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2.Translate in written form.
(From “Man and Superman”
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by B.Shaw )
Whether Ann is good-looking or not depends upon your taste;
also and perhaps chiefly on your age and sex. To Octavius she is an
enchantingly beautiful woman, in whose presence the world becomes
transfigured, and the puny limits of individual consciousness are
suddenly made infinite by a mystic memory of the whole life of the
race to its beginnings in the east, or even back to the paradise from
which it fell. She is to him the reality of romance, the inner good
sense of nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul,
the abolition of time, place, and circumstance, the etherealization of
his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the
revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the
dogmas. To her mother she is, to put it as moderately as possible,
nothing whatever of the kind. Not that Octavius’s admiration is in any
way ridiculous or discreditable. Ann is a well formed creature, as far
as that goes; and she is perfectly ladylike, graceful, and comely, with
ensnaring eyes and hair. Besides, instead of making herself an
eyesore, like her mother, she has devised a mourning costume of
black and violet silk which does honor to her late father and reveals
the family tradition of brave unconventionality by which Ramsden
sets such store.
But all this is beside the point as an explanation of Ann’s
charm. Turn up her nose, give a cast to her eye, replace her black and
violet confection by the apron and feathers of a flower girl, strike all
the aitches out of her speech, and Ann will still make men dream.
Vitality is as common as humanity; but, like humanity, it sometimes
rises to genius; and Ann is one of the vital geniuses. Not at all, if you
please, an oversexed person: that is a vital defect, not a true excess.
She is a perfectly respectable, perfectly self-controlled woman, and
looks it; though her pose is fashionably frank and impulsive. She
inspires confidence as a person who will do nothing she does not
mean to do; also some fear, perhaps, as a woman who will probably
do everything she means to do without taking more account of other
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Текст друкується за виданням B.Shaw. Man and Superman. - London:
Penguin Books, 1980
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