The Frog in the Well

ဦးဦးကထိက တင္ဆက္သည္...

ဒါကေတာ႔ က႑သစ္ေလးပါ. Ancient Chinese Stories ေလးေတြပါပဲ. ပညာေပးပုံျပင္ေလးေတြကုိ တင္ဆက္သြားမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္. အေရးအသား၊ Vocabulary သာမက Wisdom ကုိပါ ရရွိေစခ်င္တဲ႔ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္နဲ႔ပါခင္ဗ်ာ.

The frog in the well

There was a frog that lived in a shallow well.

" Look how well off I am here ! " he told a big turtle from the Eastern Ocean. " I can hop along the coping of the well when I go out, and rest by a crevice in the bricks on my return. I can wallow to my heart's content with only my head above water, or stroll ankle deep through soft mud. No crabs or tadpoles can compare with me. I am master of the water and lord of this shallow well, What more can a fellow ask ? Why don't you come here more often to have a good time ? "



ေရတြင္းခပ္တိမ္တိမ္ေလးထဲမွာ ဖားတစ္ေကာင္ ေနပါတယ္. သူဟာ အေရွ႔သမုဒၵရာက လိပ္ၾကီးကုိေတြ႔ေတာ႔ ဒီလုိေျပာပါတယ္.

“ၾကည္႔ပါဦး ငါေနတာ ဘယ္ေလာက္ ဇိမ္က်လဲ. ဒီေရတြင္းေဘာင္ေတြထဲမွာ ငါခုန္ေပါက္ျမဴးတူးႏိုင္တယ္. ေမာလုိ႔ျပန္လာရင္ေတာ႔ အုတ္ေတြၾကားထဲက အက္ကဲြေၾကာင္းေလးထဲမွာ ငါနားေနႏုိင္တယ္. ေရေပၚမွာ ေခါင္းေလးေဖာ္ျပီးေတာ႔ ငါ႔စိတ္ၾကိဳက္ ေအးေအးေဆးေဆးေလး ကူးခတ္ႏုိင္သလုိ ခပ္ေပ်ာ႔ေပ်ာ႔ ရႊံ႔ႏြံေတြၾကားထဲမွာလည္း ေျခေထာက္ေလးျမဳပ္ျပီး လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ႏုိင္ေသးတယ္. ဘယ္လုိ ဂဏန္းမ်ိဳး၊ ဖားတစ္ပုိင္းငါးတစ္ပိုင္းမ်ိဳးမွ ငါ႔စည္းစိမ္နဲ႔ မယွဥ္ႏုိင္ဘူး. ငါဟာ ဒီေရတြင္းငယ္ေလးကုိ ပိုင္စုိးတဲ႔သူ၊ ဒီေရရဲ႔ အရွင္သခင္ျဖစ္တယ္. တစ္ျခားဘာမ်ား လုိဦးမွာလဲ. အသင္လိပ္ၾကီးကေရာ ဒီေနရာကုိ ဘာလုိ႔လာျပီး ေအးေအးေဆးေဆး နားနားေနေန မေနရတာလဲ” လုိ႔ ေမးလုိက္ပါတယ္.

Before the turtle from the Eastern Ocean could get his left foot into the well, however, he caught his right claw on something. So he halted and stepped back then began to describe the ocean to the frog.

အေရွ႔သမုဒၵရာထဲက လိပ္ၾကီးဟာ သူ႔ရဲ႔ ဘယ္ဖက္ေျခေထာက္ကုိ ေရတြင္းေလးထဲ ခ်လုိက္ပါတယ္. ဒါေပမယ္႔ သူရဲ႔ ညာဖက္ေျခသည္းဟာ တစ္စုံတစ္ရာနဲ႔ သြားျငိေနပါတယ္. ဒါေၾကာင္႔ သူဟာ ရပ္ျပီး ေနာက္ကုိျပန္ဆုတ္လုိက္ကာ သူေနထုိင္တဲ႔ သမုဒၵရာအေၾကာင္းကုိ ဖားငယ္ေလးကုိ ဒီလုိေျပာျပပါတယ္.

