Sobre aprender un idioma

Relato de humor

De uno de los autores clásicos, Jerome K. Jerome, un relato humorístico, Sobre aprender un idioma, con la estructura de Tres hombres en un bote.

Me tendió un pequeño libro encuadernado en tela roja. Era una guía de conversación en inglés para el uso de los viajeros alemanes. Comenzaba «En un bote a vapor» y terminaba «En la casa del doctor.» Su capítulo más largo estaba dedicado a la conversación en un vagón de ferrocarril, entre, aparentemente, un compartimento de peleadores y malos lunáticos:

 — ¿No puede alejarse un poco? Es imposible, señora. Mi vecino, aquí, es muy gordo.

— ¿No debemos tratar de arreglar nuestras piernas?

—Por favor tenga la bondad de mantener los codos abajo. 

—Por favor, no se moleste, señora, si mi hombro le acomoda (era imposible saber si intentaba ser sarcástico o no).

—Realmente debo pedirle que se mueva un poco, señora, apenas puedo respirar.

La idea del autor era, presumiblemente, que para entonces todo el grupo estuviera mezclado en el suelo. El capítulo concluyó con la frase: "¡Aquí estamos en nuestro destino, Dios sea agradecido!" Una exclamación piadosa que, bajo las circunstancias, debió tomar la forma de un coro.

Dentro y Fuera del Escenario

Determinado a ser actor.

Llega un momento en la vida de todo hombre cuando siente que nació para ser actor. Algo en su interior le dice que es el elegido, que un día sacudirá al mundo. Arde en deseo de mostrar cómo deben ser hechas las cosas y en ganar un salario de trescientos a la semana.

Esta clase de cosas generalmente llegan al hombre cuando tiene aproximadamente diecinueve años y dura hasta que tiene cerca de veinte. No lo sabe en ese momento. Piensa que tiene una inspiración, una clase de llamado solemne, que sería inmoral no prestar atención; y cuando encuentra que hay obstáculos en camino a su aparición en Hamlet como personaje principal en el West-end, se siente devastado.

Yo personalmente  me encontré en esta situación. Estaba en el teatro una noche para ver Romeo y Julieta cuando cruzó mi mente repentinamente que esa era mi vocación. Pensé que la actuación solo se trataba de hacer el amor en calzas a hermosas mujeres y me hice al propósito de dedicar mi vida a ello. Cuando comuniqué mi heroica resolución a mis amigos me dijeron algunas cosas. Me llamaron tonto y opinaron que siempre pensaron que era  una persona sensible, aunque fue la primera vez que escuché eso.

On the Stage-and Off

Determine to Become an Actor

THERE comes a time in every one's life when he feels he was born to be an actor. Something within him tells him that he is the coming man, and that one day he will electrify the world. Then he burns with a desire to show them how the thing's done, and to draw a salary of three hundred a week.

This sort of thing generally takes a man when he is about nineteen, and lasts till he is nearly twenty. But he doesn't know this at the time. He thinks he has got hold of an inspiration all to himself a kind of solemn "call," which it would be wicked to disregard; and when he finds that there are obstacles in the way of his immediate appearance as Hamlet at a leading West-end theater, he is blighted.

I myself caught it in the usual course. I was at the theater one evening to see Romeo and Juliet played, when it suddenly flashed across me that that was my vocation. I thought all acting was making love in tights to pretty women, and I determined to devote my life to it. When I communicated my heroic resolution to my friends, they reasoned with me. That is, they called me a fool; and then said that they had always thought me a sensible fellow, though that was the first I had ever heard of it.

Sobre Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome Klapka Jerome fue un escritor y humorista ingles nacido en 1859 y fallecido en 1927, más conocido por la novela cómica Tres Hombres en un Bote (1889).

Jerome nació en Caldmore, Walsall. Fue el cuarto hijo de Jerome Clapp (que luego se cambiaría a Jerome Clapp Jerome), ferretero y predicador, dedicado también a la arquitectura; y de Marguerite Jones. Tuvo dos hermanas, Paulina y Blandina, y un hermano, Milton, que murió a temprana edad.

Jerome fue registrado como su padre, Jerome Clapp Jerome, el Klapka aparecería en una variación más adelante (siguiendo al general húngaro exiliado György Klapka).

Después de malas inversiones en la industria minera local la familia se empobreció y los acreedores visitaban a la familia con frecuencia, experiencia que Jerome describió vívidamente en su autobiografía My Life and Times (1926). El joven Jerome asistió a la St Marylebone Grammar School. Deseaba dedicarse a la política o ser un hombre de letras pero la muerte de su padre a los 13 y de su madre a los 15 lo forzó a abandonar sus estudios y a buscar trabajo para mantenerse. Se empleó en London and North Western Railway donde levantaba el carbón que caía sobre las rieles, permaneciendo allí por cuatro años.

Decision to Travel

La gente frecuentemente confundía sus problemas de higado con pereza cuando era chico. Del clásico ingles Three Men in a Boat , de Jerome K. Jerome…

" ...We sat there for half-an-hour, describing to each other our maladies.  I explained to George and William Harris how I felt when I got up in the morning, and William Harris told us how he felt when he went to bed; and George stood on the mat, and gave us a clever and powerful piece of acting, illustrative of how he felt in the night.

