I. De cuándo sucedió la cosa
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A comic novella of a miller and a magistrate
The Three-Cornered Hat El sombrero de tres picos
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, 1907
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s comic novella of 1874, the complete text and not an adaptation, taken from the 1907 Henry Holt and Company edition. In the catalog it is B2: about 25,200 words and 18 words per sentence on average. The author’s preface and 36 short chapters about the miller Lucas, his wife Frasquita and the town’s old Corregidor; the preface and the first eight chapters are the hardest, from chapter IX the story runs on dialogue.
- B2
- 25 218 words
- 4-7 hours
Will this text hold?
B1
Earlier
At B1 the preface and chapters I-VIII will be slow going: sentences of about 44 words, bracketed asides and old forms such as complacíanse and encontrose need unpacking.
B1B2
This text
You can manage it at B2: from chapter IX the exchanges between Lucas, Frasquita and the Corregidor come in short lines, and the opening can be read slowly, translating single words.
Check this passageC1
With room to spare
At C1 the opening reads freely; only the narrator’s irony and the legal and church terms of the period slow you down.
Start readingThe average sentence has 18 words, and about one word in eleven has 9 letters or more (9.3%), the top of the B2 range and just under the 9.9% where the catalog’s C1 begins. For comparison, Alarcón’s El Capitán Veneno is also B2, at 20 words per sentence and 9.1%, and Marianela (1878) is B2 at 15 words. The difficulty is uneven: the preface and chapters I-VIII (about 5,400 words) average 44 words per sentence with a long word every tenth word, while from chapter IX the dialogue brings it down to about 15. Period forms such as abriola and encontrose add work, but short exchanges carry the story. Hence B2. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 25 218
- words
- 18
- words in an average sentence
- 4-7
- hours of reading
- 1907
- Henry Holt and Company
Henry Holt and Company, 1907. Project Gutenberg
What it is about, without the ending
Early in the nineteenth century, in a town in southern Spain, the miller Lucas, a hunchback with a sharp tongue, and his beautiful wife Frasquita, who comes from Navarre, live happily in their mill outside the walls. Then the town’s Corregidor, an old and vain royal magistrate in a three-cornered hat, decides that Frasquita must be his. With the help of his scheming servant Garduña he sets a trap that calls the miller away from home on a false pretext. What happens at the mill that night, and who gets the last laugh, is not revealed here.
Compare two places
El sombrero de tres picos
XXI. ¡En guardia, caballero!
—¡, ! ¡! ¡!...— , .
—¿ ?— , .
, , .— , , , ...
—¡ ! ¡ ! ( ).—¡ !
Choose an underlined word.
Find the verb before the brackets
Alarcón stacks clauses with semicolons, brackets and a long dash that opens a new thought right after a full stop. Find the main verb first (Reinaba, habían perdido), read each bracket as a quick aside, and only then go back for the details. This is where whole-sentence translation in Reader helps most.
Speaker tags in brackets and old forms
In dialogue the speaker is often named in brackets in the middle of a line, as in (balbuceaba el infame viejo), and the line simply goes on after it. Alarcón also attaches the pronoun to the verb: abriola is la abrió and encontrose is se encontró. Move the pronoun back in front of the verb and the sentence is easy.
Where the text gets harder
·-VIIIdifficult start: very long sentences
IX-XXXVIdialogue and shorter sentences
- IX¡Arre, burra!
- XDesde la parra
- XIEl bombardeo de Pamplona
- XIIDiezmos y primicias
- XIIILe dijo el grajo al cuervo
- XIVLos consejos de Garduña
- XVDespedida en prosa
- XVIUn ave de mal agüero
- XVIIUn alcalde de monterilla
- XVIIIDonde se verá que el tío Lucas tenía el sueño muy ligero
- XIXVoces clamantes in deserto
- XXLa duda y la realidad
- XXI¡En guardia, caballero!
- XXIIGarduña se multiplica
- XXIIIOtra vez el desierto y las consabidas voces
- XXIVUn rey de entonces
- XXVLa estrella de Garduña
- XXVIReacción
- XXVII¡Favor al Rey!
- XXVIII¡Ave María Purísima! ¡Las doce y media y sereno!
- XXIXPost nubila... Diana
- XXXUna señora de clase
- XXXILa pena del talión
- XXXIILa fe mueve las montañas
- XXXIIIPues ¿y tú?
- XXXIVTambién la corregidora es guapa
- XXXVDecreto imperial
- XXXVIConclusión, moraleja y epílogo
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 chapter I a sentence like “Los demás soberanos europeos descendientes de Luis XIV habían perdido ya la corona (y el jefe de ellos la cabeza)…” puts the verb ahead of a bracketed aside and a long tail, and translating the whole sentence in Reader shows how the clauses fit together.
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
It is the original, not a learner’s abridgement: Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s complete 1874 novella, with the author’s preface and all 36 chapters. The reader follows the text of the 1907 Henry Holt and Company edition (New York) from Project Gutenberg, without the editor’s introduction, notes and vocabulary.
Is there an audiobook?
The Three-Cornered Hat has no audiobook on MovaReader: here the book is read on screen. The translation appears when you tap a word, and you will need it most for period or bookish words such as borrasca or balbuceaba.
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes, with the Reader plan. In this book it helps most in the preface and chapters I-VIII, where sentences average 44 words, for example “Los demás soberanos europeos descendientes de Luis XIV habían perdido ya la corona (y el jefe de ellos la cabeza)…”. Without the plan, single words are translated up to the daily limit.
How many hours does it take?
The whole book takes about 4-7 hours: the pace of someone reading with translation of new words, slower than a native speaker’s. Chapters are short, from about 175 to 1,700 words, so several make an evening.
Where does the text get easier?
From chapter IX. The preface and chapters I-VIII are the densest part: 44 words per sentence on average and a long word every tenth word. From chapter IX the dialogue brings it down to about 15 words per sentence; only chapters XII and XXXIV get longer again, at about 33 and 38.
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 come back to the book where you left off. Any of the 37 sections also opens from the contents on this page, for example chapter I, right after the preface.