CEL 8

Text 3

Translate the following text into Serbian:

“Every community, in the natural course of events, demands an individual who shall
take upon himself all sorts of extraordinary achievements in the ways of amusements… who
will crowd the streets, and distract the walkers therein with Transparencies and Musical
Vans,” Cornelius Mathews wrote in 1850. “In a word every community needs a Barnum.” For
most of the 19th century Phineas Taylor Barnum, the self-styled “world’s greatest showman”,
beguiled and entertained the people of America – and in the process, some say, invented
popular culture.
Last week, the Musical Van that styles itself “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band”
pitched its big top at Giants Stadium for two nights. The Lincoln Tunnel was clogged up with
Mercedes and BMWs streaming out of Manhattan to New Jersey. “Do not – I repeat do not –
contact me except for emergencies,” a middle-aged lawyer breathed urgently to his office
down a cell-phone from the car park. At the stadium, 50,000 people handed in their $60
tickets (black-market price, $400) and bought their $29 T-shirts. Then, amid a blizzard of dry
ice, pyrotechnic fireworks and several gratuitously sexist blow-up dolls, a 54-year-old
Englishman with a sore throat strutted his stuff through two dozen songs.
For all his reptilian energy, watching Mick Jagger increasingly requires a
Barnumesque suspension of disbelief. A multi-millionaire grandfather pretending to be a
Street-Fighting Man is not unlike the five-year-old boy whom Barnum passed off as a dwarf,
or his famous “Fiji Mermaid” (the upper half of a monkey attached to the tail of a fish). On
the other hand, nobody seems to mind: as Barnum said of one deception, “The people had
only themselves to blame if they did not get their money’s worth.” Seeing Mick Jagger has
become an American rite of passage. Some 2m people will catch the North American leg of
the current Rolling Stones Tour. As the New York Times pointed out in its laudatory review,
most of the audience “think they are seeing rock itself”.