" It's more than a thousand miles across and more than ten thousand feet deep. In ancient times there were floods nine years out of ten yet the water in the ocean never increased.

ငါေနထုိင္ေနတဲ႔ သမုဒၵရာဟာ မုိင္ေပါင္းတစ္ေထာင္ေလာက္ က်ယ္၀န္းျပီးေတာ႔ ေပတစ္ေသာင္းေလာက္ နက္တယ္. ဟုိးအရင္တုန္းကဆုိရင္ ဆယ္ႏွစ္မွာ ကုိးႏွစ္ေလာက္က ေရၾကီးတယ္. ဒါေပမယ္႔ သမုဒၵရာၾကီး ဘယ္ေလာက္က်ယ္သလဲဆုိရင္ အဲလုိေရၾကီးတာေတာင္ ေရေတြ တုိးမလာဘူး.

And later there were droughts seven years out of eight yet the water in the ocean never grew less. It has remained quite constant throughout the ages. That is why I like to live in the Eastern Ocean. "

အဲ. ျပီးေတာ႔ ရွစ္နွစ္မွာ ခုနစ္ႏွစ္ေလာက္က မုိးေခါင္ေရရွားျဖစ္ျပန္တယ္. ဒါေပမယ္႔ သမုဒၵရာၾကီးထဲက ေရေတြ ေလ်ာ႔က်မသြားခဲ႔ျပန္ဘူး. ႏွစ္ပရိေစၦဒ ၾကာျမင္႔တဲ႔တုိင္ေအာင္ သမုဒၵရာၾကီးထဲက ေရေတြဟာ ေလ်ာ႔က်ျခင္း၊ တုိးပြားလာျခင္း မရွိခဲ႔ဘူး. ဒါေၾကာင္႔ ငါဟာ ဒီလုိက်ယ္ေျပာၾကီးမားတဲ႔ သမုဒၵရာၾကီးထဲမွာ ေနထိုင္ျခင္းပဲျဖစ္တယ္.

Then the frog in the shallow well was silent and felt a little abashed.

အဲလုိမ်ိဳး လိပ္ၾကီးကျပန္ေျပာလုိက္တဲ႔အခါမွာ ေရတြင္းငယ္ေလးထဲက ဖားေလးဟာ အရွက္ရျပီး ခပ္မဆိတ္ေနေနပါေတာ႔တယ္တဲ႔…

Glossary: (ခက္ဆစ္)

Shallow (adj) တိမ္ေသာ
Turtle (noun) ပင္လယ္လိပ္ၾကီးမ်ိဳး. (Tortoise. ရုိးရုိးလိပ္မ်ိဳး)
Hop (verb) ျမဴးတူးခုန္ေပါက္သည္.
Crevice (noun) အက္ကဲြေၾကာင္း, crack
Wallow (verb) ေအးေအးေဆးေဆး သက္သက္သာသာ လူးလွိမ္႔ေနသည္.
Stroll (verb) သက္ေတာင္႔သက္သာ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္သည္.
(Stroller (noun) ကေလးငယ္မ်ားကုိ ထည္႔ျပီး တြန္းသြားေသာ တြန္းလွည္းမ်ိဳး)
Crab (noun) ဂဏန္း
Tadpole (noun) ဖားတစ္ပုိင္း ငါးတစ္ပုိင္း
Claw (noun) ေျခသည္းလက္သည္း
Halt (verb) Stop, ရပ္တန္႔သည္
Step back (verb) ေနာက္ကုိျပန္ဆုတ္သည္.
(Step Forward (verb) ေရွ႔တက္သည္.)
Flood (noun) ေရၾကီးျခင္း
Drought (noun) မုိးေခါင္ေရရွားျခင္း
Abashed (adj) embarrassed, ashamed, အရွက္ရေသာ