Jungle Book

Donde Shere Khan, el tigre, ataca una aldea y un pequeño humano aparece en la cueva de Papá y Mamá Loba, reclamando su parte del alimento. Del libro "The Jungle Book", de Rudyard Kipling, algunos párrafos en inglés.

En vocabulario buscamos snarly, whine, thicket, haunches, y dimpled.

También encontramos una foto de Charles Darwin, en el siglo 19, e investigamos sobre fostering.

 

"He has no right!" Father Wolf began angrily—"By the Law of the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning...

 

Tapa de la primera edición ilustrada por John Lockwood Kipling

 

Introducción

The Jungle Book es una colección de cuentos del autor inglés Rudyard Kipling. La mayoría de los personajes son animales como Shere Khan, el tigre, y Baloo, el oso, aunque un personaje principal es el niño, Mowgli, que es criado en la jungla por los lobos. Las historias están ambientadas en un bosque de la India.

 

A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering...

 

Un tema importante en el libro es el abandono seguido por la crianza, como en la vida de Mowgli, haciéndose eco de la propia infancia de Kipling.

Otro tema importante es el de la ley y la libertad. Las historias no tratan sobre el comportamiento animal, y menos aún sobre la lucha darwiniana por la supervivencia, sino sobre arquetipos humanos en forma animal.

Enseñan el respeto por la autoridad, la obediencia y conocer el lugar de uno en la sociedad con "la ley de la jungla", pero las historias también ilustran la libertad de moverse entre diferentes mundos, como cuando Mowgli se mueve entre la jungla y el pueblo.

Los críticos también han notado el salvajismo esencial y las energías sin ley en las historias, lo que refleja el lado irresponsable de la naturaleza humana.

Darwin exploró las emociones en los animales

Paragraphs

…. It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived...

… "Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me." (said the jackal)

Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga River, twenty miles away.

"He has no right!" Father Wolf began angrily—"By the Law of the Jungle he has no right to change his quarters without due warning...

…. Father Wolf listened, and below in the valley that ran down to a little river he heard the dry, angry, snarly, singsong whine of a tiger who has caught nothing and does not care if all the jungle knows it.

"The fool!" said Father Wolf. "To begin a night's work with that noise! Does he think that our buck are like his fat Waingunga bullocks?"

"H'sh. It is neither bullock nor buck he hunts to-night," said Mother Wolf. "It is Man.”…

"… The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe. The real reason for this is that man-killing means, sooner or later, the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns, and hundreds of brown men with gongs and rockets and torches…

… Father Wolf ran out a few paces and heard Shere Khan muttering and mumbling savagely as he tumbled about in the scrub.

"The fool has had no more sense than to jump at a woodcutter's campfire, and has burned his feet," said Father Wolf with a grunt...

"Something is coming uphill," said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. "Get ready."

The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world—the wolf checked in mid-spring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost where he left ground.

"Man!" he snapped. "A man's cub. Look!"

Directly in front of him, holding on by a low branch, stood a naked brown baby who could just walk—as soft and as dimpled a little atom as ever came to a wolf's cave at night. He looked up into Father Wolf's face, and laughed…

Vocabulario

Snarly: easily irritated. First recorded in 1790–1800.

I'd seen her face looming over mine, that little snarly smile as she told the man to give me a "drink."

Whine: a whining utterance, sound, or tone. To utter a low, usually nasal, complaining cry or sound, as from uneasiness, discontent, peevishness, etc.: quejarse.

The puppies were whining from hunger.

Thicket: a thick or dense growth of shrubs, bushes, or small trees; a thick coppice. Matorral.

They drive about a mile and park the bus in a bamboo thicket.

Haunches: haunch: a back leg of an animal with four legs and the part of the back near its tail: patas.

She patted the horse's glossy black haunch.

Dimple: having one or more small hollow areas in the surface, for example of a person's face when they smile: hoyuelos.

dimpled cheeks.

His skin was thick and dimpled, like an orange peel.

Para saber

Fosterage, or fostering, the practice of a family bringing up a child not their own, differs from adoption in that the child's parents, not the foster-parents, remain the acknowledged parents. In many modern western societies foster care can be organised by the state to care for children with troubled family backgrounds. In many pre-modern societies fosterage was a form of patronage, whereby influential families cemented political relationships by bringing up each other's children, similar to arranged marriages, also based on dynastic or alliance calculations.

This practice was once common in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.

Fostering: acoger.

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Fuentes

The Jungle Book