No puedes figurarte lo interesante que es tomar a un ser humano y transformarlo en otro ser...

Me ha resultado una lectura interesante, por el planteamiento, la multitud de temas y preguntas que sugiere, y por su resolución, tan diferente de la de "My Fair Lady" e infinitamente más satisfactoria. El resto de la historia no necesita representarse en escena, y casi no tendría que ser contado si nuestras imaginaciones no estuvieran extraviadas por tantas obras románticas neciamente sentimentales, que nos han acostumbrado a que todo tiene que acabar bien, pese a la lógica y al sentido común.

Empecé a leer pensando que me encontraría una historia ligera, romántica y cómica... pero su ligereza es sólo aparente, de romántica no tiene nada, y, sí, la obra está repleta de ironía y mordacidad.

El poder y la importancia de la educación, y, sobre todo, de que con esa educación nos sea dado hacer algo. Con ese cambio, ¿seríamos más felices?, ¿no sería terrible tener en la mano la herramienta y no poder utilizarla?

—¡Ojalá pudiese volver a mis flores! Sería independiente de los dos, de usted y de mi padre, y de todo el mundo. ¿Por qué me quitó usted mi independencia? ¿Por qué me la dejaría yo? Ahora soy una esclava bonitamente vestida.

"If I can't have kindness, I'll have independence."

وای درباره‌ی این یکی حتماً باید بنویسم.
حس می‌کنم بین کتابخون‌های ایرانی خیلی شناخته‌شده نیست و واقعاً حیفه که این‌قدر کم خونده شده.

It was so much fun to read this delightful and witty play out loud while stomping all around the room.

______________________
You can take the snipe out of the gutter, but…

Pygmalion has been my favorite comic play since I first saw it on stage during my senior year in high school in 1965. In fact I have re-read it every few years ever since. The play contains many funny lines, but as someone who has contributed to 4 or 5 el-hi grammar books, here is my favorite:

I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

And you probably all know one of the most quoted lines from Pygmalion:

I’m a good girl, I am.

Now, some of you are probably thinking: Pseudonymous, you drunken. drooling. babbling. septuagenarian fool, those are lines from My Fair Lady. You must have forgotten to take your meds this morning. Well, to you I say: That’s a lie. I never drool when I am inebriated. Thanks for reminding me to take my meds though.

The truth is that Pygmalion is My Fair Lady without the characters bursting into songs about getting to the church on time and how women should be more like men. Pygmalion was first staged in 1913. My Fair Lady is an extremely faithful 1956 adaptation of Pygmalion with caterwauling added and an ending that George Bernard Shaw would have strongly disapproved of.

Pygmalion is a truly entertaining read, and you can read it on-line for free.

Do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

كاش بخش آخر رو نمينوشت. ياد داده چه جوري بايد ميخوندي، انتظار داشته چجوري فكر كني، فلان خط فلان حرف رو زده بوده بعدا ازش فلان جا استفاده كرده... انگار يه منتقد تفسير كرده، توضيح داده! :-/

“galatea never does quite like pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.”



“but you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. it’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.”

Hear a Yorkshireman, or worse,
Hear a Cornishman converse,
I'd rather hear a choir singing flat.
Chickens cackling in a barn Just like this one!
Eliza Garn! Henry I ask you, sir, what sort of word is that?
It's "Aoooow" and "Garn" that keep her in her place.
Not her wretched clothes and dirty face.
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction by now should be antique.
If you spoke as she does, sir, Instead of the way you do,
Why, you might be selling flowers, too.
An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him,
The moment he talks he makes some other
Englishman despise him.
One common language I'm afraid we'll never get.
Oh, why can't the English learn to set
A good example to people whose
English is painful to your ears?
The Scotch and the Irish leave you close to tears.
There even are places where English completely
disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years!
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian; the Greeks have taught their
Greek. In France every Frenchman knows
his language fro "A" to "Zed"
The French never care what they do, actually,
as long as they pronounce in properly.
Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.
And Hebrews learn it backwards,
which is absolutely frightening.
But use proper English you're regarded as a freak.
Why can't the English,
Why can't the English learn to speak?

-my fair lady (the musical)

******************

The original written publication of this play is just excellent on every level. Thumbs up. High five.

Absolutely gorgeous. This short play is not only written brilliantly, but delivers an insanely original plot. Yes, we are all familiar with the myth of Pygmalion: but to make of Pygmalion a world renowned phoneticist, of Galatea a low-born flower seller and of the sculpting the teaching of proper English.... that is genius. Thoroughly enjoyable read that packs a philosophical punch, I only wish I'll at least once get to see it on a stage.

