The Necklace

The Necklace o The Diamond Necklace es un cuento del escritor francés Guy de Maupassant, de 1884. Fue publicado en 1884 en el periódico Le Gaulois y tiene un final inesperado. Para saber: boudoir,  soup-tureen,  pot-au-feu…

SHE was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born in a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded, by any rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public Instruction.

She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was as unhappy as though she had really fallen from her proper station; since with women there is neither caste nor rank; and beauty, grace, and charm act instead of family and birth. Natural fineness, instinct for what is elegant, suppleness of wit, are the sole hierarchy, and make from women of the people the equals of the very greatest ladies.

The Bet

The Bet (La apuesta) es un cuento de 1889 del escritor ruso Antón Chekhov, sobre un banquero y un joven abogado que hacen una apuesta sobre si la pena de muerte es mejor o peor que la cadena perpetua.

The Bet fue incluida en el volúmen 4 de Chekhov's Collected Works, publicado en 1899–1901 por Adolf Marks. "Mientras leía los originales se me ocurrió que el final era malo, que era demasiado frío y cruel", explicando sobre su omisión en 1903.

En vocabulario roan

Al final un poco sobre Antón Chekhov

 

Desiree´s Baby

Désirée’s Baby es un cuento de Kate Chopin, publicado en 1893 en la revista Vogue. “It is about miscegenation in Creole Louisiana during the antebellum period”, dice la descripción del cuento (Miscegenation es la mezcla de grupos raciales).

Más abajo algo sobre Louisiana, y algunos términos usados en el cuento (corbeille, shudder, yellow nurse). Tienen que leer sobre corbeille porque es un término que ya casi no se usa más y es una lectura casi obligada para los investigadores del corazón.

Al final un video para no perderse, sobre la vida de la autora, Kate Chopin.

The Little Match Girl

"The Little Match Girl" (La pequeña de los fósforos) es una historia del poeta y autor danés Hans Christian Andersen. La historia, sobre los sueños de una niña, fue publicada por primera vez en 1845. Ha sido adaptada a varios medios, incluyendo un film animado y un musical para television.

Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening—the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet. When she left home she had slippers on, it is true; but what was the good of that? They were very large slippers, which her mother had until then worn; so large were they; and the poor little thing lost them as she struggled across the street, because of two carriages that rolled by extremely fast.

One slipper was nowhere to be found; the other had been laid hold of by an urchin, and off he ran with it; he thought it would do capitally for a cradle when he some day or other should have children himself. So the little maiden walked on with her tiny naked feet, that were quite red and blue from cold. She carried a quantity of matches in an old apron, and she held a bundle of them in her hand. Nobody had bought anything of her the whole livelong day; no one had given her a single farthing.

Fat and Thin

Fat and Thin fue publicada en 1883. Su autor es Anton Chekhov...

Two friends—one a fat man and the other a thin man—met at the Nikolaevsky station. The fat man had just dined in the station and his greasy lips shone like ripe cherries. He smelt of sherry and fleur d'orange. The thin man had just slipped out of the train and was laden with suitcase, bundles, and bandboxes. He smelt of ham and coffee grounds. A thin woman with a long chin, his wife, and a tall schoolboy with one eye screwed up came into view behind his back.

"Porfiry," cried the fat man on seeing the thin man. "Is it you?

My dear fellow! How many summers, how many winters!"

"Holy saints!" cried the thin man in amazement. "Misha! The friend of my childhood! Where have you dropped from?"

The friends kissed each other three times, and gazed at each other with eyes full of tears. Both were agreeably astounded.

"My dear boy!" began the thin man after the kissing. "This is unexpected! This is a surprise! Come have a good look at me! Just as handsome as I used to be! Just as great a darling and a dandy! Good gracious me! Well, and how are you? Made your fortune? Married? I am married as you see. . . . This is my wife Luise, her maiden name was Vantsenbach . . . of the Lutheran persuasion. . . . And this is my son Nafanail, a schoolboy in the third class. This is the friend of my childhood, Nafanya. We were boys at school together!"

To Build a Fire

It is very dangerous not to listen to the signs of nature especially when you are out in the wild and you are the only human being around. From the American writer Jack London, the short story To Build a Fire…

 Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland.  It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch.  It was nine o’clock.  There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky.  It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible dark over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun.  This fact did not worry the man.  He was used to the lack of sun.  It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.

Bartleby, the Scrivener

A Story of Wall-Street

I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my activities for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate several histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I ignore the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of. While of other law-copyists I might write the complete life, of Bartleby nothing of that sort can be done. I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in his case those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report which will appear in the sequel.

The Offshore Pirate

The Offshore Pirate es un cuento de F. S. Fitzgerald, de Flappers and Philosophers. Esta historia representa la extraordinaria capacidad de Fitzgerald de crear algo bueno en pocas páginas…

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea—if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.

She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.

A Chameleon

A Chameleon (Un camaleón) es un cuento de Anton Chekhov. El oficial cambia de opinión de acuerdo a la conveniencia del momento. Todo un camaleón.

En vocabulario buscamos muzzle y reemplazamos forementioned para facilitar la lectura.

Más abajo ponemos una foto de la década de 1870 de un cargamento de madera.

 

… and sees a dog, moving on three legs and looking about her, run out of Pitchugin's timber-yard.

 

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.

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher es un cuento de Edgar Allan Poe. Fue publicado en setiembre de 1839. Aunque Poe escribió su cuento antes de la invención de la moderna ciencia de la psicología la condición de Roderick puede ser descripta así: hiperestesia, hipocondrismo, y ansiedad.

Más abajo ponemos unos párrafos en inglés con el vocabulario correspondiente.

Hansel and Gretel

Hansel y Gretel es un conocido cuento de hadas de origen alemán, registrado por los hermanos Grimm y publicado en 1812. Hansel y Gretel son unos jóvenes hermanos amenazados por una bruja caníbal que viven en lo profundo del bosque en una casa construida con pastelería y confitería. Los dos niños salvan sus vidas burlándose de ella.

Más abajo ponemos el resumen de la historia, con una parte en inglés para practicar el idioma. También pusimos unos párrafos de la historia.

En vocabulario encontramos outwitting y una ilustración de 1909.