首届CASIO杯翻译竞赛原文及参考译文

2010-8-1 05:09| 发布者: sisu04| 查看: 5380| 评论: 0

摘要: 第1届CASIO翻译竞赛

Delicate Wives (Excerpt)<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

John Updick

　　Veronica Horst was stung by a bee, and it should have produced no more than a minute of annoyance and pain, but she, in the apparent bloom of health at the age of twenty-nine, turned out to be susceptible to anaphylactic shock, and nearly died. Fortunately, her husband, Gregor, was with her, and threw her fainting body, all but blood-pressureless, into their car and speeded careening through the heart of town to the hospital, where she was saved. When Les Miller heard about the event, from his wife, Lisa, who was breathlessly fresh from a session of gossip and women's tennis, he was stung by jealousy: he and Veronica had had an affair the previous summer, and by the rights of love he should have been the one to be with her and to save her heroically. Gregor even had the presence of mind, afterward, to go around to the local police and explain why he had been speeding and careening through stop signs. "It seems incredible," Lisa innocently told her husband, "that here she's nearly thirty and apparently has never been stung before, so nobody knew she would react this way. As a child I was always getting stung, weren't you?"

　　"I think Veronica had a city upbringing," he said.

　　"Still," Lisa said, hesitant in the face of his ready assertion, "that's no guarantee. There are parks."

　　Les, picturing Veronica in her house, in her bed, where an elongated pink-tinged pallor had been revealed to him, like a Modigliani or a Fragonard, nestled in rumpled fabric, said, "She's a pretty indoor kind of person."

　　Lisa was not. Tennis, golf, hiking, and skiing kept her freckled the year round. Even her delft-blue irises were dotted, if you looked, with tan specks of melanin. She insisted, "Well, she nearly died," as if Les had been wandering from the point. His mind had been exploring the abysmal possibility of Veronica's beauty and high spirits being removed from the world by a chemical mischance. In her moment of need, had her care passed to her lover the previous summer, he might have proved less effective than Gregor, who was small and dark and spoke English if not with an accent with a studied precision, as if locking the sense of his words into an iron case. She found him repellent, Veronica had confessed-his fussiness, his dictatorial streak, the cold assertiveness in his touch-but Les, by breaking off their affair at the end of the summer, had possibly saved her life. In Gregor's shoes he might have panicked, doubted what was happening, and fatally failed to act. As it was, he saw gallingly, the incident would be rolled into the Horst family annals, as a pivotal and eternally ramifying moment-the time Mommy (and, as she would become, Grammy) was stung by a bee, and funny foreign-born Grampa resourcefully saved her. Les was so jealous that he nearly bent over as if with a stomach cramp. Had he, sweet dreamy Les, been there, instead of scowling, practical-minded Gregor, her emergency would have acquired and forever retained a different poetry, more flattering to her, more congruent with a doomed summer love. For what was more majestically intimate even than sex but death? He imagined her motionless profile, gray with blood loss, cradled in his arms.

　　Veronica had a favorite summer dress, with a wide oval neck and half-length sleeves, of orange, orange distributed with a tie-dyed unevenness. It was not a color most women would wear, but it brought out the reckless gleam in her long straight hair and the green of her eyes. Remembering their affair, Les seemed to squint through a wash of this color, though it was no longer summer but September when they parted, the grass in the fields going to seed and the air noisy with cicadas. Veronica's eyes watered, her lower lip trembled as she listened. He explained that he just couldn't face leaving Lisa and the kids, who were still almost babies, and unless he could they should break it off while it was still secret, before things got messy, and all their lives lay scattered and ruined. Through her tears Veronica appraised him and determined that indeed he did not love her enough to rescue her from Gregor. He was not free enough, was how he preferred to phrase it. They wept together-his tears made a gleam on the skin of her shoulder within the wide oval of her neckline-and agreed that no one but them would ever know.

　　And yet, through the fall and winter and into the next summer, he felt cheated by this secrecy; their affair had been something wonderful he wanted known. He tried to rekindle her attention. She ignored his longing looks, and rebuked his confused attempts to single her out in a crowd. Her green eyes glared, under the frown of her long reddish eyebrows. "Les dear," she said to him once when he cornered her late at a party, "did you ever hear the expression 'Shit or get off the pot'?"

　　"Well, I have now," he said, shocked and offended. Lisa would never have said such a thing, any more than she would have worn splashy tie-dyed orange.

　　His concealed affair with Veronica burned within him like an untreated infection, and as the years went by it seemed that Veronica, too, suffered from it; she seemed never to have quite recovered from the bee sting. Weight loss, making her look gaunt and stringy, alternated with periods of puffiness and overweight. There were trips to the local hospital, about which Gregor was adamantly mysterious, and spells when Veronica was hidden within her house, suffering from complaints that her husband, showing up at parties by himself, refused to name. Les, in his inert, romantic way, imagined her, having in a fit of treacherous weakness confessed their affair to Gregor, being held captive by him. Or else regret over losing Les was gnawing at her delicate constitution. Her beauty did not greatly suffer from her frailty, but gained a new dimension from it, a ghostly glow, a poignance. After years of sunbathing-all women did it back then-Veronica developed photosensitivity, and stayed pale all summer. Her teeth, as her thirties wore on, gave her trouble, and the orthodontics and periodontics specialists she regularly consulted had their offices in the nearby middle-sized city, in a tall building across from the one in which Les worked as an investment counsellor.

　　Once, he glimpsed her from his window as she reported, preoccupied and solemn in a dark, wide-skirted cloth coat, for treatment across the street. After that, he kept looking out his window for her, mourning the decade they had let slip by while married to other people. Lisa's outdoor bounce and freckled good nature had become somewhat butch; her hair, like her mother's, turned gray early. Gregor was rumored to be discontented and having affairs. Les imagined these betrayals as wounds Veronica was enduring, within the silent prison of her marriage. He still saw her at parties, but across the room, and, when he did maneuver close to her, she had little to say. During their affair they had shared, along with sex, concerns about their children, and memories of their parents and upbringings. This sort of innocent exposure of another, eagerly apprehended life figures among the things lovers lose, a flow of blameless confidences that, halted, builds up a pressure.

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