The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight

ПРАКТИКУМ

ПО АНАЛИТИЧЕСКОМУ ЧТЕНИЮ

ДЛЯ СТУДЕНТОВ

КУРСА

Сыктывкар

ПЕЧАТАЕТСЯ ПО РЕШЕНИЮ РЕДАКЦИОННО-ИЗДАТЕЛЬСКОГО СОВЕТА КОМИ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО ПЕДАГОГИЧЕСКОГО ИНСТИТУТА ОТ ...

Рекомендовано к изданию заседанием кафедры

английского языка КГПИ от 18.12.2007, протокол № 4

Рецензент: Шуляк Д.И., ст. преподаватель кафедры английского языка

Никонова Л.К.

Практикум по аналитическому чтению для студентов 5 курса: Учебно-методическое пособие для студентов 5 курса/ Л.К. Никонова. - 2-е изд., испр. и доп. – Сыктывкар: Изд-во Коми пединститута, 2008. - 100 с.

Практикум по аналитическому чтению представляет 2-ое издание – переработанное и дополненное. Практикум включает отрывки из классической и современной литературы Англии, Америки и Австралии, представляющие различные жанры.

Основная цель практикума – обучение приемам стилистического анализа и умению восприятия художественного текста в его целостности, в единстве формы и содержания.

© Никонова Л.К., 2008

© Коми государственный педагогический институт, 2008

PART ONE

PROSE

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. His wide travels and adventurous life provided the background for his many short stories and novels. His most celebrated of novels are “The Sun Also Rises” (1926), set in Paris and Spain; “A Farewell To Arms” (1929), set in Italy during World War I; “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940) about the Spanish Civil war; and “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952), set in Cuba, for which Hemingway won the Nobel and Pulitzer prize for literature.

Hemingway's manner is characterized by deep psychological insight into the human nature. He early established himself as the master of a new style: laconic and somewhat dry. His stories seem very simple, often there are very few events. But we feel that there is much behind the event that he describes, that the whole life of the character leads to this event. “A writer must know more, much more about his characters than appears in the story”, Hemingway pointed out. That is the idea of Stanislavsky: an actor who says only two words on the stage must know everything about the character whose role he is playing. A story can be compared to an iceberg. People see only one part of it; the other part, seven times as big, is under the water. But it is the part under the water that gives power to the part that can be seen. The more you know about the characters, the greater part is under the water; the more powerful your iceberg will be.

In Hemingway's prose one may find various cases of reiteration, parallel constructions and key-words in great number. Implicating or connective, every repeated word or syntactical structure is charged with new meaning.

The selection suggested for discussion is the writer's tribute to the Americans who died defending the cause of the Spanish Revolution.

On the American Dead in Spain*

The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight (1). Snow blows through the olive groves, sifting against the tree roots. Snow drifts over the mounds with the small headboards**. (When there was time for headboards.) The olive trees are thin in the cold wind because their lower branches were once cut to cover tanks, and the dead sleep cold in the small hills over the Jarama River. It was cold that February when they died there and since then the dead have not noticed the changes of the seasons.

It is two years now since the Lincoln Battalion (2) held for four and a half months along the heights of the Jarama, and the first American dead have been a part of the earth of Spain for a long time now.

The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight and they will sleep cold all this winter as the earth sleeps with them. But in the spring the rain will come to make the earth kind again. The wind will blow soft over the hills from the south. The black trees will come to life with small green leaves, and there will be blossoms on the apple trees along the Jarama River. This spring the dead will feel the earth beginning to live again.

For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die. Each winter it will seem to die and each spring it will come alive again. Our dead will live with it forever.

Just as the earth can never die, neither will those who have ever been free return to slavery. The peasants who work the earth where our dead lie know what these dead died for. There was time during the war for them to learn these things, and there is forever for them to remember them in (3).

Our dead live in the hearts and the minds of the Spanish peasant, of the Spanish workers, of all the good simple honest people who believed in and fought for the Spanish republic. And as long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.

The fascists may spread over the land, blasting their way with weight of metal brought from other countries (4). They may advance aided by traitors and cowards. They may destroy cities and villages and try to hold the people in slavery. But you cannot hold any people in slavery.

The Spanish people will rise again as they have always risen before against tyranny.

The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever (5). It will outlive all systems of tyranny.

Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.

February 14, 1939 Ernest Hemingway

*Hemingway E For Whom the Bell Tolls. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981, pp. 29-30.

**heardboard (here) - a small board on the grave with the name of the buried soldier.

Commentary*

The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight.

Sleep cold is a double predicate, which is a kind of fusion of a simple verbal and a compound nominal predicate. The adjective cold serving as a predicative is related to the subject. This adjective, however, is associated with other words of the passage bearing the notion of cold and death. One must also bear in mind that the use of adjectives with Hemingway is of particular importance. Generally he uses them sparingly, though when he does use them, they are mostly short one-syllable words carrying factual objective information or implicative value.