陆谷孙译文赏析三篇

Altogether Autumn

人间尽秋

陆谷孙 译

It’s time to plant the bulbs. But I put it off as long as possible because planting bulbs mean making space in borders which are still flowering. Pulling out all the annuals which nature has allowed to erupt in overpowering purple, orange and pink, a final cry of joy. That would almost be murder, and so I wait until the first night frost anaesthetizes all the flowers with a cold, a creaky crust that causes them to wither; a very gentle death. Now I wander through my garden indecisively, trying to hold on to the last days of late summer. 到了栽种球茎植物的时候了。我却是能拖则拖，因为栽种球茎得在园篱处腾出空间，而此时篱上仍开着朵朵鲜花。把一年生植物强行拔起，掐死造化恩赐的紫绛、橘黄和浅红这一片烂漫，阻断自然界的最后欢声，简直无异于谋杀。所以我要等待第一个霜降之夜，等待花瓣全部沾上一层冷冽的霜晶，蒙无知觉中自行凋零，和婉地寿终正寝。我在园中徜徉，拿不定主意，只求留住残夏的最后几天。

The trees are plump with leafy splendor. The birch is softly rustling gold, which is now fluttering down like an unending stream of confetti. Soon November will be approaching with its autumn storms and leaden clouds hanging above your head like soaking wet rags. Just let it stay like this, I think, gazing at the huge mysterious shadows the trees conjure up on the shining green meadows, the cows languidly flicking their tails. Everything breathes an air of stillness, the silence rent by the exuberant color of asters, dahlias, sunflowers and roses.

树叶犹盛，光鲜可人。白桦婆娑轻摇，一片片金色的叶子飘飘落地，有如一溜不绝如缕的庆典彩纸。11月行将降临，带来秋的凄风苦雨和铅灰色阴云，像浸水的抹布一样压在你的头顶。但愿眼下的好天气会持续下去，我这样想，一边注视着树木在绿油油的草地上投下的幢幢诡谲黑影，还有倦慵地甩动尾巴的牛群。一片静谧，惟有紫苑、大丽菊、向日葵和玫瑰的浓艳色彩似在撕裂四下的寂静。

The mornings begin chilly. The evenings give you shivers and cold feet in bed. But in the middle of the day the sun breaks through, evaporating the mist on the grass, butterflies and wasps appear and cobwebs glisten against windows like silver lace. The harvest of a whole year’s hard work is on the trees and bushes; berries, beech mast, chestnuts, and acorns.

清晨时分，天气凛冽，到了夜晚，你打起了哆嗦，躺在床上双脚冰凉。但在正午时分，阳光拨开云层，将雾霭化作蒸气，在草地上升腾。蝴蝶和黄蜂开始出没，蛛网犹如丝带，挂在窗前闪出银光。树梢上和灌木丛里凝结了整整一年的辛劳，浆果、毛栗、板栗和橡实等着收获归仓。

Suddenly, I think of my youngest daughter, living now in Amsterdam. Very soon she will call and ask “Have you planted the bulbs yet?” Then I will answer teasingly that actually I’m waiting until she comes to help me. And then we will both be overcome by nostalgia, because once we always did that together. One entire sunny autumn afternoon, when she was three and a half years old, she helped me with all enthusiasm and joyfulness of her age.

突然，想到如今客居阿姆斯特丹的幼女。这两天，她定会打来 来问：”球茎植物种下了吗？”随即我会用打趣的口吻答复说，老妈正等着她来帮助下种呢。接着母女双双陷入怀旧的情思，因为从前有段时间我们总是合作下种的，她才3岁半的那年，一个秋阳万里的午后，女儿曾怀着她那年龄特有的全部踊跃和欢乐，做过我的帮手。

It was one of the last afternoons that I had her around, because her place in school has been already reserved. She wandered around so happily carefree with her little bucket and spade, covering the bulbs with earth and calling out “Night, night” or “Sleep night”, her little voice chattering constantly on. She discovered “baby bulbs”, “kiddie bulbs”, and “mummy and daddy bulbs”, the latter snuggling cozily together. While we were both working so industriously, I watched my kid very deliberately. She was such a tiny thing, between an infant and a toddler, with such a round little tummy.

