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English as she is Spoke: The Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English
Mark Twain
Synopsis "English as she is Spoke: The Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English"
Originally conceived as a Portuguese-English phrase book, this literary curiosity was written by an author who, remarkably, spoke no English. With the help of a pair of dictionaries, Pedro Carolino translated a series of expressions from his native Portuguese into French and from French into English. The result is a volume of unintentional hilarity, praised by Mark Twain in his appreciative Introduction for its "miraculous stupidities."Imagine the Portuguese traveler, with this book in hand, offering grooming tips, "Dress your hairs," making polite dinner conversation, "Like you the soup?" and inviting an acquaintance to take a walk, "Let us go to respire the air." The collection is organized into sections of familiar phrases, familiar dialogues, and familiar letters -- which might not strike the native English speaker as particularly familiar, concluding with a selection of humorous anecdotes.As Twain observed, "In this world of uncertainties, there is, at any rate, one thing which may be pretty confidently set down as a certainty: and that is, that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the English language lasts. Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naïvete are as supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare's sublimities."
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, más conocido como Mark Twain, ha pasado a la historia de la literatura gracias al ingenio, humor y picardía que destila su obra. A menudo considerado el Dickens estadounidense, Twain fue periodista, tipógrafo, escritor y, sobre todo, un aventurero incansable. Su sed de aventuras lo llevó en un largo periplo lleno de experiencias: fue aprendiz de piloto, buscó fortuna en las minas de plata, recorrió el mundo dando conferencias y fue nombrado doctor honoris causa por la universidad de Oxford. Todo ello lo inspiró para empezar a escribir pequeños cuadernos de viaje que publicaba en la prensa. Se calcula que llegó a escribir más de 500 obras, entre las que destacan _Las aventuras de Huckelberry Finn_ y _Las aventuras de Tom Sawyer_: dos novelas en las que Twain evoca una infancia inocente y feliz, en la que brillan la ilusión y la rebeldía que preceden a la edad adulta. Mark Twain nació durante una de las apariciones del cometa Halley, y predijo que “se marcharía con él”. Efectivamente, el autor nos dejó el 21 de abril de 1910, a la estela de una nueva visita del cometa.
