V. Supplementary Reading. 1. Translate into Russian using a dictionary. 1. Translate into Russian using a dictionary

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1. Translate into Russian using a dictionary:

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MY BIOGRAPHY

(After Mark Twain)

 

I was born on the 30th of November 1835 in the village of Florida, Missouri. My father was John Marshall Clemens.

According to tradition some of my great-great-grand­parents were pirates and slave-traders – a respectable trade in the 16th century. In my time I wished to be a pi­rate myself.

My parents who had lived in Virginia moved to the South in the early thirtieth. I do not remember just when, for I was not born then and did not take any interest in such things. They had made a long and tiring journey be­fore they settled in Florida. The village contained a hun­dred people and when I was born I increased the population by one per cent. It had two streets, each about three hundred yards long, and a lot of lanes. Both the streets and the lanes were paved with the same material – black mud in wet times, deep dust in dry. Most of the houses were of wood – there were none of brick and none of stone. Everywhere around were fields and woods.

Not long ago someone sent me a picture of the house in which I had been born. I have always thought that it was a palace but I no longer think so and don't feel proud of it.

My uncle was a farmer and his place was in the country three miles from Florida. I have never met a better man than he was. He was a middle-aged man whose head was clear and whose heart was honest and simple. I stayed at his house for three months every year till I was thirteen years old. Nowhere else was I happier than at his house. He had eight children and owned about fourteen Negro slaves whom he had bought from other farmers. For a girl of fifteen he had paid but twelve dollars and gave her two dresses and a pair of shoes a year. A strong man had cost him seventy five dollars for clothes he got, two pairs of shoes and two suits a year. Everything cost not more than three dollars. My uncle and everyone on the farm treated the slaves kindly. All the Negroes on the farm were friends of ours and with those of our own age we were playmates. Since my childhood I have learned to like the black race and admire some of its fine qualities. In my school days nobody told me that it was wrong to sell and buy people. Everybody around owned slaves. Neither the local paper nor our school-teacher said anything against it. At church we heard that God had approved it. It is only much later that I realized all the horror of slavery.

The country school was three miles from my uncle's farm. It stood in a forest and could take in about twenty five boys and girls. We attended school once or twice a week. No one went home at dinner time. All the pupils brought something to eat in baskets: some sandwiches, some fruit or something else, sat in the shade of the trees and ate it.

My first visit to school was when I was seven. A girl of fifteen asked me, "Do you chew tobacco?" I answered that I had never tried. She addressed all the children around and said: "Here is a boy seven years old who can't chew tobacco." By the effect which this produced I realized that it was something shameful not to chew tobacco. I was cruelly ashamed of myself. I tried to reform but I only made myself sick. I was not able to learn to chew tobacco and remained a boy with a poor reputation.

I was a sickly child and lived mainly on medicine the first seven years of my life. I asked my mother if she had worried about me. "Yes, the whole time," she said.

When I was twelve years old my father died. After my father's death our family was left penniless. I was taken from school at once and placed in the office of a local newspaper as printer's apprentice where I was to receive board and clothes but no money. The clothes consisted of nothing else but two suits a year, but Mr. Amend (my master, the owner of the paper) never bought anything for me so long as his own clothes held out.

I was about half as big as Mr. Amend; therefore his shirts gave me the sense of living in a tent and I had to turn up his trousers to my ears to make them short enough.

For ten years I worked in print shops of various cities. I started my journalistic life as a reporter on a newspaper in San-Francisco. It was then that I began to sign my pub­lications by my penname Mark Twain. At nine in the morning I had to be at the police court for an hour and make a brief history of the incidents of the night before. At night I visited the six theatres of the city one after an­other, seven days in the week. After a day of hard work from 9 a.m. till 11 p.m. I took my pen and tried to cover with words and phrases as many pages as I could. It took me half the night.

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