生活中女儿绕膝的下午不多了，因为学校已给她留出一个名额。她带上自己的小桶和铲子，兴高采烈又无忧无虑地满园子跑，给球茎培掩泥土的同时，用尖细的嗓子一遍又一遍聒噪着“晚安，晚安”或是“睡个好觉”。她还分别发现了“贝贝种”和“娃娃种”，还有“妈妈爸爸种”，后者指的是那些亲密依偎的球茎种。两人辛苦劳作的同时，我曾留意审视孩子：真是个小不点

儿，出了襁褓，挺着个圆滚滚的小肚子刚开始蹒跚学步。

Every autumn, throughout her childhood, we repeated the ritual of planting the bulbs together. Every autumn I saw her changing, the toddler became a schoolgirl, a straightforward realist, full of drive. Never once dreamy, her hands in her pockets; no longer happily indulging in her fantasies. The schoolgirl developed long legs, her jaw-line changed, she had her hair cut. It was autumn again that I thought “bye roses, bye butterflies, bye schoolgirl”. I listened to her stories while we painstakingly burrowed in the earth, planting the promise of spring.

在女儿童年期的每个秋季，我们履行仪式似的种下球茎植物，而每个秋季我都注意到女儿身上发生的变化。学步小儿长大成了女学生，成为一个充满进取心又坦率直面现实的人，从不把双手插在口袋里想入非非，再不靠恣意梦想而自得其乐。女学生的双腿变得修长，下颏的轮廓线变了，要上理发店剪发了。秋季再次来临时，我在心里默念“别了，玫瑰；别了，蝴蝶；别了，女学生。”当我们使劲在泥土里掘洞，种下明春的希望时，我在倾听女儿述说她的故事。

Suddenly, much quicker than I had expected, a tall teenager was standing by my side. She is taller than I. The ritual became rather silent, and we no longer chatter from one subject to another. I thought about her room full of posters and knick-knacks, how it had been full of treasures in bottles and boxes, white peddles, a copper brooch, colored drawings, the treasures of a child who still knew nothing of money, who wanted to be read to and who looked anxiously at a spider at her room and asked, “Would he want to be my friend?” 突然，站在我身旁的女儿成了大姑娘，变化之神速远胜我的预料。随后，她的身高超过了我。下种成了相对无言的程式，不再有天南海北的闲聊。我不由地想起她那挂满大幅招贴以及充满各种小摆设的房间，而先前这儿多的是瓶子和纸盒，白色的卵石，一枚铜制胸针，彩色图画。这些都是一个尚不知晓金钱为何物的幼儿的珍藏品，一个要大人读书给她听的稚女，见了屋里的蛛网会忧心忡忡地发问：“蜘蛛愿跟我做朋友吗？”

Then came the autumn when I planted the bulbs alone, and I knew from then on it would always be that way. But every year, in autumn, she talks about it, full of nostalgia for the security of childhood, the seclusion of a garden, the final moments of a season. How both of us would dearly love to have a time machine to go back. Just for a day.

接着就是我单独下种的那个秋天，我还知道从此就是单干的命了。但每年秋天，她总要提到下种的事，口气里充满怀旧的意味，缅想事事都有保障的童年，幽闭的庭园，一个季节的最后时刻。父女俩多么衷心希望有一台时间机器，能回到往昔，即便过上一天也好。

陆谷孙译文赏析三篇〔2〕战前星期天

Sunday Before the War

Arthur Clutton-Brock

On Sunday, in a remote valley in the West of England, where the people are few and scattered and placid, there was no more sign among them than the quiet hills of the anxiety that holds the world. They had no news and seemed to want none. The postmaster was ordered to stay all day in his little post-office, and that something unusual that interested them, just only because it affected the postmaster.

