Saul Bellow describes his impressions of the seemingly endless cornfields of Illinois.
索爾·貝婁描述了自己對伊利諾伊看似無邊無際的玉米地的印象。
伊利諾伊之旅
索爾·貝婁
The features of Illinois are not striking; they do not leap to the eye but lie flat and at first appear monotonous. The roads are wide, hard, perfect, sometimes of a shallow depth in the far distance but so nearly level as to make you feel that the earth really is flat. From east and west, travelers dart across these prairies into the huge horizons and through cornfields that go on forever; giant skies, giant clouds, an eternal nearly featureless sameness. You find it hard to travel slowly. The endless miles pressed flat by the ancient glacier seduce you into speeding. As the car eats into the distances you begin gradually to feel that you are riding upon the floor of the continent, the very bottom of it, low and flat, and an impatient spirit of movement, of overtaking and urgency passes into your heart.
伊利諾伊的地貌平平常常，沒有引人注目之處。平坦的地勢，初初看來單調乏味。道路寬闊堅實，毫無損毀，有時遙看有個不深的凹陷，可差不多全是那么平坦，你禁不住以為地球實際上是平的。從東到西，從西到東，旅人飛快地駛過茫茫大草原，駛向蒼茫天際，穿過一望無際的玉米地；高不可測的蒼穹，碩大的云朵，老是幾乎平淡無奇、千篇一律。你很難緩慢地行駛。被古冰川擠壓得平平坦坦的無盡長路誘使你加快車速。汽車漸行漸遠，你這才開始逐步意識到自己正穿行在北美大陸的底部，地勢最低之處，既低又平坦，這時一種亟欲行進、急著想超車的焦躁情緒在心頭滋生。
Miles and miles of prairie, slowly rising and falling, sometimes give you a sense that something is in the process of becoming, or that the liberation of a great force is imminent, some power, like Michelangelo's slave only half released from the block of stone. Conceivably the mound-building Indians believed their resurrection would coincide with some such liberation, and built their graves in imitation of the low moraines deposited by the departing glaciers. But they have not yet been released and remain drowned in their waves of earth. They have left their bones, their flints and pots, their place names and tribal names and little besides except a stain, seldom vivid, on the consciousness of their white successors.
連綿不斷的大草原徐徐起伏，有時會讓你覺得有什么東西正在生成，或是即刻將有偉力釋放，某種力，一如米開朗琪羅的奴隸雕像只浮現半個身形。可以想象，擅長構筑土墩的印第安人相信人的死而復生會與某種類似的釋放同時發生，所以他們在建造墓塋時模仿離去的冰川積下的低矮冰磧。然而，他們迄今未能復蘇，仍掩埋在泥土中。他們留下了自己的尸骸、燧石、壺罐、地名和部落名，此外就沒留下什么，除了白人后繼者的意識中并不清晰的污痕。
The soil of the Illinois prairies is fat, rich and thick. After spring plowing it looks oil-blackened or colored by the soft coal which occurs in great veins throughout the state. In the fields you frequently see a small tipple, or a crazy-looking device that pumps oil and nods like the neck of a horse at a quick walk.... () Along the roads, with intervals between them as neat and even as buttons on the cuff, sit steel storage bins, in form like the tents of Mongolia. They are filled with grain. And the elevators and tanks, trucks and machines that crawl over the fields and blunder over the highways -- whatever you see is productive. It creates wealth, it stores wealth, it is wealth.
伊利諾伊大草原上，土壤肥沃、豐產而深厚。春耕之后，泥土油亮烏黑，像是被遍布全州的大礦脈里松軟的煙煤染過似的。田野上你常常看到一種小型翻卸車，一種樣子滑稽的抽油用的裝置，就像飛奔中馬匹的頸部上下抖動…… 沿途聳立著形似蒙古包的鐵皮谷倉，它們之間的間距如同袖口的紐扣般排列得整齊劃一。里面儲滿了谷物。還有升降機、儲藏罐、卡車、機器緩慢地行駛在田野上，笨拙地奔走在公路上――你所見到的一切都能產生經濟效益。這塊土地創造財富，這塊土地儲存財富，這塊土地本身就是財富。
As you pass the fields, you see signs the farmers have posted telling in short code what sort of seed they have planted. The farmhouses are seldom at the roadside, but far within the fields. The solitude and silence are deep and wide. Then, when you have gone ten or twenty miles through cornfields without having seen a living thing, no cow, no dog, scarcely even a bird under the hot sky, suddenly you come upon a noisy contraption at the roadside, a system of contraptions, rather, for husking the corn and stripping the grain. It burns and bangs away, and the conveyor belts rattle....
