miércoles, 28 de agosto de 2013

La Hora del Vampiro, Stephen King.

… viajaban juntos y a simple vista parecían padre e hijo. El hombre, alto y de pelo negro, trabajó en varios lugares mientras viajaban: en Rhode Island, en una industria textil, en Youngstown, Ohio, en una estación de servicio, y en California, cerca de la frontera mejicana arreglando autos importados.
Cada vez que paraban en algún lugar compraba el Press Herald, un diario de Maine, que ocasionalmente traía noticias de un pueblo llamado Jerusalem Lot (familiarmente Salem´s Lot).
Escribió el bosquejo de una novela, en los moteles, mientras viajaba, y la envió a su agente. Un editor se mostró interesado en el escrito pero no quiso adelantar ningún dinero.
El chico parecía distante y atento al hombre alto. Incluso cuando llegaban a un restaurant y el hombre debía ir al baño lo seguía con su mirada ansioso de quedarse solo. En varias ocasiones el hombre había intentado hablar sobre el tema pero el chico lo evadía. A veces dejaba el diario con noticias de Salem´s Lot a propósito pero él no lo tocaba.
Cuando terminó el libro estaban viviendo en una cabaña en la playa cerca de una carretera en el Pacífico.

Salem´s Lot, a novel by Stephen King

I had been reading Ana Karenina and I needed a change. I wanted something different; perhaps an adventure or a mystery would be nice. Searching the Internet I came across this novel, Salem´s Lot, and of course I immediately recognized it. It was the same Stephen King´s story that I had read when I was 15.
At that time I was living at my granny´s house and we were the two only inhabitants of this big old house. The furniture of the house was not common. They all had special carvings resembling the ones you can only find in a museum, or in old magazines from the 1930s. On the walls of the living-room some pictures of forgotten relatives hung looking severely at the passersby. This same house had been occupied by many of my granny´s dead brothers and sisters in the past and their spirits were still infused in the place.

jueves, 22 de agosto de 2013

Ana Karenina: Tips para Aprender Inglés

Ana Karenina, del autor León Tolstoi, es un clásico de la literatura rusa. Ahora, ¿Podemos aprender inglés con esta novela?... Por supuesto que sí, los capítulos que leímos provienen de la traducción rusa al inglés de Constance Garnett y aprendimos que la novela tiene un vocabulario sencillo, y a la vez rico en sinónimos, y que la historia en sí es excelente.

Entonces algunos consejos para aprender inglés con la historia de León Tolstoi:

Ampliar el vocabulario
Hacer un listado de las palabras difíciles, buscar el significado de aquello desconocido, encontrar sinónimos y palabras relacionadas. Esto nos ayudará a memorizar todos los términos nuevos.
En Ana Karenina una de las palabras que quedaron grabadas:
Chum = intimate friend
También buscamos:
Governess, carriage-jobbers, kammerjunker, fomin, beaming, deigned, shrouded, loftiest, cockade, coterie

lunes, 19 de agosto de 2013

Ana Karenina, Levin

"Where is he?"
"Maybe he’s gone into the passage, but here he comes anyway. That is he," said the doorkeeper…
Stepan Arkadyevitch was standing at the top of the stairs. His good-naturedly glowing face above the embroidered collar of his uniform glowed more than ever when he recognized the man coming up.
"Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!" he said with a friendly mocking smile, scanning Levin as he approached. "How is it you have thought to look me up in this den?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, and not content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. "Have you been here long?"
"I have just come, and very much wanted to see you," said Levin, looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around.
"Well, let’s go into my room," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who knew his friend’s sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew him along, as though guiding him through dangers…

viernes, 16 de agosto de 2013

Ana Karenina, Morning Routine

Stepan checks his mail, the newspaper and we learn from his point of view:
When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked with a slight variation on each leg into the dining-room, where coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and papers from the office.
He read the letters. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was buying a forest on his wife’s property. To sell this forest was absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of all was that his pecuniary interests should in this way enter into the question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the forest—that idea hurt him.
When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch moved the office-papers close to him, rapidly looked through two pieces of business, made a few notes with a big pencil, and pushing away the papers, turned to his coffee. As he sipped his coffee, he opened a still damp morning paper, and began reading it.

