Read Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift in French and English, a parallel text graded reader with audio. Available in CEFR levels A2, B1, B2, and C2.
About this book
A ship's surgeon wakes on a strange shore to find he cannot move. Slowly he understands why: he is pinned to the grass by hundreds of threads, and a six-inch man with a bow and quiver is climbing across his chest. A colossal wooden engine on twenty-two wheels hauls him, bound and sleeping, toward a walled city. There he learns the great questions of the day: whether heels should be high or low, and which end of an egg a civilized person ought to break. So begins the first of Lemuel Gulliver's four voyages, and the strangest career in travel writing.
Each voyage sets Gulliver among a new impossibility. He is a giant among the tiny people of Lilliput, then a plaything among the giants of Brobdingnag, where a queen crunches a lark's bones between her teeth. There a farmer's young daughter looks after him while everyone else puts him on show for profit. He tours an academy where earnest men extract sunbeams from cucumbers, and a land where courteous, reasoning horses keep filthy man-shaped creatures as beasts. Swift lets a plain-spoken king look down at the whole human parade and call it "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
The comedy is procedural and patient, the satire never hurried. An inventory of an Englishman's pockets becomes a catalogue of weapons and gods. Scholars debate Gulliver's nature and settle on an empty Latin label. Behind the invention sits a steady question about pride, cruelty, and how small human grandeur looks from the right distance.
Three centuries on, the mirror still holds. Gulliver keeps insisting on the strict truth of everything he reports, which is precisely when the reader should watch him most closely.
Available editions
A2
Short, concrete sentences for early learners.
2,733 sentences
B1
Longer sentences and a wider vocabulary.
2,733 sentences
B2
Complex sentences and a fuller vocabulary, close to everyday native reading.
2,733 sentences
C2
Original English — The most complex prose — long, intricate sentences, and advanced vocabulary.
2,733 sentences
Read a sample
Chapters
1 / 39
Un voyage à Lilliput : Chapitre 1
A Voyage to Lilliput: Chapter 1
1
L’auteur nous parle de lui et de sa famille.
The author tells us about himself and his family.
2
Il explique pourquoi il a d’abord voulu voyager.
He explains why he first wanted to travel.
3
Son bateau coule, et il doit nager pour sauver sa vie.
His ship sinks, and he must swim to save his life.
4
Il arrive sain et sauf sur la terre, dans le pays de Lilliput.
He reaches land safely in the country of Lilliput.
5
Là-bas, il est capturé et emmené plus loin dans le pays.
There he is captured and taken further into the country.
6
Mon père avait un petit terrain dans le Nottinghamshire.
My father had a small piece of land in Nottinghamshire.