Translation Exercise
45 Make a written translation of the text into Ukrainian.
From Nigella Lawson's "Private Lives, Cutting Edges", Observer, September 17, 2000 Is there anyone who truly believes that seeing a violent film is going to make them violent? No - but we all fear the effect it has on others. Of course, our fears are - as they should be - concerned mostly with the vulnerable young, and that certainly seems to be the drive behind the latest rethink of film-categorisation and censorship policy. Yet however well intentioned any discussion of censorship rules or guidance, there is an inherent problem. Our society is violent. Not as violent as it has been (though there wasn't the mass entertainment business around to exploit it), but we do seem to enjoy violence and no amount of censorship can have any impact on that. While I can understand the primitive bloodlust that lies behind the desire to see as much detailed, hideously realistic violence in the name of entertainment as possible, I am more disturbed by the impulse itself than its screen manifestation. And this is not because I feel there is a danger of our being actively corrupted: it's that our appetite for it is a sign of our prior corruption. Perhaps our untroubled engagement with the violent and the horrific is the natural reaction of a coddled generation: we haven't witnessed war or had to go off to fight. Our lives are protected and sanitised, and the result is that while we insist on trying to make the world less randomly dangerous than it ever can be, we are intent on immersing ourselves in lurid acts of violence that the age we live in has otherwise spared us. If this seems inconsistent - in that I have declared my distaste for screen violence to have no basis in the belief that it might incite further public violence - it is because the two areas of concern are disparate. … But the sort of violence people pay to go and see is cartoon-violence. It's for amusement. It's not really that much different from the enjoyment taken in a television series such as Casualty, which is not shocking or repellent, but does in the same way make one wonder about what kind of people we are that we take so much pleasure in viewing people even play-acting distress, pain, suffering, the rest. In part, I envy those whose lives are so untouched by personal catastrophe that they feel impelled to make up the shortfall cinematically or on television. …
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