*这可能是我至今为止看到的最有感觉的英文短篇了......非常难翻。非常难翻出作者那种感觉来。
原来做了这个翻译的本子不在身边,暂时先把原文挂这里,寒假回家以后再放上来。
在地铁上
C.K.威廉姆斯
在地铁上我不得不请一位年轻女士把她身边的包裹挪开,好让我有个空儿坐下来。
她在读书,一只脚支在前面的椅子上,当她将包裹挪开的时候甚至都没从书本中抬起眼来。
我坐下来,拿出我自己的书——萧沆(齐奥兰)的《逃离的诱惑》,便发觉她抬眼来看我的书名。然后,就如刚布罗维茨所说的那样,她“在肉体层面确认了她自己”。
......
请大家(不要)期待【
On the Metro
BY C.K.Williams
On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers
to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is,
becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself
to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark
her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)
She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;
she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,
achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.
I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,
but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:
a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now,
our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,
my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.
The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,
and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,
(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,
(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again
as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.