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Carmen Miranda’s centenary
Carmen was born in February 1909. As a singer and actress, she became one of the biggest Broadway andHollywoodstars
In1939 ayoung Brazilian singer, at just1.53 meterstall, went to theUnited Statesto show off her talent. She could barely speak English, but after a few Broadway shows she began to win the Americans over. Carmen was an original artist. In her shows she wore an outfit fromBahiaand an exotic hat decorated with tropical fruits. In her Broadway performances, Carmen sang Brazilian songs for the American audience.Songs such as “Mamãe eu Quero”, “Tico-tico no Fubá" and "O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?”Carmen’s success on Broadway caughtHollywood’s attention and in the 1940s and ’50s she made 14 films.
The Brazilian Bombshell
ThePequena Notávelwas born in a small Portuguese town onFebruary 9th1909and moved toBrazilwhen she was just ten months old. In the 1930s Carmen Miranda achieved success singing in the famousCassino da Urca, inRio de Janeiro. Shewon overBrazilsingingsongs written by the great songwriters of the time. On some occasions, Carmen formed a duo with her sister, Aurora. In1939 amajor American businessman invited Carmen to sing in theUSA. Carmen became famous the world over and made a lot of money, singing and acting. However, work damaged her health and onAugust 5th1955she had a heart attack and died at home inBeverly Hills. Her funeral, inRio de Janeiro, was attended by a million people.
Matéria publicada na edição de fevereiro da Revista Maganews.
CD de Áudio – Voz: Alline de Paula
Vocabulary
1 to show off – mostrar / exibir
2 she could barely – aqui = ela mal sabia
3 to win over – conquistar
4 to wear – usar / vestir
5 outfit – traje
6 hat – chapéu
7 to catch attention (past = caught) – chamar a atenção
Double-click any word to find the definition in the Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary
Or download MP3 (Right-click or option-click and save link)
BOB DOUGHTY: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English.
This week in our series, Larry West and Tony Riggs continue the story of President Woodrow Wilson.
LARRY WEST: In nineteen seventeen, Europe was at war. It was the conflict known as World War One. After three years of fighting, Europe's lands were filled with the sights and sounds of death. But still, the armies of the Allies and the Central Powers continued to fight.
The United States had tried to keep out of the European conflict. It declared its neutrality. In the end, however, neutrality was impossible.
Germany was facing starvation because of a British naval blockade. To break the blockade, German submarines attacked any ship that sailed to Europe. That included ships from neutral nations like the United States. The German submarines sank several American ships. Many innocent people were killed.
TONY RIGGS: German submarine attacks finally forced the United States into the war. It joined the Allies: Britain, France, and Russia.
Like most Americans, President Wilson did not want war. But he had no choice. Sadly, he asked Congress for a declaration of war. Congress approved the declaration on April sixth, nineteen seventeen.
It was not long before American soldiers reached the European continent. They marched in a parade through the streets of Paris. The people of France gave them a wild welcome. They cheered the young Americans. They threw flowers at the soldiers and kissed them.
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General John J. Pershing
LARRY WEST: The Americans marched to the burial place of the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette was the French military leader who had come to America's aid during its war of independence from Britain. The United States wanted to repay France for its help more than a hundred years earlier.
An American Army officer made a speech at the tomb. He said: "Lafayette, we are here!"
TONY RIGGS: And so the Americans were there. They were ready to fight in the bloodiest war the world had ever known. Week by week, more American troops arrived. By October, nineteen seventeen, the American army in Europe totaled one hundred thousand men. The leader of that army was General John J. Pershing.
Pershing's forces were not sent directly into battle. Instead, they spent time training, building bases, and preparing supplies. Then a small group was sent to the border between Switzerland and Germany. The Americans fought a short but bitter battle there against German forces.
The Germans knew the American soldiers had not fought before. They tried to frighten the Americans by waving their knives and guns in a fierce attack. The Americans surprised the Germans. They stood and fought back successfully.
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"Here Are the Americans!" says a French poster from World War One, showing a large shadow of an American soldier over a German soldier
LARRY WEST: Full American participation in the fighting did not come for several months. It came only after another event took place. That event changed the war and the history of the Twentieth Century. It was the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Its leader was Vladimir Lenin.
The Russian Revolution began in the spring of nineteen seventeen. The people of that country were tired of fighting Germany. And they were tired of their ruler, Czar Nicholas. The Czar was overthrown. A temporary government was established. It was headed by Alexander Kerenski.
President Woodrow Wilson sent a team of American officials to Russia to help Kerenski's new government. The officials urged Russia to remain in the war.
