II. Los regalos de las hadas
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A1 adaptation of Perrault’s fairy tale
Sleeping Beauty La Bella Durmiente
Charles Perrault
This is a retelling of Charles Perrault’s tale in simple Spanish, not the original text: a MovaReader adaptation for readers who are just starting to read in Spanish. In the catalog it is A1: about 4,000 words told in the present tense, with sentences of 6 words on average. 8 short chapters about a princess cursed at her christening by an old fairy, a spindle hidden at the top of a tower, a castle that sleeps for a hundred years behind a wall of thorns, and a prince who hears its story a century later.
- A1
- 4 003 words
- 1 hour
Will this text hold?
A1
This text
You can manage it at A1: sentences are short, the story stays in the present tense, and words like huso or zarzas translate with a tap.
Check this passageA2
With room to spare
At A2 the tale reads almost without translation: a quick, confident read before stories told in the past tense.
Start readingThe average sentence has 6 words: the tale moves in short present-tense statements, and about a fifth of the text is the characters’ lines in quotation marks. Long words are rare: the whole text has only 26 words of 9 letters or more, about one in 150, such as despertar or alrededor. The difficulty is even: the 8 chapters average between 5 and 7 words per sentence. The catalog’s other Perrault tale in Spanish, the Cinderella adaptation, stands at A2 with 10 words per sentence and a long word about once in 28; full texts in Spanish start at B2, where Unamuno’s Mist has 13 words per sentence and one long word in fourteen. Hence A1. This is the catalog’s assessment, not a certificate.
- 4 003
- words
- 6
- words in an average sentence
- 1
- hour of reading
MovaReader. Wikisource
What it is about, without the ending
A king and queen wait many years for a child, and when a daughter is born at last they invite seven fairies to the christening, each with a golden case and a gift for the baby. Then an old fairy nobody invited walks in, and, angry that there is no golden case for her, she says the girl will prick her hand on a spindle and die. The youngest fairy cannot undo the curse, only soften it: the princess will sleep for a hundred years until a king’s son comes. The king bans every spindle in the land, but fifteen years later, at the top of a tower, the princess finds an old woman spinning. What happens next is not revealed here.
Compare two places
La Bella Durmiente
V. El príncipe y el bosque
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Choose an underlined word.
Va a tocar: the future with ir a
The old fairy’s curse rests on one pattern: ir a with an infinitive talks about the future. Esta niña va a tocar un huso: “this girl is going to touch a spindle”. La niña se va a morir: “the girl is going to die”, where se stands before va. Le tiembla todo el cuerpo: literally “the whole body trembles to her”, the Spanish way of saying “her whole body shakes”. Más de rabia que de vieja: “more from rage than from old age”.
Dormidos or se duermen
Two ways of sleeping stand side by side here. Están dormidos: estar with dormido describes a state, “they are asleep”. Se duermen con la copa en la mano: dormirse means “to fall asleep”, so the soldiers nod off with their cups in hand. Duermen on its own is simply “they sleep”. Están en fila: “they stand in a row”, and con las armas al hombro: “with their weapons on their shoulders”.
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 the whole sentence where simple words add up to an unfamiliar phrase, as in con una ogra no se juega, “you don’t mess with an ogress”.
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Before you read
Is this the original or a learner adaptation?
An adaptation, not the original text. It is MovaReader’s own retelling in simple Spanish of Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant, from Histoires ou contes du temps passé, 1697. The language and length have changed: the present tense, 6 words per sentence on average, a few scenes opened up into short conversations, and the verse morals at the end left out. The episodes of the source remain: the seven fairies and their golden cases, the old fairy’s curse and the young fairy’s gentler spell, the ban on spindles, the old woman spinning in the tower, the hundred-year sleep of the whole castle with the little dog Pouffe, the wall of thorns and the rumours about the castle; Perrault’s second part, about the prince’s mother, is kept in a gentler form. The full text of the tale is not in the catalog in Spanish.
Is there an audiobook?
No, there is no audio version of this tale on MovaReader; the text is read on screen. Tap an unfamiliar word and its translation appears: here that will mostly be words such as huso (spindle), zarzas (brambles) or cierva (doe).
Can I translate a whole sentence?
Yes: whole-sentence translation comes with the Reader plan. But sentences in this tale average 6 words, so you will rarely need a whole one translated: mostly lines like Hace cincuenta años que nadie la ve or La carne deja de dar vueltas, where the words are simple but the pattern is not. Without the plan you can translate single words until the daily limit runs out.
How many hours does it take?
About an hour for the whole tale: the pace of someone who still translates new words, not a native speaker’s. There are 8 chapters of roughly 370 to 800 words each, so a chapter is easy to read in one sitting.
Where does the text get easier?
The difficulty is even from start to finish: each of the 8 chapters averages 5-7 words per sentence. The shortest sentences are in chapter III, where the princess finds the spindle, at about 5; chapters I, IV and VII run slightly longer, at about 7.
Will my place in the book be saved?
Yes. After you sign in, the reader remembers where you stopped and which words you opened. The contents on this page also open any of the 8 chapters directly, for example chapter IV, “Cien años de sueño”.