Chloe Wofford

Más abajo ponemos una entrevista a Toni Morrison, autora de Beloved, y de The Bluest Eye. Morrison había leído a Hemingway, Faulkner o Willa Cather pero tenían trazos racistas. ¿Su autor favorito? James Baldwin. También había leído a Chinua Achebe y a Zora Neale Hurston, pero ninguno de ellos había escrito sobre el ser negro, el cómo se sentía ante el racismo, en una sociedad dominada por blancos. Y eso es lo que planteó Morrison en sus escritos: el sentimiento de inferioridad por tener otro color de piel.

También un vocabulario encontramos deadpan.

The Tigers of Mompracem

The Tigers of Mompracem es una novela de aventuras escrita por el italiano Emilio Salgari, y publicada en 1900. The Tigers of Mompracem  presenta a su célebre personaje, Sandokán.

… “Yanez!” the man with the turban exclaimed, spreading his arms in welcome.

“Sandokan!” replied the newcomer, the hint of an accent discernible in his voice. “brr! What a night from hell, little brother!”

“Come!”

They walked quickly to the hut and closed the door behind them. The newcomer removed the carbine from his shoulder and took of his cape. Sandokan filled two glasses with whisky and offered one to his friend.

“Drink, my good Yanez.”

“To your health, Sandokan.”

“To yours.”

They quickly drained their glasses and sat down at the table. The newcomer was European, a man in his early thirties, a little older than his friend. He was tall and well-built with pale skin and fine aristocratic features. He had thin lips, a black moustache, sharp blue eyes, and was renowned for having a strong will and quick wit.

“Well, Yanez,” Sandokan asked excitedly, “Did you see the young woman with the hair of gold?”

“No, but I haven´t come back empty handed. I´ve learned all you wanted to know and more.”

“You didn´t go to Labuan?”

Oysters

Las calles de Moscú fueron testigos del pequeño mendigo que junto a su padre pedían algunas monedas para sobrevivir. Al acomodarse frente al restaurant esperaban llamar la atención de los comensales que entraban y salían del lugar. Un cuento de Antón Chekhov, Oysters

I NEED no great effort of memory to recall, in every detail, the rainy autumn evening when I stood with my father in one of the more frequented streets of Moscow, and felt that I was gradually being overcome by a strange illness. I had no pain at all, but my legs were giving way under me, the words stuck in my throat, my head slipped weakly on one side . . . It seemed as though, in a moment, I must fall down and lose consciousness.

If I had been taken into a hospital at that minute, the doctors would have had to write over my bed: Fames, a disease which is not in the manuals of medicine.

Beside me on the pavement stood my father in a worn out summer overcoat and a serge cap, from which a bit of white padding was sticking out. On his feet he had big heavy goloshes. Afraid, vain man, that people would see that his feet were bare under his goloshes, he had drawn the tops of some old boots up round the calves of his legs.

This poor, foolish, queer creature, whom I loved the more warmly the more ragged and dirty his smart summer overcoat became, had come to Moscow, five months before, to look for a job as copying-clerk. For those five months he had been walking about Moscow looking for work, and it was only on that day that he had brought himself to go into the street to beg for assistance.

The 42nd Parallel

The 42nd Parallel forma parte de U.S.A. Trilogy, novelas escritas por John Dos Passos en 1930. La novela cubre el desarrollo histórico de la sociedad norteamericana en las tres primeras décadas del siglo 20.

Más abajo aclaramos que es Industrial Workers of the World y ponemos una foto de un salón fúnebre y una huelga en 1.900.

The Portrait of a Lady

El mayor de los caballeros, sentado junto a un collie, ya había bebido su té. Cerca de él caminaban otros dos hombres. El primero, de aproximadamente treinta y cinco años, tenía un rostro firme. El segundo era alto y su cara más bien enfermiza. La casa en la que estaban se extendía sobre la colina cerca del Támesis. El hombre mayor decidió no repetir su té. Párrafos de El retrato de una dama, de Henry James, en inglés…

En vocabulario aparece la palabra wicker

 

. . . The shadows on the perfect lawn were straight and angular; they were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep wicker-chair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and of two younger men strolling to and fro, in desultory talk, in front of him…