miércoles, 14 de agosto de 2013

Ana Karenina, Stephan

Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky está muy preocupado. Su esposa descubrió su romance con la institutriz de sus hijos. No supo explicar la situación en su momento, y ahora debe dormir en su estudio. Todo es un caos en su casa. Anna Karenina de León Tolstoi.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct. He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself. All he repented of was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would have had such an effect on her. He had never clearly thought out the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the fact. He had even supposed that she, a worn-out woman no longer young or good-looking, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good mother, ought from a sense of fairness to take an indulgent view. It had turned out quite the other way.

lunes, 12 de agosto de 2013

The Jelly-bean

Otra historia de F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jelly-bean. Después de los párrafos en inglés aparece nuestra propia traducción al español, y algunas definiciones para aclarar algunos términos

Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.
Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two—a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago.
Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound—rather like the beginning of a fairy story—as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all sort of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. "Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular—I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.

domingo, 11 de agosto de 2013

El Curioso Caso de Benjamin Button, Datos

La historia del anciano que nace con 70 años y a medida que pasa el tiempo va haciéndose más joven es el argumento de Benjamín Button, un cuento de F. Scott Fitzgerald. Sobre el cuento surgen algunos puntos interesantes que podemos resumirlos en el autor, el vocabulario, la historia, la geografía:

 

El autor

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) escribió su Tales of the Jazz Age en 1922. Está dividida en 3 partes, de acuerdo a los temas, e incluye una de sus historias más conocidas “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. Sobre el cuento el mismo autor decía: “Esta historia fue inspirada por un comentario de Mark Twain sobre que era una lástima que la mejor parte de la vida venía al comienzo y lo peor al final. Experimenté con esta idea sobre un hombre en un mundo normal…”

sábado, 10 de agosto de 2013

El curioso caso de Benjamin Button

El Resumen

¿Quién fue Benjamin Button y qué fue llamativo de él? La historia no deja de ser original (¿nacer viejo e ir rejuveneciendo para morir como bebé?) y recibió un envión con la adaptación al cine.

En vocabulario encontramos senescence y averiguamos un poco sobre la guerra española-americana.

Más abajo ponemos una foto de tropas norteamericanas festejando la rendición de los españoles en Santiago.

 

Aburrido en casa se alista en la Guerra Española-Americana en 1.898 y logra un gran triunfo en el ejército, llegando al rango de teniente coronel…

viernes, 9 de agosto de 2013

The Curious Case … , at Yale

Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of normal ungrowth. When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked tremble and descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to Yale College. Benjamin passed his examination and became a member of the freshman class.
On the third day following his matriculation he received a notification from Mr. Hart, the college registrar, to call at his office and arrange his schedule. Benjamin, glancing in the mirror, decided that his hair needed a new application of its brown dye, but an anxious inspection of his bureau drawer disclosed that the dye bottle was not there. Then he remembered—he had emptied it the day before and thrown it away.

jueves, 8 de agosto de 2013

The Curious Case …, Adjusting to New Things

Even after the new addition to the Button family had had his hair cut short and then dyed to a thin unnatural black, had had his face shaved so close that it glistened, and had been attired in small-boy clothes made to order by an amazed tailor, it was impossible for Button to ignore the fact that his son was a poor excuse for a first family baby. Despite his aged inclination, Benjamin Button—for it was by this name they called him instead of by the appropriate but unpleasant Methuselah—was five feet eight inches tall. His clothes did not conceal this, nor did the clipping and dyeing of his eyebrows disguise the fact that the eyes under—were pale and watery and tired. In fact, the baby-nurse who had been engaged in advance left the house after one look, in a state of considerable indignation.
But Mr. Button persisted in his firm purpose. Benjamin was a baby, and a baby he should remain. At first he declared that if Benjamin didn't like warm milk he could go without food altogether, but he was finally prevailed upon to allow his son bread and butter, and even oatmeal by way of a compromise. One day he brought home a rattle and, giving it to Benjamin, insisted in no uncertain terms that he should "play with it," whereupon the old man took it with—a tired expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals throughout the day.

