(no subject)

[sapote]

Spanish original
My (literal and unimproved) translation:

David's Sling,
Augusto Monterroso
(Short story. Complete text.)

There was once a boy called David N, whose aim and ability with a slingshot awoke so much envy and admiration in his friends in the neighborhood and at school that they saw in him - and called him, among themselves when their parents couldn't hear - a new David.

Time passed.

Tired of the tedious target shooting that he had been practicing, throwing his pebbles against empty cans and pieces of bottle, David discovered that it was much more entertaining to exercise the ability that God equipped him with against birds, and thus from then on he took aim against all those that put themselves within his reach, especially against sparrows, larks, mockingbirds, and goldfinches, whose bloody little corpses fell smoothly to the grass, their hearts still trembling from fright and from the violence of the stone.

David ran jubilantly towards them and gave them a Christian burial.

When David's parents discovered this habit of their son's, they were very alarmed, they told him what was what, and they scolded him for his conduct so roughly and convincingly that, with tears in his eyes, he renounced his crime, he sincerely repented, and for a long time he applied his sling exclusively against other children.

Enlisted years later in the military, David was promoted to general during the Second World War and decorated with the highest medals for killing thirty-six men single-handedly, and later he was stripped of his rank and shot for letting a messenger dove belonging to the enemy escape with its life.

The End.

Translation of Augusto Monterroso's story, here because if I ever do a Panthalassa dvd commentary I'm going to want to refer to this and I can't find an English translation anywhere on the internet.