¿Qué libros me recomiendan?

Un adolescente preguntaba hace unos días: ¿qué libros me recomendarían? Me gusta aprender algo de las novelas.

Mi recomendación fue que leyera “Las Aventuras de Huckleberry Finn”, de Mark Twain, “La Isla del Tesoro”, de Robert Louis Stevenson, o “Ivanhoe”, de Walter Scott. Tres novelas que leí en inglés y castellano, en diversos períodos de mi vida, y que disfruté enormemente.

¿Qué tiene Huckleberry Finn? Pues tiene aventuras diversas de un chico en su viaje por el Mississippi. Solo que éste viaje lo realiza en una balsa, en el siglo XIX, ayudando a su amigo, esclavo, a llegar a la libertad. Ya pueden imaginarse la historia. Huck, como se le conoce, no solo se las ingenia para atravesar los condados esclavistas del sur de Estados Unidos sino que además se rebela contra las ideas de la época que compartían la esclavitud y el hecho de considerar a los negros como animales. En una parte de la novela Huck confiesa que prefiere ser condenado y excluido de sus pares que permitir que su amigo sea esclavizado. Admirable, un chico admirable y valiente.

La Palabra que Faltaba: Enfermedades en “Tres Hombres en un Bote”

Los protagonistas de “Tres Hombres en un Bote” sienten que son perseguidos por toda clase de enfermedades. Algunas de estas “plagas” son conocidas otras no tanto. En este artículo definimos algunos términos.

“I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages.  I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too ...”

Danza de San Vito (Saint Vitus' dance): desorden nervioso caracterizado por movimientos involuntarios del cuerpo.

La enfermedad de Bright (Bright's disease): enfermedad de los riñones. Se nota por la presencia de albúmina serum en la orina.

Rodilla del ama de casa (Housemaid's knee): hinchamiento de la bursa al frente de la patella justo debajo de la piel causada por un trauma tal como arrodillarse excesivamente.  

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.

Three Men in a Boat VI: Anecdotes

He paid for the whole series but could not eat anything but some biscuits …

Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed happy, either—seemed discontented like.

At six, they came and told him dinner was ready.  The announcement aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt that there was some of that two-pound-five to be worked off, and he held on to ropes and things and went down.  A pleasant odour of onions and hot ham, mingled with fried fish and greens, greeted him at the bottom of the ladder; and then the steward came up with an oily smile, and said:

“What can I get you, sir?”

“Get me out of this,” was the feeble reply.

And they ran him up quick, and propped him up, over to leeward, and left him.

For the next four days he lived a simple and blameless life on thin captain’s biscuits (I mean that the biscuits were thin, not the captain) and soda-water; but, towards Saturday, he got uppish, and went in for weak tea and dry toast, and on Monday he was gorging himself on chicken broth.  He left the ship on Tuesday, and as it steamed away from the landing-stage he gazed after it regretfully.

Three Men in a Boat V: Some Experiences

They decided that they needed a rest but a short sea journey was not good …

You start on Monday with the idea implanted in your bosom that you are going to enjoy yourself.  You wave an airy adieu to the boys on shore, light your biggest pipe, and swagger about the deck as if you were Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and Christopher Columbus all rolled into one.  On Tuesday, you wish you hadn’t come.  On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, you wish you were dead.  On Saturday, you are able to swallow a little beef tea, and to sit up on deck, and answer with a wan, sweet smile when kind-hearted people ask you how you feel now.  On Sunday, you begin to walk about again, and take solid food.  And on Monday morning, as, with your bag and umbrella in your hand, you stand by the gunwale, waiting to step ashore, you begin to thoroughly like it.

I remember my brother-in-law going for a short sea trip once, for the benefit of his health.  He took a return berth from London to Liverpool; and when he got to Liverpool, the only thing he was anxious about was to sell that return ticket.

It was offered round the town at a tremendous reduction, so I am told; and was eventually sold for eighteenpence to a bilious-looking youth who had just been advised by his medical men to go to the sea-side, and take exercise.

La lectura del lunes, que debió haber sido el domingo: The Life of Pi

The Life of Pi es la novela de Yann Martel, publicada en 2001. A continuación unos párrafos para saborear su contenido.

Mi sufrimiento me dejó triste y pensativo.

Los estudios académicos y la lenta práctica de la religión me devolvieron a la vida. He mantenido lo que la gente llama extrañas prácticas religiosas. Después de un año de secundaria asistí a la Universidad de Toronto e hice dos especializaciones: estudios religiosos y zoología. Mi tesis en religión se basaba en la teoría cosmogónica de Issac Luria, el gran Cabalista del siglo XVI de Safed. Mi tesis de zoología era sobre el análisis funcional de la glándula tiroidea del oso perezoso de tres dedos. . .

Nunca había tenido problemas con mis compañeros de ciencia. Los científicos son un grupo de gente amigable, trabajadora, atea, y bebedora de cerveza cuyas mentes están preocupadas por el sexo, el ajedrez y el beisbol cuando no están haciendo ciencia. Yo fui un muy buen estudiante, si puedo decirlo. Estuve primero en St Michael´s por cuatro años. Obtuve todos los premios posibles para un estudiante del Departamento de Zoología. Si no obtuve ninguno del Departamento de Estudios Religiosos fue porque este no otorga ninguno. …

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

Artículo relacionado

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