It rained in the morning, but the afternoon was clear and glorious and shining, with all distances revealed far into the heart of Wales and to the high ridges of the Welsh mountains. The cottages of that valley are not gathered into villages, but two or three together or lonely among their fruit-trees on the hillside; and the cottagers, who are always courteous and friendly, said a word or two as one went by, but just what they would have said on any other day and without any question about

the war. Indeed, they seemed to know, or to wish to know, as little about that as the earth itself, which beautiful there at any time, seemed that afternoon to wear an extreme and pathetic beauty. The country, more than any other in the England, has the secret of peace. It is not wild, though it looks into the wildness of Wales; but all its cultivation, its orchards and hopyards and fields of golden wheat, seem to have the beauty of time upon them, as if men there had long lived happily upon the earth with no desire for change nor fear of decay. It is not a sad beauty of a past cut off from the present, but a mellowness that the present inherits from the past; and in the mellowness all the hillside seems a garden to the spacious farmhouses and the little cottages; each led up to by its own narrow, flowery lane. There the meadows are all lawns with the lustrous green of spring even in August, and often over-shadowed by old fruit-trees – cherry, or apple, or pear; and on Sunday after the rain there was an April glory and freshness added to the quiet of the later summer.

Nowhere and never in the world can there have been a deeper peace; and the bells from the little red church down by the river seemed to be the music of it, as the song of birds is the music of spring. There one saw how beautiful the life of man can be, and how men by the innocent labours of many generations can give to the earth a beauty it has never

known in its wildness. And all this peace, one knew, was threatened; and the threat came into one’s mind as if it were a soundless message from over the great eastward plain; and with it the beauty seemed unsubstantial and strange, as if it were sinking away into the past, as if it were only the memory of childhood.

So it is always when the mind is troubled among happy things, and then one almost wishes they could share one’s troubles and become more real with it. It seemed on that Sunday that a golden age had lasted till yesterday, and that the earth had still to learn the news of its ending. And this change has come, not by the will of God, not even by the will of man, but because some few men far away were afraid to be open and generous with each other. There was a power in their hands so great that it frightened them. There was a spring that they knew they must not touch, and, like mischievous and nervous children, they had touched it at last, and now all the world was to suffer for their mischief.

So the next morning one saw a reservist in his uniform saying goodbye to his wife and children at his cottage-gate and then walking up the hill that leads out of the valley with a cheerful smile still on his face. There was the first open sign of trouble, a very little one, and he made the least of it; and, after all, this valley is very far from any possible war, and

its harvest and its vintages of perry and cider will surely be gathered in peace.

But what happiness can there be in that peace, or what security in the mind of man, when the madness of war is let loose in so many other valleys? Here there is a beauty inherited from the past, and added to the earth by man’s will; but the men here are of the same nature and subject to the same madness as those who are gathering to fight on the frontiers. We are all men with the same power of making and

destroying, with the same divine foresight mocked by the same animal blindness. We ourselves may not be in fault today, but it is human beings in no way different from us who are doing what we abhor and they abhor even while they do it. There is a fate, coming from the beast in our own past, that the present man in us has not yet mastered, and for the moment that fate seems a malignity in the nature of the universe that mocks us even in the beauty of these lonely hills. But it is not so, for we are not separate and indifferent like the beasts; and if one nation for the moment forgets our common humanity and its future, then another must take over that sacred charge and guard it without hatred or fear until the madness is passed. May that be our task now, so that we may wage war only for the future peace of the world and with the lasting courage that needs no stimulant of hate.

