O
Pioneers! es una novela de 1913 de Willa
Cather, escrita mientras vivía en Nueva York. O Pioneers! es la primera novela de la trilogía Great Plains, seguida de The Song of the Lark (1915) y My
Ántonia (1918).
A continuación unos párrafos en inglés y en vocabulario
feed store y whimpering.
Y una prenda que cayó en desuso: el ulster
Más abajo una foto histórica: suecos saliendo del puerto de Goteburgo rumbo a norteamérica.
Párrafos
One January day,
thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska
tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was
curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray
prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the
tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight,
and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the
open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind
blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road,
now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain
“elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumberyard and the horse pond at
the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden
buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the
feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with
trampled snow, but at two o’clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come
back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children
were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few
rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down
to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives to town, and now and then
a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At
the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm
wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was quiet,
for there would not be another train in until night.
On the sidewalk
in front of one of the stores sat a little Swede boy, crying bitterly. He was
about five years old. His black cloth coat was much too big for him and made
him look like a little old man. His shrunken brown flannel dress had been
washed many times and left a long stretch of stocking between the hem of his
skirt and the tops of his clumsy, copper-toed shoes. His cap was pulled down
over his ears; his nose and his chubby cheeks were chapped and red with cold.
He cried quietly, and the few people who hurried by did not notice him. He was
afraid to stop any one, afraid to go into the store and ask for help, so he sat
wringing his long sleeves and looking up a telegraph pole beside him,
whimpering, “My kitten, oh, my kitten! Her will fweeze!” At the top of the pole
crouched a shivering gray kitten, mewing faintly and clinging desperately to
the wood with her claws. The boy had been left at the store while his sister
went to the doctor’s office, and in her absence a dog had chased his kitten up
the pole. The little creature had never been so high before, and she was too
frightened to move. Her master was sunk in despair. He was a little country
boy, and this village was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where
people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts. He always felt shy and awkward
here, and wanted to hide behind things for fear someone might laugh at him.
Just now, he was too unhappy to care who laughed. At last he seemed to see a
ray of hope: his sister was coming, and he got up and ran toward her in his
heavy shoes.
His sister was a
tall, strong girl, and she walked rapidly and resolutely, as if she knew
exactly where she was going and what she was going to do next. She wore a man’s
long ulster
(not as if it were an affliction, but as if it were very comfortable and
belonged to her; carried it like a young soldier), and a round plush cap, tied
down with a thick veil. She had a serious, thoughtful face, and her clear, deep
blue eyes were fixed intently on the distance, without seeming to see anything,
as if she were in trouble. She did not notice the little boy until he pulled
her by the coat. Then she stopped short and stooped down to wipe his wet face.
“Why, Emil! I told you to stay in the store
and not to come out. What is the matter with you?”
“My kitten,
sister, my kitten! A man put her out, and a dog chased her up there.” His
forefinger, projecting from the sleeve of his coat, pointed up to the wretched
little creature on the pole… (O Pioneers!
by Willa Cather)Inmigrantes saliendo de Goteburgo rumbo a los Estados Unidos e Inglaterra
Vocabulario
Feed store: forrajería.
Whimpering:
llorando.
Para saber
Ulster:
el Ulster fue originalmente un
sobretodo de trabajo de la época victoriana, con capa y mangas. Se lo ve frecuentemente en novelas como las de Charles
Dickens, y las historias de Sherlock
Holmes: A Study in Scarlet, The
Sign of the Four, A Scandal in
Bohemia, The Adventure of the Blue
Carbuncle y The Adventure of the
Noble Bachelor.De moda en 1903: el Ulster
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