But they answered: "Frighten Why should any one be frightened by a hat"My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained. My Drawing Number Two looked like this:
小时候,当时我还只要6岁,看到一本描述原始丛林壮观气象的书,名叫《实在的故事》。书里有一幅很出色的插画,画的是一条大蟒蛇正在吞食一只植物,上面就是那幅插画的复成品。
Chapter 1
The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been 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 be always and forever explaining things to them.
我把这幅佳构拿给大人们看,我问他们我的画是否让他们感到惊骇。
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 constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.