四川外语学院第四届“语言桥杯”翻译大赛原文、参考译文及获奖译文选登

When the Sun Stood Still

Remember how time used to stretch forever?

We are well into summer now here in the city. An early morning alarm gets my daughter, Morgan, up for summer school. My son, Patrick, has gone off with his uncle, and my husband and I have to go to our jobs and try to find a way to cram a vacation in somewhere.

Summer wasn’t always like this. When I was growing up in a small California town called Lagunitas, a perfect stillness awaited us when we stepped out of school in June. We had no summer classes, no camps, no relatives to visit. The calendar was a blank.

Every day the hills of Lagunitas pressed in and the light pressed down. It was as if the planet had come lazily to a stop so we could all hear the buzzing of the dragonflies above the creek—and the beating of our own hearts.

June was far away, September a distant blur. Without school to tell us who we were—fifth-graders or sixth-graders, good students or good-offs—we were free just to be ourselves, to build forts, to moon around the neighborhood with a head full of fantastical schemes.

There was time for everything. Minutes were as big as plums, hours the size of watermelons. You could spend a quarter of an hour watching the dust motes in the shaft of sunlight from the doorway and wondering if anybody else could see them.

I don’t really miss those long, slow days. What I miss is summertime, the illusion that the sun is standing still and the future is keeping its distance. On summer afternoons, nobody got any older. Kids didn’t have to worry about becoming adults, and adults didn’t have to worry about running out of adulthood. You could lie on your back watching clouds scud across the sky, and maybe later walk down to the store for a Popsicle. You could lose your watch and not miss it for days.

These busy kids I’m raising today don’t know what summertime is. They are on city time. “My life is going too fast,” Patrick once grumbled as he got into bed. “This whole day went by just like that. I didn’t have enough fun.”

He’s a city child, a child whose fun is packed into short, hurried weekends. Even in summer his hours grow shorter and begin to run together, faster and faster. It won’t be long before an hour—once an eternity—is for him, too, a walk to the grocery store, three phone calls, half a movie.

Maybe that’s why we still need long school vacations—to anchor kids to the earth, keep them from rocketing too fast out of childhood.

If they have enough time on their hands, they might be among the lucky ones who carry their summertime with them into adulthood.