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Karen Blixen - Out of Africa

1) The author grew coffee on their farm, though the land was marginally too high and it required hard work to maintain. They were never rich from farming. 2) When flying over Africa, the author admired how their neatly laid out coffee plantation appeared bright green amongst the grey-green landscape. The human mind yearns for geometric order. 3) Coffee growing is a long process. It takes 4-5 years for trees to bear fruit, and in the meantime drought, diseases and weeds can impact the fields before the crop is established.

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1K views1 page

Karen Blixen - Out of Africa

1) The author grew coffee on their farm, though the land was marginally too high and it required hard work to maintain. They were never rich from farming. 2) When flying over Africa, the author admired how their neatly laid out coffee plantation appeared bright green amongst the grey-green landscape. The human mind yearns for geometric order. 3) Coffee growing is a long process. It takes 4-5 years for trees to bear fruit, and in the meantime drought, diseases and weeds can impact the fields before the crop is established.

Uploaded by

iza.pluriel
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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UCA- LCER- Traduction littéraire : version

L1 S2

We grew coffee on my farm. The land was in itself a little too high for coffee, and it was hard work to
keep it going; we were never rich on the farm. But a coffee-plantation is a thing that gets hold of you
and does not let you go, and there is always something to do on it: you are generally just a little behind
with your work.

In the wildness and irregularity of the country, a piece of land laid out and planted according to rule
looked very well. Later on, when I flew in Africa, and became familiar with the appearance of my farm
from the air, I was filled with admiration for my coffee-plantation, that lay quite bright green in the grey-
green land, and I realized how keenly the human mind yearns for geometrical figures. All the country
round Nairobi , particularly to the north of the town, is laid out in a similar way, and here live a people
who are constantly thinking and talking of planting, pruning, or picking coffee, and who lie at night and
meditate upon improvements to their coffee-factories.

Coffee-growing is a long job. It does not all come out as you imagine, when, yourself young and hopeful,
in the streaming rain, you carry the boxes of your shining young coffee-plants from the nurseries, and,
with the whole number of farm-hands in the field, watch the plants set in the regular rows of holes in
the wet ground where they are to grow, and then have them thickly shaded against the sun, with
branches broken from the bush, since obscurity is the privilege of young things. It is four or five years till
the trees come into bearing, and in the meantime you will get drought on the land, or diseases, and the
bold native weeds will grow up thick in the fields […].

Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, (1937)

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