Zabanadabi

CHAPTER 1

A.      The World of Literature

     The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination. We see a great deal that reminds us vividly of the life we know. But in that very vividness there's something unreal. We can understand more clearly with pictures, perhaps. There are trick picturcs-trompel'oeid, the French call them-where the resemblance to life is very strong. An American painter of this school played a joke on his bitchy wife by painting one of her best napkins so expertly that she grabbed at the canvas trying to pull it off. But a painting as realistic as that isn't a reality but an illusion: it has the glittering unnatural clarity of a hallucination. The real realities, so to speak, are things that don't remind us directly of our own experience, but are such things as the wrath of Achilles or the jealousy of Othello, which are bigger and more intense experiences than anything we can reach-except in our imagination, which is what we're reaching with.

Sometimes, as in the happy endings of comedies, or in the ideal world of romances we seem to be looking at a pleasanter world than we ordinarily know. Sometimes, as in tragedy and satire, we seem to be looking at a world more devoted to suffering or absurdity than we ordinarily know. In literature we always seem to be looking either up or down. It's the vertical perspective that's important, not the horizontal one that looks out to life. Of course. In the greatest work of literature we get both the up and down views, often at the same time as different aspects of one.

B.   Translate the following passage into fluent Persian. Write your translation in the space provided.

     There are many signs of inexperienced reader. He makes fixed demands of every story he reads, and he feels frustrated and disappointed unless these demands are satisfied. Often he sticks to one type of subject matter. Instead of being receptive to any story that puts human beings in human situations. He reads only sports stories, western stories, love stories, or crime stories. If he is willing to accept a wider range of experience, he still wishes every story to conform at bottom to several strict though perhaps unconsciously formulated expectations.