La rena, la Spegna, la campegna...

https://youtu.be/uVmU3iANbgk

0,4 Estrellas


¿Ve usted a esa muchacha con su lenguaje canallesco y estropeado, ese lenguaje que no la dejará salir del arroyo en toda su vida? Pues bien: si fuese cosa de apuesta, yo me comprometería a hacerla pasar por una duquesa en la "soiree" o en la "Garden Party" de una embajada. Digo más: le podría proporcionar una colocación como dama de compañía o como una vendedora de una tienda elegante, para la que se exige mejores modos de expresarse.

Que feliz me ha hecho el Epilogo de esta obra!!


Siempre nos hemos quedado con la idea preconcebida, en la cual, una sumisa y arrepentida Eliza, vuelve sobre sus pasos y se queda junto al empedernido solterón Henry Higgins para siempre felices comiendo perdices..., aunque el sea un redomado déspota y la trate con la punta del pie. Como vemos en la película Pygmalion (1938) y más tarde en el Musical My Fair Lady (1964), adaptación de la obra por parte de Alan Jay Lerner.

Bernard Shaw luchó por su legítimo final, a pesar de que el productor de la obra (en su estreno, 1913) considerara que había que darle un final romántico entre ambos protagonistas; bueno, para gustos hay colores, así que yo me siento complacida con el final original (Sin Spoilers).

Dejando de lado, disfruto muchísimo con las dos adaptaciones, ambas son unas verdaderas joyas del cine.

Hay que separar las cosas, cine y Teatro van de la mano, aunque con cuidado.

#An ostentatious re-read

Pygmalion ends on an indefinite note. It does not make comprehensible the following aspects:

1) Do Eliza and Freddy in actuality tie the knot with each other?
2) Are their financial difficulties triumphed over?
3) Do they lead a contented and calm married life?

All these questions are discussed and elucidated in the Appendix which the dramatist has added to the play.

The Appendix is an indispensable appendage to the play; it is crucial for explaining much that is left indistinguishable and indefinite in the play itself.

At the termination of Act V, Higgins is astonished to hear that Eliza is going to marry Freddy, and he remarks rather contemptuously: “Pickering! Nonsense: she is going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy! Ha! ha! ha ! (He growls with hilarity as the play finishes).

After this speech Shaw does not say anything about the celebration of Eliza’s marriage with Freddy. Therefore, Shaw clears in the Appendix many murky points left unresolved in the play.

He begins the follow-up with these words: “The rest of the story need not be shown in action and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the rag shop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories.”

In this sequel, Shaw tells us that Higgins was predominantly a great professor of phonetics. He had concentrated all his powers of head and heart into the study of science of language. He was not attracted towards anything else.

Consequently Shaw has explained in the following words: “Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself Higgins’s formidable powers of resistance to the charm that prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was instinctively aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of him, or come between him and his mother. To put it shortly, she knew that for some mysterious reason he had not the makings of a married man in him, according to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and fondest and warmest interest.”

Higgins does not heed for anything in life apart from phonetics. As a reaction to the burly will of Higgins not to marry any woman, Eliza chooses not to marry Higgins.

Freddy had been writing love-letters to her every day. He is youthful, nearly twenty years younger than Higgins. He is a gentleman and speaks a very civilized language. He is satisfactorily dressed and is reasonably fit to marry Eliza.

The relations between Freddy and Eliza are not romantic but their marriage is going to be held on sensible grounds.

In the sequel, Shaw has elucidated that Eliza would have committed an error in marrying Higgins. She would have been a slave to Higgins all her life.

“This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a life-time of Freddy fetching hers ?”

Her reasons for marrying Freddy are economic and not romantic.

Shaw has explained at length the causes that have led Eliza to choose Freddy and give up the hope of marrying Professor Higgins. All the intricate motives for the marriage of Eliza with Freddy have been explained in the Appendix to the play.

The anti-romantic Shaw does not say that the shop was a grand success from the very beginning owing to the earlier experience of Eliza. He is anti- romantic to the core and tells us of the hard reality that, “the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to keep it.

True, Eliza had not to begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of the cheaper flowers; and her ecstasy was unbounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at low-priced, ostentatious, and scrupulously unproductive schools, knew a little Latin.

It was very small, but enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his ease with botanical nomenclature.

Fatefully he knew nothing else: and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings or so, and had acquired a certain acquaintance with the language of Milton from her struggles to make the grade for winning Higgins’s bet, could not write out a bill without completely disgracing the establishment.

The dramatist concludes with the statement that Eliza continued to take pleasure in good relations both with Higgins and Pickering, but she could no longer be bullied by Higgins.

Rather, she could always have her own in their recurrent conflict of words.

She often wished that she and Higgins could be alone together for some time to enable her to drag him down from his towering plinth.

“But when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dramas and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel: and she does not like Higgins and Mr Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.”

An absolute classic. Wonderful in every way.

They based My Fair Lady on this play. For me, this version is the best.

I loved it.