The Curious Case …, Clothes

"Good-morning," Mr. Button said nervously, to the clerk in the Chesapeake Dry Goods Company. "I want to buy some clothes for my child."
"How old is your child, sir?"
"About six hours," answered Mr. Button, without due consideration.
"Babies' supply department in the rear."
"Why, I don't think—I'm not sure that's what I want. It's—he's an unusually large-size child. Exceptionally—ah large."
"They have the largest child's sizes."
"Where is the boys' department?" inquired Mr. Button, shifting his ground desperately. He felt that the clerk must surely scent his shameful secret.
"Right here."
"Well——" He hesitated. The notion of dressing his son in men's clothes was repugnant to him. If, say, he could only find a very large boy's suit, he might cut off that long and awful beard, dye the white hair brown, and thus manage to conceal the worst, and to retain something of his own self-respect—not to mention his position in Baltimore society.

miércoles, 7 de agosto de 2013

The Curious Case . . . , a Shock

He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a room from which proceeded a variety of howls—indeed, a room which, in later discussion, would have been known as the "crying-room." They entered.
"Well," gasped Mr. Button, "which is mine?"
"There!" said the nurse.
Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin fell a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which hid a puzzled question.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.
I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.
The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous aristocracy which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies—Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of "Cuff."

domingo, 4 de agosto de 2013

El Manifiesto Comunista

El Manifiesto Comunista es un panfleto escrito por Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels. Se publicó originalmente en Londres, en 1848. El manifiesto presenta una aproximación analítica a la lucha de clases y critica el capitalismo.

El Manifiesto Comunista se divide en un preámbulo y 4 secciones. La primera sección del manifiesto explica el materialismo histórico.

En vocabulario encontramos bourgeoisie y proletariat

viernes, 2 de agosto de 2013

The Communist Manifesto

Todos los poderes se habían unido para pelear contra el comunismo: el Papa, los radicales franceses, los espías de la policía alemana. Ya era tiempo que se aclararan las ideas compartidas por los comunistas de todo el mundo. La burguesía se había acomodado en la sociedad y ganado todo el poder posible. Era la oposición a la clase trabajadora. Del Communist Manifesto, algunos párrafos en inglés.

En vocabulario encontramos hurl y cornerstone.

 

The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie...

jueves, 1 de agosto de 2013

A. Karenina

El resumen

La historia comienza con los problemas de los Oblonskys. La esposa descubrió el affaire que el esposo mantenía con la institutriz francesa de la familia. La casa se convierte en un infierno. La esposa no salía de su cuarto, el esposo había desaparecido de la casa, los chicos corrían sin orden en toda la casa, la institutriz inglesa peleaba con el ama de llaves, el cocinero había renunciado y la ayudante de cocina y el cochero estaban a punto de renunciar.
El príncipe Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky se despertó en un sofá en su estudio, no en su dormitorio. Hubiera querido seguir durmiendo. Se abrazó a su almohada. Se sentó en el sofá y abrió los ojos. Trató de encontrar sus pantuflas y su bata. Allí cayó en la cuenta que no se encontraba en el dormitorio de casa, con su esposa.
Recordó la pelea con su esposa. Era toda su culpa.
“No me lo perdonará”, pensó. “No puede perdonarme. Y lo peor de todo es que es mi culpa. Toda mi culpa y sin embargo no es para culparme.”
Lo peor fue el primer minuto cuando volvió del teatro, de buen humor, con una pera para su esposa. No estaba en el living ni en el estudio. Estaba en su cuarto con la carta.
Ella, su Dolly, que siempre se ocupaba de las cosas de la casa, le mostraba una carta exigiéndole una explicación.

Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina es una novela del ruso León Tolstoy, publicada en capítulos entre 1875 y 1877 en The Russian Messenger.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was no sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky—Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world—woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study. He turned over his stout, well-cared-for person on the elastic sofa, as though he would sink into a long sleep again; he vigorously embraced the pillow on the other side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

Libros para Todos los Gustos: del Nuevo Rico al Intelectual

Como todo en la vida en los libros también hay diferentes gustos, lectores para uno u otro autor, categorías que favorecen a uno u otro fanático, y editoriales que favorecen a uno u otro público.  A vuelo de pájaro se puede esbozar una clasificación: lectores románticos, aventureros, Americanistas, nuevos ricos, intelectuales, y niños. La clasificación puede ser caprichosa pero si uno se pone a buscar los listados interminables que aparecen en cualquier catalogo se pueden encontrar libros para uno u otro lector.
Lógicamente los románticos y aventureros se sobreentiende a quienes se refieren. Los primeros son lectores que prefieren una historia de amor, mientras que los segundos andarán por las novelas de acción, policiales, de misterio, las denominadas novelas negras y todo tipo de historias que enfaticen las luchas entre los hombres, contra la naturaleza y contra el sistema prevalente.