ARTS ET DÉBATS D’IDÉES

Annales

• Thème « Arts et débats d’idées »

   

  Partie 1 : Synthèse du dossier, en anglais

  Prenez connaissance de la thématique ci-dessus et du dossier composé des documents A, B et C et répondez en anglais à la consigne suivante (500 mots environ) :

  Paying particular attention to the specificities of the three documents, show how they interact to reflect the ways in which artists are inspired by New York City.

   

  Partie 2 : Traduction, en français 

  Traduisez en français le passage suivant du document A (lignes 9 à 14) :

  A very thin little path had been cleared on Eighty-second Street between Lexington and Third, just wide enough for two able-bodied people to squeeze through. The snow was piled high on either side. A small canyon, really, in the middle of the footpath. On the street—a quiet street at the best of times, if anything can be quiet in New York—the cars were buried under drifts. The telegraph wires sagged. The underside of the tree branches appeared like brushstrokes on the air.

   

  Documents A and B are excerpts from the same collection of stories, in which some famous people write about their experience of New York City.

  Document A

  Colum McCann Writer
  Arrived: 1982

  [...] But I truly fell in love with the city many years later, in the early 1990s, on my second stint, when I wasn’t quite sure if I was meant to be here at all, and it was a quiet moment that did it for me, one of those little glancing shoulder-rubs that New York can deal out at any time of the day, in any season, in any weather, in any place—even on the fiercely unfashionable Upper East Side.

  It had snowed in the city. Two feet of it over the course of the night. It was the sort of snow that made the city temporarily magical, before all the horn-blowing and slush puddles and piles of dog crap crowning the melt.

  A very thin little path had been cleared on Eighty-second Street between Lexington and Third, just wide enough for two able-bodied people to squeeze through. The snow was piled high on either side. A small canyon, really, in the middle of the footpath. On the street—a quiet street at the best of times, if anything can be quiet in New York— the cars were buried under drifts. The telegraph wires sagged. The underside of the tree branches appeared like brushstrokes on the air. Nothing moved. The brownstones looked small against so much white. In the distance sounded a siren, but that was all, making the silence more complete.

  I saw her from a distance halfway down the block. She was already bent into the day. She wore a headscarf. Her coat was old enough to have once been fashionable. She was pushing along a silver frame¹. Her walk was crude, slow, laborious. With her frame, she took the whole width of the alley. There was no place to pass her [...].

  As she got closer, I noticed her gloves were beautifully stencilled with little jewels. Her headscarf was pulled tight around her lined face. She shoved the silver frame over a small ridge of ice, walked the final feet, and stopped in front of me.

  The silence of strangers.

  But then she leaned forward and said in a whisper: “Shall we dance?”

  She took off one glove and reached her hand out, and with the silver frame between us, we met on the pavement. Then she let go of my hand. I bent to one knee and bowed slightly to her. She grinned and put her glove back on, said nothing more, took a hold of her silver frame, and moved on, a little quicker now, along the corridor of snow and around the corner.

  I knew nothing of her, nothing at all, and yet she had made the day unforgettable. She was my New York.

  Still is.

  Colum MCCANN in My First New York, Early Adventures in The Big City, 2010. 1 A frame: here, a device used by people who have difficulty walking. 

  1. A frame: here, a device used by people who have difficulty walking.

   

  Document B

  Tom Wolfe Writer
  Arrived: 1962

  I arrived in New York City at four in the morning feeling very romantic. I raised my fist— “I’m going to conquer you yet!”—the way Eugène de Rastignac does in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. I was alone, so I had breakfast at an Automat across the street from my hotel. All the food was yellow: the eggs, the coffee, even the meat.

  I then headed off to the Tribune, just off Times Square, feeling more romantic the closer I got to the paper. Suddenly I heard this voice. “T.K.!” Those were my first two initials— Thomas Kennerly. It was an old girlfriend, and she said, “How would you like to come to a party tonight?” The party was on Central Park West, at an apartment that belonged to the poet Robert Lowell, who had arranged a Summer apartment trade with people from Brazil. There were these Brazilians, and the party was nice, maybe only twenty of us there. All of a sudden the host said, “Gilberto, can’t you play something for us?” and the musicians started playing “The Girl from Ipanema.”

  This destroyed my whole fantasy, which was to come to New York alone, ready to take on the city. I wanted to be a romantic figure, but Christ, it was over the first day: meeting an old friend, going to an incredibly cosmopolitan party. Over the next few months, I discovered how unromantic the things I had once found romantic were. Being on packed subways became a real nuisance. I would be walking down the street and a gust of wind would blow a greasy newspaper around my leg. I remember seeing so many stars of movies and music walking down the street. That was exciting, until it dawned on me that these people had to live somewhere.

  But it was a much safer city back then, before the late 1960s. I took the subway everywhere and never thought twice about it being dangerous, whether I was going to the Bronx or the Rockaways.

  Tom WOLFE in My First New York, Early Adventures in The Big City, 2010.

   

  Document C

  

  Elliott ERWITT, New York City, 1955.

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