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Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’ Università e della Ricerca ESAME DI STATO DI ISTRUZIONE SECONDARIA SUPERIORE Indirizzi: LI04, EA03 - LICEO LINGUISTICO (Testo valevole anche per le corrispondenti sperimentazioni internazionali e quadriennali)
Tema di: LINGUA E CULTURA STRANIERA 1 (INGLESE) e LINGUA E CULTURA STRANIERA 3 (SPAGNOLO) PART 1 – COMPREHENSION AND INTERPRETATION Read the text below
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The ceremony of the passport control, followed by the abrupt change in the scale of things – the new toy landscape after Dover – set his thoughts wandering in the direction of his youth as a young secretary of Embassy in an England which he loved and hated with all the emotional polarity of his race. How would she withstand this cataclysm? Would she just founder? He trembled for her – she seemed so exhausted and done for, with her governments of little yellowing men, faded to the sepia of socialism, the beige of bureaucracy. And Egypt, so corrupt, so vulnerable, was at their mercy, in their hands … Long ago he had made a painstaking analysis of the national character in order to help in the education of his Ambassador, dear old Abdel Sami Pasha. But it had been altogether too literary, and indeed altogether too wise. He had distinguished three strains in the English character which came, he was sure, from Saxons, Jutes or Normans – each Englishman had a predominance of one or other strain in his make-up. That is why one had to be so careful in one’s dealings with them. The Saxon strain made them bullies and pirates, the Jutish toadies and sanctimonious hypocrites, while the Norman strain bred a welcome quixotry which was capable of rising like a north wind and predominating over the other two. Poor Sami had read the whole memorandum with attention, but without understanding a word. Then he said, “But you have not said that they are rich. Without that …” The long struggle against his English infatuation had coloured his whole life; it had even imperilled his precious national sentiment. How would they ever drive them out of Egypt, how would they ever become free? But then, would it make sense to replace them with Germans or Italians? His glance softened as he saw the diminutive dolls’ houses flashing by outside the window, saw the dove-grey land unrolling its peaceful surges of arable and crop, like swaying of an autumn sea. Yes, this country had marked him, and his little Princess used often to tease him by saying that he even dreamed in English. Damn them, the English! He compressed his lips and wagged his head reproachfully. He lit a slender gold tipped cigarette and blew a puny cloud of smoke high into the air, as if it would dispel these womanish failings of sentiment! Womanish! The very word reminded him that the whole of his love-life and his miraculously happy marriage had been tinged by London. He hoped that Selim had not forgotten to book the suite at Brown’s Hotel – the Princess loved Brown’s and always sent the porter a Christmas card from Cairo. But then Egypt was one thing and the Court quite another; their education had modified fanaticism and turned them willy-nilly into cosmopolitans that who could almost laugh at themselves. It came from languages, from foreign nannies and those long winterings at Siltz or Baden-Baden or Pau. It had etiolated their sense of race, their nationalism. The French distinguish between knowing a language and possessing it; but they had gone even further; they had become possessed by English. The other chief European tongues they knew, but for purely social purposes. There was none of the salt in them that he found in English…. Nor was anyone at the Court like him, for some were more charmed by French, some surrendered to Italian. But it was his first firm link with Fawzia, the passion for England. Even when he was at Oxford, and writing anti-British articles in Doustour under his own signature! And paradoxically enough she loved him for it, she was proud of his intellectual stance. (615 words) from The Avignon Quintet, Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)