战前星期天

阿瑟·克拉顿

星期天，在英格兰西部一处居家稀少、民性平靖的幽远山谷，如在寂静的群山之中一样，全无世人忧心忡忡的迹象。谷地的人们没有外部世界的消息，看来也不想打听。当地邮差接获通知，让他整日守着小小的办公室。这是引人关注的不寻常事态，不过也只是因为事关邮差而已。

早晨下了雨，午后放晴，阳光明媚，逶迤伸展到远处威尔士腹地以及威尔士山脉巍峨群峰的景致，全部呈现在眼前。谷地的农舍并不集成村落，而是三两簇聚，要不就孤零零的，掩埋在山腰的果树丛中。农舍的住户从来都彬彬有礼，态度友善，见人走过，会说上一两句话，然而也只是任何寻常日子的家常话，全不问打仗的事。看来，对于战争，他们知之甚少，也不想了解更多，漠然宛假设他们脚下的大地。这儿的土地常年秀美，而在这天下午更是披上了一种极度凄婉动人的美。这片乡野，比起英格兰的任何乡野，更得和平的奥秘。虽说面对威尔士的荒原，这片乡野并非蛮荒，倒是以其耕作的成绩，以其果园、啤酒花藤栽培场和金黄色的麦田，显示出日月流逝留下的美，仿佛这儿的人常年以来一直在土地上幸福度日，既不期盼变更，也不畏惧衰亡。这不是一种与现今隔绝的往昔的悲凉美，而是现今继承自往昔的一种醇美。就在这一片醇美之中，四周的山坡似乎成了宽敞的农舍和玲珑家舍的家园，每座都由各自花色烂漫的小径引至门前。这儿的牧场全是精心整理的草地，即使在八月仍是一片春

日的葱郁；不少地方更有栽培经年的樱桃、苹果和梨树等果树掩映。在这雨后的星期天，除了残夏特有的恬静。田乡还透出一种四月的辉耀和新生气息。

世间任何地方在任何时候都不可能领略比这儿更为深沉的和平。从山下河畔那座红砖小教堂传出的钟声，像是和平的主题音乐，正如啁啾的鸟语是春天的音乐一样。在这儿，你看到了人类生活可有多么美好，人类又如何以迭代的老实劳动给土地带来一种土地在蛮荒时代从未领略到的美。然而，你也意识到，这儿的和平景象正遭到威胁。这威胁如同穿越向东延伸的大平原传来的无声讯息，随之，田野之美顿时变得虚空而诡奇，似乎正融入往昔而渐渐消失，渺远宛假设童年的回忆。

置身幸福环境的人，在思想受到困扰的时候，总有这种体验。接着，他几乎会奢望幸福环境能分担他的困扰并在分担过程中变得更为真实。在那个星期天，人们感到，一个黄金时代已在昨日宣告结束，而大地对这消息犹浑然不觉。这场变化之所以发生，不是上帝的旨意使然，甚至也不是人类的意志使然，而是因为远在别处的少数人怯于开诚布公地善待同类。他们手中握有足以令他们战栗的大权。有一条他们知道不可去触动的弹簧发条，可是如同喜欢捣蛋又战战兢兢的孩子，他们毕竟去触动了，为了他们的淘气，如今全世界的人要受罪了。

于是，翌日早晨，人们看见一名预备役士兵穿上制服，在农舍门口告别妻孥，爬山出谷去了，脸上仍挂着欣喜的笑容。那是出现麻烦的第一个朕兆，一点蛛丝马迹而已，当事人更是尽量不事声张。归根到底，这片谷地远在可能燃起的

