coati Cubs and Two Human Children | 2286 | 141 |
| La guerra de los yacarés | The War of the Caimans | 3017 | 254 |
| El paso del Yabebirí | The Ford of the Yabebirí | 3348 | 245 |
What the eight ask of a reader
17,546 running words across 1,298 sentences, drawn from 1,516 distinct dictionary words — and 715 of those 1,516, 47%, appear in more than one of the tales.
That last number is the one worth having, and it is the answer to «where do I start». A shelf whose books share most of their vocabulary is a shelf where the second book is easier than the first and the third easier again; a collection of unrelated texts is eight first books in a row. Quiroga's are one forest, with the same river and the same animals in them, and the arithmetic shows it. The full ledger, per tale and as a file, is at Quiroga, counted.
Reading him in the original
Every word is glossed where it stands — dictionary form and meaning, without leaving the sentence — and an English line sits under each sentence, out of your eyeline until you ask for it. «Las medias de los flamencos» is free, entire, and needs no account, and the opening scene of «La tortuga gigante» comes free after it; the rest is part of the library at €5 a month or €39 a year, one subscription for every room in the house.
A note on the printing
The text is the 1918 first edition, which is very nearly modern Spanish. Where it is not — the accent the Real Academia dropped in 1959, on fué, dió, vió, fuí, and the old accented preposition á — today's spelling is printed beside it, so no word hides behind an accent that is no longer used. The Spanish is American: this is the Río de la Plata, not Castile.
Cuentos de la selva · the shelf, counted · the Russian authors