| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: giving it a numerical or mechanical character.
(3) This, however, is not one of the greatest difficulties of the
translator; much greater is that which arises from the restriction of the
use of the genders. Men and women in English are masculine and feminine,
and there is a similar distinction of sex in the words denoting animals;
but all things else, whether outward objects or abstract ideas, are
relegated to the class of neuters. Hardly in some flight of poetry do we
ever endue any of them with the characteristics of a sentient being, and
then only by speaking of them in the feminine gender. The virtues may be
pictured in female forms, but they are not so described in language; a ship
is humorously supposed to be the sailor's bride; more doubtful are the
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith: have done with me.
(Singing.)
"We are the boys
That fears no noise
Where the thundering cannons roar." [Exeunt.]
ACT THE THIRD.
Enter HARDCASTLE, alone.
HARDCASTLE. What could my old friend Sir Charles mean by recommending
his son as the modestest young man in town? To me he appears the most
impudent piece of brass that ever spoke with a tongue. He has taken
possession of the easy chair by the fire-side already. He took off his
She Stoops to Conquer |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: that M. d'Espard was ruined, and where all, from the lowest to the
highest, refused the privileges of nobility to a nobleman without
money, because they were all ready to allow an enriched bourgeois to
usurp them. Thus the lack of communion between this family and other
persons was as much moral as it was physical.
In the father and the children alike, their personality harmonized
with the spirit within. M. d'Espard, at this time about fifty, might
have sat as a model to represent the aristocracy of birth in the
nineteenth century. He was slight and fair; there was in the outline
and general expression of his face a native distinction which spoke of
lofty sentiments, but it bore the impress of a deliberate coldness
|