战火之外，这儿的一应作物以及用于今年酿造的梨子和苹果都将在和平环境中收摘归仓。

但是，在这么一种和平中，有什么幸福可言？当战争的疯狂在其他许多山谷中自由逡巡之际，人的心态又怎能平安释然？这儿存在一种往昔传下又被人的意志赋予大地的美，可是这儿的居民跟那些聚集在国境线上厮杀的士兵有同样的人性，又为同样的疯狂所驱遣。我们都是人，具有同样的创造力量和消灭力量，又都有神一般的远见卓识，只是这种识见时被共同的盲目兽性所嘲弄。今天，我们自己兴许并未做错事。然而，正在从事令我们厌憎不已的恶行的是一些同我们完全一样的人；这些恶行同样使他们自己即使作恶的同时也感到厌憎。今人的人性尚未驯服早年原始人的兽性，正是这种兽性形成了某种必然性。眼下，宿命的必然性似乎正表现为存在于宇宙本原中的邪恶力量。纵然这儿的山景美轮美奂，邪恶力量正向我们发出嘲弄的狞笑。但是，事情终究不是这样，因为我们不是各自为政又无动于衷的兽类。倘假设一个民族必须接过那神圣的使命，不怀仇恨也不抱恐惧地保卫它，直至疯狂殒消。但愿这一点成为今日我们的职责，以使我们只为世界的未来和平而作战，带着不需要由仇恨激化的永恒的勇气去作战。

陆谷孙译文赏析三篇〔3〕这儿是纽约

Here Is New York〔excerpt〕

这儿是纽约

E. B. White

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

对于任何企求这类离奇奖赏的人，纽约会送上两件礼物：孤寂和私密。正是这种大度解释了城市人口中相当一部分人的存在，因为曼哈顿居民中多的是异乡客，他们背井离乡，到这儿来寻求庇护，或实现抱负，要不就是追求别的什么大大小小的目标。得以向人送上如此不成其为礼物的礼物，乃是纽约一种谜一般的特质，它可毁掉一个人，也可成全他，很大程度上全看此人运气如何。不愿交好运的人可别来纽约居住。

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader, and the merchant. It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings. I am sitting at the moment in a stifling hotel room in 90-degree heat, halfway down an air shaft, in midtown. No air moves in or out of the room, yet I am curiously affected by emanations from the immediate surroundings. I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, five blocks from the publisher's office where Ernest Hemingway hit Max

Eastman on the nose, four miles from where Walt Whitman sat sweating out editorials for the Brooklyn Eagle, thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska, one block from where Marceline used to clown on the boards of the Hippodrome, thirty-six blocks from the spot where the historian Joe Gould kicked a radio to pieces in full view of the public, thirteen blocks from where Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, five blocks from where I used to usher at the Metropolitan Opera and only 112 blocks from the spot where Clarence Day the elder was washed of his sins in the Church of the Epiphany (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without.

纽约把艺术、商业、体育、宗教、娱乐、金融融于一炉，将角斗士、福音布道牧师、赞助人、演员、股市黄牛和商贾各色人等推上同一个紧凑的舞台。城市彰显的特点是带有一种无法抹煞的陈年久远的气味，所以不管你坐在纽约的什么地方，你都会感受到伟大时代和荒谬行状的回声，还有那些奇人怪事和业绩。此刻，气温高达华氏90度，我正坐在中城区一家酒店叫人透不过气的客房里，置身于通风井不上不下的位置。房间内外没有空气流动，可稀奇的是我却能感受到周围散发出的气息：此去22条马路就是鲁道夫·瓦伦蒂诺大殓前供人瞻仰的地方；8条马路之外是内森·黑尔的刑场；5条马路之隔有家出版社，就在那办公室里欧内斯特·海明威曾猛击迈克斯·伊斯特曼的鼻梁；过去4英里，那曾是沃尔特·惠特曼坐着挥汗为布鲁克林《鹰报》撰写社论的地方；34条马路之外是薇拉·凯瑟来纽约时住过的那条街，在那儿她写下了关于内布拉斯加的几部作品；离此一条马路之隔乃是马塞林经常表演丑角的大马戏场；36条马路之外，历史学家佐·古尔德曾在众目睽睽之下把一台收音机踹成碎片；13

条马路之外是哈利·索奥射杀斯坦福·怀特的现场；距此5条马路，是我当年当领座员的大都会歌剧院；克莱伦斯·戴的老子清洗罪孽的显圣堂离这儿再远也只须走过112条马路。〔就这类轶事拉一张单子可以长得没完没了。〕依同理，我此刻置身其中的客房可能不知被多少显贵和在某一方面值得缅怀的人物占用过，其中某些人在炎热又闷塞的下午，同样感到落寞而离群，又满怀各人对于从户外传来的人事影响的敏感。