George imagines he is ill; but there’s never anything really the matter with him, you know.

At this point, Mrs. Poppets knocked at the door to know if we were ready for supper.  We smiled sadly at one another, and said we supposed we had better try to swallow a bit.  Harris said a little something in one’s stomach often kept the disease in check; and Mrs. Poppets brought the tray in, and we drew up to the table, and toyed with a little steak and onions, and some rhubarb tart.

I must have been very weak at the time; because I know, after the first half-hour or so, I seemed to take no interest whatever in my food—an unusual thing for me—and I didn’t want any cheese.

This duty done, we refilled our glasses, lit our pipes, and resumed the discussion upon our state of health.  What it was that was actually the matter with us, we none of us could be sure of; but the unanimous opinion was that it—whatever it was—had been brought on by overwork.

“What we want is rest,” said Harris.

“Rest and a complete change,” said George.  “The overstrain upon our brains has produced a general depression throughout the system.  Change of scene, and absence of the necessity for thought, will restore the mental equilibrium.”

George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physicianary way of putting things.

I agreed with George, and suggested that we should seek out some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes—some half-forgotten corner, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world—some quaint-perched place on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.

Harris said he thought it would be sad.  He said he knew the sort of place I meant; where everybody went to bed at eight o’clock, and you couldn’t get a Referee for love or money, and had to walk ten miles to get your tobacco.

“No,” said Harris, “if you want rest and change, you can’t beat a sea trip.”

I objected to the sea trip strongly.  A sea trip does you good when you are going to have a couple of months of it, but, for a week, it is wicked…" (Paragraphs from Three Men in a Boat, de Jerome K. Jerome)

Vocabulario reemplazado

Hearth-rug  Fancies  Nook  Eyrie  Humpy  Baccy

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Enfermedades

Estamos leyendo Around the World in 80 Days donde encontramos información interesante

The Chemist´s

Después de examinarlo el doctor le dio una receta. Del clásico de Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat…

"…I did not open it.  I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in.  The man read it, and then handed it back.

He said he didn’t keep it.

I said:

“You are a chemist?”

He said:

“I am a chemist.  If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you.  Being only a chemist hampers me.”

I read the prescription.  It ran:

“1 lb. beefsteak, with

1 pt. bitter beer every 6 hours.

1 ten-mile walk every morning.

1 bed at 11 sharp every night.

And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”

I followed the directions, with the happy result—speaking for myself—that my life was preserved, and is still going on.

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being “a general disinclination to work of any kind.”

What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell.  From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it.  As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day.  They did not know, then, that it was my liver.  Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.

“Why, you skulking little devil, you,” they would say, “get up and do something for your living, can’t you?”—not knowing, of course, that I was ill.

And they didn’t give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the head.  And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often cured me—for the time being.  I have known one clump on the head have more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight away then and there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now.

You know, it often is so—those simple, old-fashioned remedies are sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary stuff." … (Adaptado del clásico de Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat)

Vocabulario:

Co-operative store: una tienda operada y controlada por un grupo en el que tienen una acción.

Oblige: satisfacerlo

Hamper: obstaculiza

Clump: golpe

El libro

Una de las cosas que más se alaba sobre Three Men in a Boat es como todo parece no tener época al ojo del lector moderno. Las bromas parecen actuales e inteligentes aún hoy en día.

Estamos terminando de leer Around the World in Eighty Days, de Julio Verne

Visit to the Doctor

Del clásico de la literatura inglesa Three Men in a Boat, de Jerome K. Jerome…

“…I sat and reflected. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all.  Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute.  I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back.  But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue.  I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

The Start

“…estábamos en  mi habitación, fumando, y hablando acerca de lo mal que nos sentíamos…” del clásico de Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat…

"…There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency.  We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were—bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course. Three Men in a Boat

We were all feeling squalid, and we were getting quite nervous about it.  Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of dizziness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that he had fits of dizziness too, and hardly knew what he was doing.  With me, it was my liver that was out of order.  I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order.  I had them all.

Tres Hombres en un Bote

La novela de Jerome K. Jerome, Tres Hombres en un Bote, comienza con la presentación de George, Harris, Jerome y Montmorency, un fox terrier. Los hombres pasan la noche fumando y discutiendo enfermedades que ellos imaginan que sufren.

“Estábamos hablando sobre nuestras enfermedades, en mi habitación, mientras fumábamos. Todos manifestábamos cierto mareo. En mi caso el problema era el hígado, cuyos síntomas descubrí al leer una propaganda. En cierta ocasión encontré un libro donde se detallaban las enfermedades. Al buscar que enfermedades podía tener descubrí que las tenía a todas, o casi todas. Difteria, fiebre tifoidea, la danza de San Vito, la enfermedad de Bright, cólera. Al parecer me salvaba de la rodilla del ama de casa, enfermedad que me pareció escurridiza. ¿Por qué no podía tenerla?”