I. La tortuga gigante
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Animal tales of the jungle for B2
Jungle Tales Cuentos de la selva
Horacio Quiroga, 1918
Horacio Quiroga’s complete collection from the 1918 first edition, not an adaptation. In the catalog it is B2: about 17,700 words and 15 words per sentence on average. Eight animal tales of the Misiones jungle, written for children: the plots are simple, but the sentences run long, and the Spanish is that of the Río de la Plata, in the spelling of 1918 (fué, vió).
- B2
- 17 667 words
- 3-5 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the plots are easy to follow, but the long chained sentences (about 19 words in “La tortuga gigante”) and Río de la Plata words such as plata, pollerita or tomá will slow you down.
B1B2
This text
You can manage it at B2: the tales are short, the dialogue is quick, and regional words translate with a tap.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the collection reads freely; only the animals of Misiones and the 1918 spelling make you pause.
Start readingThe average sentence has 15 words, more than in Unamuno’s Mist (13) or Quiroga’s own Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte (14): telling a tale to children, Quiroga strings actions together with y, commas and semicolons. The vocabulary is lighter than in those books: one word in eighteen has 9 letters or more, against one in fourteen in Mist and one in eleven in Cuentos de amor, and most long words are everyday ones like respondió. What slows you down is Río de la Plata Spanish: voseo (tomá, andá), plata for money, chicos, bichos, pollerita, the animals of Misiones (yacaré, coatí, tatú, yarará) and the 1918 spelling fué and vió. The stories run from 13 to 19 words per sentence. Hence B2, at the lighter end of the level. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 17 667
- words
- 15
- words in an average sentence
- 3-5
- hours of reading
- 1918
- Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial Limitada
Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial Limitada, 1918. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
Eight tales of the animals of Misiones that Quiroga wrote for children. A sick man from Buenos Aires goes to live in the jungle to get well and saves a giant tortoise from a jaguar. The flamingos, whose legs were still white then, want to charm the coral snakes at a ball. Pedrito, a tame parrot, chatters away to a jaguar. The caimans build a dam to stop a steamer coming up their river. A fawn learns the deer’s prayer from her mother, a coatí cub wanders up to the settlers’ house and meets two children, the stingrays of the Yabebirí owe a debt to a man who would not let fishermen dynamite the river, and a lazy bee refuses to work with the hive. How each tale ends is not revealed here.
Compare two places
Cuentos de la selva
II. Las medias de los flamencos
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Choose an underlined word.
One breath, many actions
Five sentences and over a hundred words: the second one alone runs to about fifty, joined by commas and y, the way a tale is told aloud. Vió with an accent is the 1918 spelling of today’s vio. Parada de canto: the jaguar stood the tortoise on its edge to reach inside the shell. Tigre is what people in the Río de la Plata call the jaguar.
Words of the Río de la Plata
One sentence with semicolons lists the snakes’ dresses. Colorado and coloradas mean red, as in much of Latin America; pollerita is a little skirt, from pollera, the Río de la Plata word for falda. The yarará is a venomous pit viper of the region, and its skirt is painted with stripes of brick dust and ash, the colours of the snake itself.
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
In “La tortuga gigante” sentences average about 19 words and run on with y and commas: translating the whole sentence in Reader keeps the thread of the tale.
ReaderIf this book is not the one
Spanish books B1 Earlier Stories of Love, Madness and Death Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte Another book by the same author B2
All books at this level
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
Yes, this is Quiroga’s own text, not a simplified retelling: all eight tales of Cuentos de la selva, first published in Buenos Aires in 1918. The reader uses that first edition of the Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial Limitada, as transcribed on Wikisource from a scan, and keeps its spelling (fué, vió, dió) and a few misprints as they are.
Is there an audiobook?
There is no audiobook of these tales on MovaReader: you read them on the page. Tap a word to see its translation; you will need it most for the animals of Misiones, such as yacaré, coatí or yarará.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. It helps most in “La tortuga gigante”, where sentences average about 19 words, and in the tale of the coatí cubs (about 17). Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole collection takes about 3-5 hours at the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker. The tales run from about 1,400 words (“Las medias de los flamencos”) to about 3,400 (“El Paso del Yabebirí”), so one fits into an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is fairly even, from 13 to 19 words per sentence, so there are no harder or easier parts marked. The longest sentences are in the first tale, “La tortuga gigante” (about 19), and in “Historia de dos cachorros de coatí y de dos cachorros de hombre” (about 17). “La guerra de los yacarés”, “La gama ciega” and “El Paso del Yabebirí” sit at about 15, and the last tale, “La abeja haragana”, has the shortest sentences, about 13: you can start there instead of at the beginning.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. Once you sign in, the reader keeps your last place and the words you opened, so you can read one tale a night and pick up where you stopped. Each of the 8 tales also opens from the contents on this page, for example “Las medias de los flamencos”, the shortest.