When I went down to lunch a few minutes ago I noticed that the man sitting next to me (about eighteen inches away along the wall) was Fred Stone. The eighteen inches are both the connection and the separation that New York provides for its inhabitants. My only connection with Fred Stone was that I saw him in the The Wizard of Oz around the beginning of the century. But our waiter felt the same stimulus from being close to a man from Oz, and after Mr. Stone left the room the waiter told me that when he (the waiter) was a young man just arrived in this country and before he could understand a word of English, he had taken his girl for their first theater date to The Wizard of Oz. It was a wonderful show, the waiter recalled—a man of straw, a man of tin. Wonderful! (And still only eighteen inches away.) “Mr. Stone is a very hearty eater, ” said the waiter thoughtfully, content with this fragile participation in destiny, this link with Oz.

几分钟前我下楼进午餐，曾注意到邻座〔沿墙约18英寸之外〕竟是弗雷德·斯通。这儿说的18英寸乃是纽约为其居民提供的人与人之间既联系又分隔的距离。我与弗雷德·斯通的唯一联系是，大概在世纪初吧，我看过他在《绿野仙踪》中的表演。可我们的侍应生因为在近距离接触了一位“绿野人”，同样大受激励，一俟斯通先生离去，便告诉我说，那还是他〔指侍者〕一个小伙子初来美国而且一个英文大字都不识的时候，和女友初次剧院约会看的戏。演出可精彩啦，侍者回忆道，稻草人，铁皮人。妙不可言！〔仍在18英寸之外〕“斯通

先生吃东西真是好胃口，”侍者假设有所思地说，因为跟“绿野”扯上了关系而心满意足，虽说那纽带一碰就断，也算是有缘的参与吧。

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn’t attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn’t even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this air shaft to fly over. The biggest oceangoing ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers. I am told this is the greatest seaport in the world, with 650 miles of waterfront, and ships calling here from many exotic lands, but the only boat I’ve happened to notice since my arrival was a small sloop tacking out of the East River night before last on the ebb tide when I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss. The Lions have been in convention. I've seen not one Lion. A friend of mine saw one and told me about him. (He was lame, and was wearing a bolero.) At the ballgrounds and horse parks the greatest sporting spectacles have been enacted. I saw no ballplayer, no race horse. The governor came to town. I heard the siren scream, but that was all there was to that—an eighteen-inch margin again. A man was killed by a falling cornice. I was not a party to the tragedy, and again the inches counted heavily.

纽约把离群索居的礼物和亲历参与的激动混合在一起。比之大多数人口密集的社区，纽约更能使个人〔只要你愿意，而几乎每个人都愿意并需要这样〕与外

界每一分钟发生的所有群众场面、残忍暴行、精彩表演完全绝缘。我坐在这臭气熏天的通风井处已有一会儿，城里可已发生了许多光怪陆离的事件。一名男子妒火中烧，开枪射杀妻子。这样的恶事竟不传社区之外，仅在报上简要提了一笔。我没去赶热闹，我是说打我来此，世界上最为壮观的飞行表演在纽约举行，我没去观摩，800万居民中的多数人也没去，尽管据说观众人数不少。我甚至没听见飞机的轰鸣，除去按常例从这儿通风井上空飞过的一两次西去的商业航班。几艘北大西洋最大的海轮抵港复离港。我根本未予注意，大多数其他纽约人也是这样。别人告诉我这儿可是全世界最大的海港，滨水码头区长达650英里，从许多域外异国驶来的航船在此停泊。不过来此以后我也碰巧注意过一艘小小的单桅帆船，忽左忽右抢风驶出东河去。那是前天夜里的退潮时分，我正步行跨越布鲁克林大桥。不过，某日午夜，我也曾听到“玛丽王后”拉响汽笛，那声音带着浓浓的离绪，又有期盼和失落的全部苍凉。国际狮子会在此开大会，我可一头狮子都未见到。我的一个朋友倒是见过一位，还把这人的模样告诉了我。〔是个瘸子，穿了件西班牙式的短上衣。〕在球场和赛马场有最盛大的体育比赛。我没见过一名球员或一匹赛马。州长大驾光临。我听得警笛长鸣，所知也就仅限于此了——18英寸画地为牢的又一明证。一名男子被坠落的屋檐砸死。我与这齣悲剧全无干系，以英寸度量的距离又一次彰显无遗。

