Маленький принц / The Little Prince

Маленький принц / The Little Prince

Антуан де Сент-Экзюпери

Легко читаем по-английски

«Маленький принц» – одно из самых известных и до сих пор любимых читателем произведений французского писателя Антуана де Сент-Экзюпери. Эта небольшая повесть-сказка переведена практически на все языки мира, а общий тираж изданий по всему миру превысил к настоящему времени 80 миллионов экземпляров. Текст сопровождается упражнениями на понимание прочитанного, комментариями и словарем, облегчающим чтение. Предназначается для продолжающих изучать английский язык нижней ступени (уровень 2 – Pre-Intermediate).

Антуан де Сент-Экзюпери / Antoine de Saint-Exupеry

Маленький принц / The Little Prince

Иллюстрации Е.Д. Шавиковой

© Матвеев С.А., адаптация текста, коммент., упражнения и словарь, 2019

© Шавикова Е.Д., иллюстрации

© ООО «Издательство АСТ», 2019

1

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest.

It was a picture of a boa which was swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing:

In the book it said: “Boas swallow their prey whole, they do not chew it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.”

I thought about it. And then I made my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked like this:

I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.

But they answered: “Frighten? Why can anyone be frightened by a hat?”

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa which was digesting an elephant. But the grown-ups were not able to understand it. They always needed explanations. So I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa. This time the grown-ups could see it clearly. My Drawing Number Two looked like this:

The grown-ups advised me not to draw the boas from the inside or the outside, and study geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar.

That is why, at the age of six, I stopped drawing. So I did not become a famous painter. I was disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to explain things to them all the time.

So I chose another profession, and became a pilot.