Переведите тексты письменно. Text 1. The Jefferson Memorial

Text 1. The Jefferson Memorial

The lightness and openness of the Jefferson Memorial, the beauty and grace of its circular design, are enhanced by its setting at the edge of a lagoon surrounded by a wider circle of cherry trees. The building reflects Jefferson’s respect for classical architecture which he introduced in his design for the University of Virginia and his own home at Monticello. Completed in 1943, the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth, the memorial is a fitting tribute to this multi-talented man – architect, inventor, diplomat, author of the nation’s Declaration of Independence, and its third president.

The interior walls of the white marble building are inscribed with ringing words of freedom from Jefferson’s writings, reflecting the hopes and aspirations of the nation’s founders:

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man...” “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men...”

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Among his many accomplishments, he wished to be remembered most of all as the author of this document and as a founding father of the University of Virginia.

Text 2. Carl Sandburg

On a train trip from Chicago to Pasadena, the fourth stop is the small town of Galesburg, Illinois, site of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and birthplace of poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Like the great President whom he chronicled in a six-volume history, Sandburg had the habits of an ordinary man, but in no way was he ordinary. Both believed in the natural goodness of common men and women and in their capacity to build a just society.

The son of Swedish immigrants, Sandburg’s interest in writing was evident at an early age, and he read anything he could get his hands on – even the biographies of famous persons distributed with packages of cigarettes. In his autobiography Always the Young Strangers, Sandburg tells us that he “learned by heart and never forgot” verses of Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

At 13 after finishing the eighth grade, he left school to help out at home. He worked as a helper in a drugstore, carried water for a road crew, sold refreshments and rented out boats at a resort, shifted scenery in a theater, and worked at a racetrack, a bottling plant, a brickyard, and a pottery. Looking back at his youth, Sandburg wrote: “In those years as a boy in that prairie town, I got education in scraps and pieces of many kinds, not knowing that they were part of my education. I met people in Galesburg who were puzzling to me, and later when I read Shakespeare, I found these same people were puzzling him.”

At 19 dissatisfied with these odd jobs, Sandburg jumped a train and traveled throughout the Midwest as a hobo.1 When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, he enlisted in the army and was sent to Puerto Rico. When asked what he had learned from the experience, his answer was “...more than I can use...”; but indeed he did draw upon these experiences in his later writings.

Following the war, Sandburg entered college in Galesburg supporting himself by working as a fireman. He became a member of a group called the Poor Writers’ Club which met weekly to read aloud Turgenev, Kipling, and Twain as well as their own writings. He published his first collection of verse, dedicated to his mother, and typeset and printed it in his professor's basement.

Sandburg left college before graduation to go back to hoboing. He worked at odd jobs including writing political pamphlets for a socialist political party in Wisconsin where he met and fell in love with Lillian Steichen. When they got married in 1908, the word “obey” was dropped from the wedding vows; and they signed a legal agreement that the marriage could be terminated if either wished to do so – an unusual beginning for a marriage that was to last nearly sixty years.

Sandburg became nationally known when some of his work was published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse; and in 1914, he won $200 for his poem “Chicago”. Some critics appreciated his work saying that he shaped poetry like a sculptor shapes clay while others called his work “ugly and distorted” and his language “unrefined”.

Sandburg's poetry fell into three categories: 1) the big city poems, 2) the poems of social conscience and the common man, and 3) the philosophical and lyrical poems. Chicago had an indelible effect upon Sandburg, and he wrote again and again about its streets, its buildings, its people, and its soul. His book Chicago Poems, published in 1916, treats the city in the human context speculating about the fate of the ordinary people. In his poems of social conscience, Sandburg is the populist orator and political reformer. His long free verse poem The People, Yes, written in the middle of The Great Depression, celebrates the strength and creativity of workers, the farmers, and the “little” people who make up “the masses”. But in his lyrical poems like Fog or Windsong, Sandburg creates word-pictures of experiences that moved him.

Sandburg won Pulitzer prizes for his Collected Poems (1950) and his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln (1926–1939). The first two volumes tell of Lincoln’s boyhood in the Midwest, and the remaining four volumes cover Lincoln’s Presidency during the Civil War, focusing on the human experience rather than on events. More than any other person, Sandburg is associated with the Lincoln story.

Although Sandburg’s roots were in the Middle West, he spent the last 22 years of his life in North Carolina on a large farm where his wife raised goats, and he wrote some of his major works. Though he moved easily among the great, Sandburg was always a man of the people. They loved him because they knew he loved them.

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