Снежная королева / The Snow Queen

Ганс Христиан Андерсон / Hans Christian Andersen

Снежная королева / The Snow Queen

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Story the First

Which Tells of the Looking-Glass and the Bits of It

Attention, please, we’re going to begin. When we’ve got to the end of the story we shall know more than we do now. Once there was a wicked troll. He had made a looking-glass which had this property: everything good and pretty that was reflected in it became bad and ugly. Andeverything that was no good came out even worse[1]. The most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best of men grew hideous. Their faces were so distorted that they couldn’t be recognized. It was very funny, the troll said. He couldn’t help but laugh at his clever invention. Everyone who attended the troll school (for he kept a troll school) spread the news all about that miracle looking-glass: you could now see, they said, what the world and mankind really looked like. They ran about everywhere with the glass, and at last there wasn’t a country or a person left who hadn’t been distorted in it. After that they decided to fly up to heaven itself and make fun of the angels. The higher they flew with the glass, the more it grimaced. Up and up they flew, and then the glass grimaced so hard that it fell out of their hands and to the ground. It broke into millions of tiny pieces. Some of them were as big as a grain of sand. They flew around the wide world, and when they got into peoples’ eyes, they stuck there, and from that moment the people saw everything crooked and only looked for the bad things

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Примечания

1

everything that was no good came out even worse – все, что уже было плохим, становилось еще хуже