TONY RIGGS: Under Kerenski, Russia did keep fighting. But it continued to suffer terrible losses. Many Russians demanded an end to the war.
Lenin saw this opposition as a way to gain control of the government. So he went to the city of Petrograd. There, he led the opposition to the war and to Kerenski. Night after night, he spoke to big crowds. "What do you get from war." He shouted. "Only wounds, hunger and death!"
Lenin promised peace under Bolshevik Communism. Within a few months, he won control of the Petrograd Soviet. That was an organization of workers and soldiers. Another Bolshevik Communist, Leon Trotsky, controlled the Soviet in Moscow.
LARRY WEST: Kerenski's government continued to do badly in the war. More and more Russian soldiers lost hope. Many fled the army. Others stayed. But they refused to fight.
The end came in November, nineteen seventeen. Soldiers in Petrograd turned against Kerenski. Lenin ordered them to rebel. And he took control of the government within forty-eight hours. Russia was now a Communist nation.
As promised, Lenin called for peace. So Russia signed its own peace treaty with Germany. The treaty forced Russia to pay a high price for its part in the war. It had to give up a third of its farmland, half of its industry, and ninety percent of its coal mines. It also lost a third of its population. Still, it did not have real peace with Germany.
TONY RIGGS: The treaty between Russia and Germany had a powerful influence on the military situation in the rest of Europe. Now, Germany no longer had to fight an enemy on two fronts. Its eastern border was quiet suddenly. It could aim all its forces against Britain, France, and the other Allies on its western border.
Germany had suffered terrible losses during four years of war. Many of its soldiers had been killed. And many of its civilians had come close to starving, because of the British naval blockade. Yet Germany's leaders still hoped to win. They decided to launch a major attack. They knew they had to act quickly, before the United States could send more troops to help the Allies.
LARRY WEST: German military leaders decided to break through the long battle line that divided most of central Europe. They planned to strike first at the north end of the line. British troops held that area. The Germans would push the British off the continent and back across the English Channel. Then they would turn all their strength on France. When France was defeated, Germany would be victorious.
The campaign opened in March, nineteen eighteen. German forces attacked British soldiers near Amiens, France. The Germans had six thousand pieces of artillery. The British troops fought hard, but could not stop the Germans. They were pushed back fifty kilometers. The attack stopped for about a week.
TONY RIGGS: Then the Germans struck again. This time, their target was Ypres, Belgium.
The second attack was so successful it seemed the Germans might push the British all the way back to the sea. The British commander, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, ordered his men not to withdraw. Haig said: "There is no other course open to us, but to fight it out."
The British fought hard and stopped the attack. Losses on both sides were extremely high. Yet the Germans continued with their plan.
LARRY WEST: Their next attack was northeast of Paris in May. This time, they broke the Allied line easily and rushed toward Paris. The German Army chief, General Erich Ludendorff, tried to capture the French capital without waiting to strengthen his forces. He got close enough to shell the city.
The French government prepared to flee.
Allied military leaders rushed more troops to the area. The new force included two big groups of American marines.
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Damage caused by shells that struck Belleau Woods, France
TONY RIGGS: The heaviest fighting was outside Paris at a place called Belleau Wood. The American Marines were advised to prepare for a possible withdrawal. One Marine said: "Withdraw? We just got here!"
The Marines resisted as the Germans attacked Allied lines in Belleau Wood again and again. Then they attacked the German lines. The Battle for Belleau Wood lasted three weeks. It was the most serious German offensive of the war. The Germans lost.
We will continue our story of World War One next week.
(MUSIC)
BOB DOUGHTY:
Our program was written by Frank Beardsley. The narrators were Larry West and Tony Riggs.
You can find our series online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and images at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. Join us again next week for THE MAKING OF A NATION -- an American history series in VOA Special English.
Isaac Bashevis Single wrote a wonderful story called “Taibele and Her Demon”. In it, a man pretending to be a demon visits by night a pretty young woman whose children have died and whose husband has walked out in utter despair.
At first the demon terrifies her with his ugliness, but then she falls in love with him – as much for his vivid stories of hell and heaven as for his demonic lovemaking. She completely forgets that he’s ugly and becomes more and more attached to him - even though after a while she can see his human failings. Yet this demon “perspired, sneezed, hiccupped, yawned.” Yes, “sometimes his breath smelled of onion, sometimes of garlic… His body felt like the body of her husband, bony and hairy, with an Adam’s apple and a navel… His feet, were not goose feet but human with nails and frost blisters.