當你穿過田野時，你見到農場主張貼的指示牌，上面用簡短的標記寫明他們播下的是什么種子。農舍通常不在路邊，而是建在田野深處。那份寂寥和靜謐既深沉又廣大。當你穿行在玉米田間，行駛了十里，二十里，卻看不到一個活物，看不到牛看不到狗，連晴熱天空下的飛鳥也難見到，這時，突如其來地，你會見到路旁有個發出噪聲的新奇的機械裝置，或者說是一組機械裝置，那是用來剝玉米殼碾谷的。它熱得燙手，不停地砰砰作響，傳送帶咯嚓喀嚓地在運行……
When you leave, this noise and activity are cut off at one stroke: you are once more in the deaf, hot solitude of trembling air, alone in the cornfields.
你一走開，這聲響，這動靜就倏然消失：你重新回到那份無聲的灼人的寂寥之中，呼吸顫動的空氣，回到玉米田間，孤身一人……
North, south, east and west, there is no end to them. They line roads and streams and hem in the woods and surround towns, and they crowd into back yards and edge up to gas stations. () An exotic stranger might assume he had come upon a race of corn worshipers who had created a corn ocean；or that he was among a people who had fallen in love with infinite repetition of the same details, like the builders of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago who have raised up bricks and windows by the thousands, and all alike. From corn you can derive notions of equality, or uniformity, massed democracy. You can, if you are given to that form of mental play, recall Joseph's brethren in the lean years, and think how famine has been conquered here and super-abundance itself become such a danger that the Government has to take measures against it.
東南西北，四面八方的玉米地望不到邊。路邊、溪邊都種了玉米，林子、城鎮四周也都種了玉米，玉米種滿后院，甚至擠到了加油站。異鄉客會以為自己來到了一個創建起玉米海洋的對玉米頂禮膜拜的民族，或以為自己身處那些偏愛無休止地重復同樣細節的人們之中，就如同紐約、芝加哥那些摩天高樓的建造者，他們壘萬磚安千窗，全都一個模樣。在玉米田間，你可以獲得平等的觀念、劃一的觀念、大眾民主的觀念。如果你好做這類腦力游戲，你可以回想一下遇到荒年的約瑟夫兄弟，想一想在這里饑饉是如何被鏟除的，過剩本身又如何成為一種危險，政府不得不對其采取措施。
The power, the monotony, the oceanic extent of the cornfields do indeed shrink up and dwarf the past. How are you to think of the small bands of Illini, Ottawas, Cahokians, Shawnee, Miamis who camped in the turkey grass, and the French Jesuits who descended the Mississippi and found them. () When you force your mind to summon them, the Indians appear rather doll-like in the radiance of the present moment. They are covered in the corn, swamped in the oil, hidden in the coal of Franklin County, run over by the trains, turned phantom by the stockyards. There are monuments to them...throughout the state, but they are only historical ornaments to the pride of the present...
玉米地所展現的那種震撼力、那種千篇一律、浩瀚無垠的確使過去變得渺小。你不妨回想一下那些在草地設營的小群印第安人：伊里尼人、奧塔瓦人、卡豪凱揚人、肖尼人、邁阿密人，也不妨回想一下順密西西比河而下、發現他們的法國耶穌會教徒。當你凝神回顧這些昔日的印第安人時，他們在今日的輝煌之前顯得猶如玩偶。他們被玉米掩沒，被石油淹沒，被富蘭克林縣的煤埋沒，被火車碾過，化作了在牲畜圍場近旁出沒的幽靈。為他們建的紀念碑……遍布全州，但這些不過是為今日的榮耀添彩的歷史點綴……
評論
打印
