게티스버그 연설(2013년 3월 2일)

영어 공부하는 곳에서 에이브러햄 링컨의 게티스버그 연설을 암송하는 것은 흔한 일입니다. 짧은 글에 민주주의의 정신을 잘 집약해 보여주기 때문이겠지요. 저는 천성적으로 기억력이 나빠 외우는 것을 못하지만 젊은 학생들은 저보다 기억력이 좋고 잘 외우는 것 같습니다. 오늘 새로이 탐라YLA의 가족이 되는 학생들이 이 짧은 연설문을 반복해 읽어 외우길 바랍니다. 영어가 모국어가 아닌 사람이 영어를 잘하게 되는 첫째 비결은 자주, 소리내어 읽는 것입니다.

Gettysburg Address

delivered by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg.

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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground.

 

The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

 

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.