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четверг, 27 декабря 2012 г.
вторник, 25 декабря 2012 г.
W.S.Maugham "In a Strange Land”
W.S.Maugham "In a Strange Land”
Interpretation
Born in Paris, of Irish
ancestry, Somerset Maugham was to lead a fascinating life and would become
famous for his mastery of short evocative stories that were often set in the
more obscure and remote areas of the British Empire. Suffering from a bad
stammer, he received a classic public school education at King's school in
Canterbury, Kent. Rather more unconventionally he studied at Heidelburg
university where he read philosophy and literature. He then studied in London,
eventually qualifying as a surgeon at St Thomas's hospital. He conducted his
year's medical practice in the slums of the East End. It was here that he found
material for his first, rather lurid, novel Liza of Lambeth in 1897 and
much of the material for his critically acclaimed autobiographical novel Of
Human Bondage although this wasn't to be published until 1915.
Continuing with more
peacable travels, Maugham took to the South Seas, where he visited the island
of Tahiti and on which he based his novel The Moon and Sixpence.
Sickness would then force Maugham to return and remain in a Scottish
tubercoulosis sanatorium. However, on recovery, he returned to the Far East and
collected imperial information and experiences that would form the basis of
many short stories, plays and novels: East of Suez in 1922, Our
Betters in 1923 and The Letter in 1927, are amongst the better known
of these.
I think the title has only
direct meaning, dealing with a foreign country which is unfamiliar and odd to
you. The main character observed the behavior of old English who leave their
native land.
The story touches upon many
problems, but the major one, in my opinion, is love without borders.
The narrator stood at the hotel in Turkey where he met
Signore Niccolini - an English woman. She
was a house-keeper in service in a noble English family, and her husband Signor
Niccolini was a chef. Later the couple bought a hotel and after many years she continued
living there but without the husband. Signor Niccolini had died and his wife
adopted his sons and she never returned back to England. This story shocked the
narrator because it was strange for him to get accustomed to a place and lost
the contact with the relatives.
The main idea of the story
is connected with the fact that one should know one's roots. It is impossible to
grow into the foreign culture fully. Origin would give oneself away.
I would like to tell about Signora
Niccolini; she was an Englishwoman, living in Turkey for many years. She
described directly. She looked exactly like a house-keeper in a great English
house. She looked upon everyone who wasn’t English as a foreigner and therefore
as someone, almost imbecile, for whom allowances must be made. She ruled her
staff despotically, and everything about the hotel was clean and neat. Signora
Niccolini speak Turkish very well but her cockney accent made her quite recognized
for the narrator.
The story seems to me very
interesting, because of the way it is organized and the number of the themes
that are mentioned there.
When
you are in love with someone who belongs to your usual environment, you somehow
know them and things are easier. However, when you fall in love with a
stranger—who may even be a foreigner—things are quite different. People that have a mentality influenced by traditions are different from
people that are dominated by modernism for example, and if you are in love with
someone who belongs to a family with a mentality totally different to yours,
things will be quite difficult between you two. What is really important in a relationship is the other person’s
personality. If their personality fits with yours, you’ll be happy!
However,
if you are in love with a foreigner, you’ll have more obstacles and difficulties
in order to find out who they really are, because of all the problems we have
already examined and many others. So, do your best in order to learn everything
you can about the unknown person before getting too involved with them, without
really understanding who you are with.
понедельник, 10 декабря 2012 г.
вторник, 4 декабря 2012 г.
Rendering 12
The editorial
published on the website of the newspaper "The New York Times” on November
1, 2012 is headlined “As Wolves’ Numbers Rise, So Does Friction BetweenGuardians and Hunters’’. The author (STEVEN YACCINO) gives us
some details about the situation in the United States. The article touches upon
the fact that Ms. Dowler cares for five
full-grown purebreds. She bottle-fed them as pups and howls with them at
passing sirens. The other day she gave one breath mints through a hole in the
fence, passing it directly from her lips to his.
It was revealed
that Hers seems a fairy tale world
compared with the legal dogfights occurring beyond these kennels. Out there,
Wisconsin is three weeks into its first wolf-hunting season, sanctioned by the
State Legislature in April. Minnesota is scheduled to begin its first
registered wolf hunt this weekend.Moreover, the legalization of wolf hunting in
both states was devised to manage a rebounding wolf population after the
federal government stopped listing the species as endangered in the region last
year. Both have drawn lawsuits from local and national animal rights groups
that fear the undoing of nearly four decades of work to restore a healthy
number of wolves.
The article carries a lot of comment on the
fact that since the wolf hunt began last month, at least 42 have been killed in
Wisconsin. All told, officials expect 600 wolves will die at the hands of
hunters and trappers in the two states before spring. Wolves were once so numerous in the United States that ranchers and
government agencies paid people to kill them. By the time the Endangered
Species Act began protecting wolves in 1973, they were nearing extinction in
the lower 48 states. Today, wolf numbers have grown to 4,000 and exceeded
recovery goals in the western Great Lakes area, according to federal estimates.
In addition,
Wisconsin humane groups have filed a lawsuit to prohibit the use of dogs for
hunting wolves, calling it cruel. Minnesota advocates also took legal action
against their state in an attempt to stop its hunt, which lasts from Nov. 3 to
Jan. 31. And Minnesota’s Chippewa tribes have banned wolf hunting and trapping
on its reservation lands.
The main purpose of the article is to give the
reader some information about animal
rights groups have little sympathy for the hunters. They argue that the state
kill quotas do not properly account for other ways that wolves can die, like
poaching and vehicular collisions and the killing of the animals by farmers and
ranchers protecting their livestock. Those additional causes, they say, could
put the animals at risk again.
Analyzing the situation in the word it is
necessary to emphasize that people absolutely love wolves or they absolutely hate them. There are few
people in the middle.
So many animals are now in danger of extinction that a list is kept in a Red
Book. unfortunately, the list gets longer every year.We should do something, we
can’t wait. We mustn’t wait!
понедельник, 3 декабря 2012 г.
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