II. La cueva del tesoro
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An A2 adaptation of an Arabian Nights tale
Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp Aladino y la lámpara maravillosa
Antoine Galland
This is a retelling of the tale in simpler Spanish, not the original text: MovaReader wrote it from the French text of Antoine Galland, who first printed the story of Aladdin in his Thousand and One Nights in 1712. The catalog places it at A2, with about 6,500 words, 10-word sentences on average and the whole story told in the past tenses. Ten chapters run from the false uncle and the treasure cave to the palace with twenty-four windows and the magician’s return from Africa.
- A2
- 6 517 words
- 1-2 hours
Will this text hold?
A1
Earlier
At A1 this text is still a stretch: sentences average 10 words rather than the 6-7 of the A1 adaptations, and the whole story is told in the past tenses (vivía, llegó, había visto).
A1A2
This text
Right for A2: familiar past tenses, 10-word sentences, almost a third of the text in dialogue, and a word of 9 letters or more only once in 88.
Check this passageB1
With room to spare
At B1 you will get through all ten chapters in an hour or two, hardly needing translation, and be ready for the catalog’s full Spanish texts, the easiest of which are B2.
Start readingSentences average 10 words, as in the Don Quixote adaptation, which is also rated A2. The narration runs in the pretérito indefinido and the imperfecto, and almost a third of the words belong to lines of dialogue in quotation marks. Long words, of 9 letters or more, are scarce here: about one in 88, fewer than in that adaptation (one in 36) and even fewer than in the A1 adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood (one in 55). So the level is set by sentences and tenses rather than vocabulary: the A1 adaptations in the catalog have 6-7 words per sentence, and full Spanish texts start at B2, where Unamuno’s Mist has 13 words per sentence. The difficulty holds steady from start to finish, with chapter averages between 9.7 and 11.2 words per sentence. Hence the A2 verdict. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 6 517
- words
- 10
- words in an average sentence
- 1-2
- hours of reading
MovaReader. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
Aladdin, the lazy son of a poor tailor in a great city of China, spends his days playing in the street until a stranger from Africa stops him and says he is his uncle. He is in fact a magician: he leads the boy into the mountains, opens a passage underground with a spell and sends him down for an old lamp he cannot take himself. Aladdin will not hand the lamp over before he is out, and the furious magician shuts him in the cave. Rescue comes from a ring the same magician gave him, and at home his mother starts to clean the lamp to sell it, and a second genie appears. With its help the tailor’s son asks for the hand of Princess Badroulbadour, sends the Sultan forty gold trays of jewels and raises a palace opposite the Sultan’s in a single night. Meanwhile, in Africa, the magician learns that Aladdin is alive and rich; what comes of it is left for the reading.
Compare two places
Aladino y la lámpara maravillosa
VIII. Lámparas nuevas por viejas
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Choose an underlined word.
Commands with pronouns
The magician is giving Aladdin his instructions, and nearly every sentence here is a command. After an affirmative command the pronoun is written as part of the verb: Crúzalo (cross it, the garden), Apágala and guárdala (put it out and tuck it away, the lamp), and tráemela carries two at once: “bring it to me”. In the negative the pronoun stands on its own before the verb, and the command takes the subjunctive form: No las toques, “don’t touch them”, No tengas miedo, “don’t be afraid”. Verás, morirás and quedará are in the future tense: this is how the magician warns what lies ahead below.
Trading one thing for another
Cambiar A por B means “to trade A for B”: por marks what you get in return. The magician shouts lámparas viejas por nuevas, “old lamps for new”, and the people in the square, repeating his words, swap them round: who gives away new lamps for old ones? Riéndose is the gerund of reírse, and the pronoun se is attached at the end, just as with a command. Se reía and decían are in the imperfecto because the laughing and the talk went on all the while the magician was shouting in the square. Muerta de risa: “dying of laughter”, the maid can hardly stop laughing.
Chapters
Translation while you read
The book stays free on every plan. Reader, €1 a month, removes the daily limit on words and sentences.
Reader
€1 a month
Reader translates whole sentences, which helps where pronouns merge with the verb, as in the explanation of why the magician needs Aladdin: Pero él no podía tomarla con sus manos: otra persona tenía que sacarla y dársela.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Spanish books A1 Earlier Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Alí Babá y los cuarenta ladrones Another book by the same author A2
All books at this level
Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
A learning adaptation: MovaReader retold Antoine Galland’s Histoire d’Aladdin, ou la Lampe merveilleuse in simple Spanish; Galland first printed it in 1712, in volumes IX and X of his Thousand and One Nights. The Spanish is modern and plain, in the past tenses with 10-word sentences on average, and the text is cut to 10 chapters and about 6,500 words: Galland’s French text is more than five times longer. The main events remain: the false uncle, the cave with its garden of jewels, the genies of the ring and the lamp, the honest jeweler, the proposal to the princess, the forty gold trays, the palace with twenty-four windows and the magician’s return. Scheherazade’s frame is dropped, and long speeches, descriptions and repetitions are cut. The catalog does not yet hold a full version of Aladdin.
Is there an audiobook?
There is no recording of Aladdin here, only the text. Tap a word you don’t know to see its translation beside it; here those are often the names of jewels: perlas, rubíes, esmeraldas, zafiros.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, on the Reader plan: it translates any sentence whole, from the magician’s Soy tu tío y ahora soy como tu padre to the orders given to the genies. Sentences here are short, 10 words on average, so you will want it mainly where several pronouns join the verb (dársela, tráemela, pedírselo) or where a genie speaks: Aquí estoy para obedecerte como tu esclavo. The free plan leaves you single-word translation, as far as the daily limit allows.
How many hours does it take?
Reading with translation of unfamiliar words, the whole tale takes 1-2 hours. Chapters vary in length, from about 470 words in VIII to about 970 in IX, that is from 5 to 16 minutes.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even, with no easier stretch: the average sentence per chapter ranges from 9.7 words (IX) to 11.2 (VI). Long words are a little more frequent in chapters VII and VIII, about the palace and the lamp trade: there a word of 9 letters or more comes about once in 50, against roughly once in 130-140 in chapters III-VI.
Will my place in the book be saved?
It will be, provided you read signed in: the reader reopens Aladdin at the last place you reached and remembers every word you tapped. From the contents on this page you can open any chapter directly, VII, “El palacio de las veinticuatro ventanas”, for instance, where Aladdin’s palace rises in a single night.