Sister Carrie, el clásico de Theodore Dreiser, aquí
con algunos párrafos en ingles más fácil…
When Caroline
Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a
small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap
purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van
Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was
eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance
and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it
was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A flow of tears at her
mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars knocked by the
flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar
green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her
so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.
To be sure there
was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the
great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily.
Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What,
pray, is a few hours—a few hundred miles? She looked at the little paper
bearing her sister's address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape,
now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression
with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.
When a girl
leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into
saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan
standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the
circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning tricks, no
less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces
which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most
cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the
persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the
unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A
clamor of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human structures, appeal to
the astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to
whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe
into the unguarded ear! Unrecognized for what they are, their beauty, like
music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the simpler human
perceptions.
Caroline, or
Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by the family, was
possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis.
Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her
guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid
prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual
shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair
example of the middle American class—two generations removed from the emigrant.
Books were beyond her interest—knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive graces
she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully. Her hands
were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set flatly. And yet she
was interested in her charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life,
ambitious to gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was,
venturing to inspect the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some
vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject—the proper
penitent, humiliating at a woman's slipper.
"That,"
said a voice in her ear, "is one of the prettiest little resorts in
Wisconsin."
"Is
it?" she answered nervously.
The train was
just pulling out of Waukesha. For some time she had been conscious of a man
behind. She felt him observing her mass of hair. He had been moving, and with
natural intuition she felt a certain interest growing in that quarter. Her
maidenly reserve, and a certain sense of what was conventional under the
circumstances, called her to prevent and deny this familiarity, but the daring
and magnetism of the individual, born of past experiences and triumphs,
prevailed. She answered.
He leaned
forward to put his elbows upon the back of her seat and proceeded to make
himself vociferously agreeable.
"Yes, that
is a great resort for Chicago people. The hotels are excellent. You are not
familiar with this part of the country, are you?"
"Oh, yes, I
am," answered Carrie. "That is, I live at Columbia City. I have never
been through here, though."
"And so
this is your first visit to Chicago," he observed.
All the time she
was conscious of certain features out of the side of her eye. Flush, colourful
cheeks, a light moustache, a grey fedora hat. She now turned and looked upon
him in full, the instincts of self-protection and coquetry mingling confusedly
in her brain.
"I didn't
say that," she said.
"Oh,"
he answered, in a very pleasing way and with an assumed air of mistake, "I
thought you did."… (Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser, in easier
English)
Replaced vocabulary
clacked reconnoitre
groveling fidgetting volubly
swell
Vocabulary
Satchel: bolso con correa, frecuentemente llevado
cruzado al cuerpo.
Resources
Sister Carrie. Online text
Related post
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
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