Sentence Translation

         Dickens goes into great detail to captivate and inform the reader.  He puts a helpful image of the text inside our minds.  In part two chapter eight this is displayed perfectly; “A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it but not abundant.   Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat.  On inanimate nature, as on the man and woman who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency toward an appearance of vegetating unwillingly- a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away” (118).  At first glance this passage looks overwhelming and nearly impossible to decipher.  But when one looks closer the multiple meanings imbedded in the passage become evident.  Dickens starts out by describing the slim variety of plants, and uses characteristics such as “not abundant” “poor” “most coarse” “dejected disposition” “inanimate” and “wither away”.  These characteristics paint a gray, sorrowful scene inside ones head.  Then Dickens switches gears by saying that these characteristics apply to not only the plants but the people of the village as well; “On inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetation unwillingly- a dejected disposition to give up and wither away”. Here Dickens uses the word inanimate to describe the ‘lifeless’ plants.  Then he says‘As on the men and woman who cultivate it’ showing that the men and women who tend to the plants are also lifeless.  The second sentence translates to; “the plants look like they are unwillingly growing, as though they wanted to give up and die”.  We can infer that in the second sentence Dickens is again talking about the farmers of the plants not only the plants themselves. 

             I made sense of these passages by breaking them up and deciphering them little by little.  I looked up vocabulary words in the dictionary and replace them with similar synonyms.  I also moved around the sentence structure so it made more sense.  This enabled me to understand Dickens language and find out the many meanings behind it. 

            It is crucial to take the time to breakdown passages in the book that are challenging because it helps you not only understand the passage, but the book as a whole better.  And more importantly it lets you get out what Dickens wants you to get out of reading instead of being hung up on the text.