I mention these events merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. In most metropolises, small and large, the choice is often not with the individual at all. He is thrown to the Lions. The

Lions are overwhelming; the event is unavoidable. A cornice falls, that it hits every citizen on the head, every last man in town. I sometimes think that the only event that hits every New Yorker on the head is the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, which is fairly penetrating—the Irish are a hard race to tune out, there are 500,000 of them in residence, and they have the police force right in the family.

我提到这些事情只是为了说明，纽约的结构真是够特别的，可以吸纳几乎任何一件发生在此的事情〔不管是从东方驶来的长达一千英尺的班轮，还是一次从西方来的两万人大会〕，而不使事情强行影响本市居民。结果，一应大事，在某种意义上，都成了市民本人的选择，每个人都过着舒心日子，可以自行选择参与哪一桩盛举，从而节约自己的精神支出。在大多数都市，不管大小，选择往往由不得个人，你身不由己地被拉去参加狮子大会，狮群集会可是件压倒一切的大事，躲也躲不开的。倘有屋檐坠落，那就相当于砸在每个公民的头上，没有谁可以幸免。我有时想，真能砸到每个纽约人头上的大事惟有一年一度的圣帕特里克节大游行了。这场活动渗透到每个角落——爱尔兰人容不得别人不把自己当回事，在全城居民中占了50万，而家中干警察这一行的还特别多。

The quality in New York that insulates its inhabitants from life may simply weaken them as individuals. Perhaps it is healthier to live in a community where, when a cornice falls, you feel the blow; where, when the governor passes, you see at any rate his hat.

纽约城把居民与生活隔绝的特质可能只会弱化个体。也许，个人生活在一个这样的社区更为健康：当屋檐坠落，应当感觉就像砸在自己头上一样；当州长路过，至少能见到他的帽子。

I am not defending New York in this regard. Many of its settlers are probably here merely to escape, not face, reality. But whatever it means, it is a rather rare gift, and I believe it has a positive effect on the creative capacities of New Yorkers—for creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

我不是在这方面替纽约辩白。在此定居的好些人之所以来这儿，可能仅仅是为了逃避而不是面对现实。但是，不管其含义究竟是什么，这份礼物相当难得。我还相信，这份礼物对于纽约人的创造能力大有裨益——因为所谓创造，部分的意思无非是摒弃大大小小让你分心的事情。

Although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or

forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location ten blocks or by reducing your fortune by five dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation—a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless. I think that although many persons are here from some excess of spirit (which caused them to break away from their small town), some, too, are here from a deficiency of spirit, who find in New York a protection, or an easy substitution.

纽约虽说时常给人一种沉重的失落感或被遗弃感，城市却难得显出死气沉沉或一筹莫展的样子，反倒是你总拥有一种希望：越过10条马路搬次家，或是花去5美元，就能重新焕发青春。许多缺乏独立精神的人依赖城市巨大的多样性和兴奋源，来求得精神上的耐久力并保持振奋。在乡下，青春得以突然重新焕发的偶然时机不是没有 —— 也许是天气的骤变，要不收到一封让你惊喜的邮件。可是在纽约，这样的时机无穷无尽。在我看来，尽管有不少人是由于精神

追求过度到这儿来的〔这使他们逼着自己离开小城〕，也有些人是因为精神贫乏到纽约来的，并在此找到了保护或是轻而易举得到了易地取代的报偿。