“Once Taibele asked him the meaning of these things, and Humirzah [the demon’s assumed name] explained: ‘When one of us consorts with a human female, he assumes the shape of a man. Otherwise she would die of fright’.
“Yes, Taibele got used to him and loved him. She was no longer terrified of him and his impish antic”. Perhaps she suspected he was really a man, but not wanting to know it, she refused to. Singer’s story is a kind of reverse Schehezade: the woman falls in love with the teller of tales and welcomes his lovemaking no matter what his looks. But it is more than that. It’s a fable of disguise between a woman and a man, who both need the disguise to give each other permission to love each other. She needs to believe he is a demon so that she thinks she has no choice but to submit to him. He needs to be convinced that she believes him in order to keep up the elaborate fantasy that turns her on. Many marriages are based on less. The story of Taibele has always seemed to me the perfect metaphor for my life as a writer. The job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories. Often you go to bed with a man who claims to be a demon and later you find out he’s just an everybody slob. By then he may have inspired a novel. The novel remains though the demon has departed.
I wrote to my friend Ken Follet about this metaphorical resonance I found in the Singer story. He read the story. Then, he asked me in an e-mail: “Do you really see yourself as a woman who slept with someone who claimed to be Devil, but then turned out to be an ordinary slob?
He answered his own question:
Let me guess. You’re going to reply:
Yes – every damn time.
But once, the demon was not unmasked.
When was that? My friend asked.
I will tell you by and by. Taibele doesn’t want to acknowledge that her lover is merely human. She needs the belief in demons to complete her sexual life. She needs to believe in demons because otherwise she’d betraying her wandering husband. And she is not that kind of girl. The best stories don’t have one metaphor but are layered with man. Isaac Bahsevis Singer was too thoughtful a writer to give us a single metaphor. He gives so many that the tale resonates endlessly – the definition of a great story. So, he is my demon? He is a wild, uncivilized and live entirely in the moment. He makes up stories and acts them out. He is never polite. He didn’t go to college and certainly did not get an MFA at Iowa. He doesn’t know which fork to use. He never heard about the Ten Commandments – and certainly not the one about adultery. He has hairy feet and very likely a tail.
Let’s see if you can tell when the demon appears. It shouldn’t be hard. He casts a jagged shadow. And he leaves a wet spot on the sheet. Of course, for male writers he is a she. She becomes whatever physical type the write favors, since men care so much more about appearance than women do.
Does he like big tits with rose nipples? She has them. Does she like steatopygous asses? She has one that resembles twin planets. Does he like blue eyes? She has them. Brown? They’ve just changed colour. Is he a chubby chaser? She’s chubby too. Is hea modelizer? (Ugh – what a stupid word) – then she’s skinny. At six-foot-four with slanty Slavic cheekbones, green eyes with neon yellow pupils, she weighs in at ninety-nine pounds. In life, she reminds you of Auschwitz, in bed, she feels like a bicycle. But in photos she looks like a goddess.
For a gay writer, he’s the perfect boy. He has idealized muscles like Michelangelo’s David. He may even be a lovely Bacchus or a Hermes with winged sandals.
He’s Greek, of course. The Greek’s had the beautiful boys.
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Halloween: a 2500-year-old tradition
Learn a bit about the origin and symbols of this event held all over the world
The Celts were people who lived over 2,500 years ago inEurope. On the 31st October they got together to commemorate the end of summer, the end of the harvest and the start of a new year. However, this date did not only signify happiness for the Celts. They also believed that on that date the spirits of dead people returned to the world to try to reincarnate in the bodies of people in that region. To face them, the Celts dressed in the most frightening manner possible and hit the streets carrying lit candles and making noise to scare away the bad spirits.
In the modern world, Halloween appeared in the XIX Century, when the Irish took the party to theUnited States. But there this ancient European tradition ended up as a happy children's party, in which children dress up and ask for candy from house to house, sayingtrick or treat.It is such a party that October 31st is a holiday in theUnited Statesand stores register record sales.
“Day of the Witches” in Brazil
Halloween is a traditional event in many countries, but only recently started to be popular in Brazilamong the young and old alike. Schools and even nightclubs now organize parties and fancy dress balls on this date, which is also known here as “Dia das Bruxas”.
The legend of Jack O’ LanternOne of the most traditional symbols of Halloween is a pumpkin in the shape of a face, known as “Jack O' Lantern” – This tradition appeared through Irish folklore. The legend says that there was a man called Jack who could not get into heaven because he had been very bad and was also expelled from hell because he played tricks on the Devil. He was then condemned to prowl the earth eternally, carrying a lantern to light his way.
