叶子南  翻译天堂  2016-09-26

纽约是一首诗

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway—they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently. 一首诗纳万千于方寸，再配上韵律，便意蕴非凡。纽约亦如诗，它将所有生活、人种、族群压缩在一个小岛上，配以韵律，再配以内燃机的轰鸣。曼哈顿这座岛屿无疑是地球上集万种人于一地的极致，她是一首诗，诗的魔力千万个居民都能理解，诗的深意却永难把握。一边是豪华的办公大楼，楼旁却是赤贫的民宅。河滨教堂中信徒们正举止文雅地举行宗教仪式，而哈莱姆的伏都教徒却在不远处施展魔法。商业王子乘豪华车，沿东河路，直奔华尔街，车过处吉普赛王仅与他们一箭之遥；但是这些王子不知道他们正与国王们擦身而过。不过这倒也无妨，反正国王也还没起来：吉普赛般的生活要比华尔街的来得悠闲舒畅，酩配大醉更是十分平常。

New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the Depression. The Empire State Building shot 1250 feet into the air when it was madness to put out as much as six inches of new growth. (The building has a mooring mast that no dirigible has ever tried to; it employs a man to flush toilets in slack times; it has been hit by an airplane in a fog, struck countless times by lightning, and been jumped off of by so many unhappy people that pedestrians instinctively quicken step when passing Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street.) 纽约与巴黎十分不同，也和伦敦完全两样，它不是斯博坎市的60倍，也非底特律乘四。城邦无数，惟纽约是巅峰之都。它甚至在大萧条最低迷的时刻，竖起了最高耸的建筑。刺破青天的帝国大厦高达1250英尺，而当时六英寸的发展已属疯狂。（帝国大厦上有个飞船停系塔，但却没有飞船停靠过；不繁忙时大楼内还雇佣一个专人冲厕所；大雾中曾有架飞机撞到楼上，闪电无数次击中大厦；郁郁寡欢的人一次次从上面跳下，结果行人走过第5大道和34街时便总是不自觉地加快步伐）。

Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow. This, more than any other thing, is responsible for its physical majesty. It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village—the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up. The summer traveler swings in over Hell Gate Bridge and from the window of his sleeping car as it glides above the pigeon lofts and back yards of Queens looks southwest to where the morning light first strikes the steel peaks of midtown, and he sees its upward thrust unmistakable: the great walls and towers rising, the smoke rising, the heat not yet rising, the hopes and ferments of so many awakening millions rising—this vigorous spear that presses heaven hard. 曼哈顿被迫直冲云端，因为南北东西已无法扩展。这是它巍巍壮观的主要原因。曼哈顿之于美国，恰如白色教堂的塔尖之于村落，它是志向与信仰的显著象征，一缕白烟冉冉升起，告诉人们，向上才是正道。夏季的游客经地狱门大桥进人纽约，皇后区沿车道的鸽子楼和一家家的后院在他的卧车下掠过，从车窗向西南方向望去，第一道晨光照在市中心铁铸钢造的尖顶上，他清楚地看到了城市活力无比，冉冉向上：城墙与塔楼在升起，烟雾在升起，热气仍未升起，可千百万个正在醒来的人们的希望和激情正在升起，这柄活力无比的长矛直逼苍弯。

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time the residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Gatskills and the hills of Westchester. When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube—pfft—just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines steam pipes, gas mains, and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils. Every time an incision is made in the pavement, the noisy surgeons expose ganglia that are tangled beyond belief. By rights New York should have destroyed itself long ago, from panic or fire or rioting or failure of some vital supply line in its circulatory system or from some deep labyrinthine short circuit. Long ago the city should have experience an insoluble traffic snarl at some impossible bottleneck. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ships’ rats. It should have been overwhelmed by the sea that licks at it on every side. The workers in its myriad cells should have succumbed to nerves, from the fearful pall of smoke-fog that drifts over every few days from Jersey, blotting out all light at noon and leaving the high offices suspended, men groping and depressed, and the sense of world’s end. It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker. 纽约竟能运转，这是个奇迹。所有的一切都难以想象。纽约居民每次刷牙就得从卡兹基尔山和维切斯特山区调来数百万加仑的水。一位曼哈顿的年轻小伙子给布鲁克林的姑娘写情书，一纸情话是借充气管道吹过去的，“璞”的一声爱就过去了。电话线、电缆线、蒸汽管、煤气管、下水道这一地下系统就足以让你遗弃这一岛屿，把它留给众神和象虫。每一次在行人道上做个切口，嘈杂的外科医生总是将神经节般错综复杂的地下网络暴露无遗。按理，纽约本早该自我毁灭了，早该毁于恐慌、大火、骚乱，毁于循环系统中关键供应线的停运，或毁于地下复杂系统的短路。很久以前，这个城市就该在某个难以疏通的瓶颈处，毁于无法解决的交通混乱。它本早该在食物供应线停转数天后，就毁于饥饿。它本早该因源自贫民窟或由轮船带进的鼠疫而毁于瘟病。它本早该被城市四周拍岸的海水所淹没。而在蜂窝式房间里工作的人本早该神经崩溃，因为从泽西每隔数日从泽西每隔数日飘来的白色烟雾令人感到害怕，它阻断了午间的阳光，使高耸的办公楼悬在空中，人们摸索前行，感到沉闷，感到世界末日来临。它本早该被炙热当头的八月骄阳烧烤得精神失常。

Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seems always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit—a sort of perpetual muddling through. Every facility is inadequate—the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin—the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled. 群体歇斯底里能散发出一股可怕的力量，但是纽约人似乎总能有惊无险躲避疯狂：他们坐在一动不动的地铁车厢里，居然没患上幽闭恐惧症，几句俏皮话就拒恐怖于千里之外，你混乱拥塞，我耐心坚韧，好像总能度过难关。每一个设施都不堪重负：医院、学校、操场人满为患，高速公路混乱成灾，年久失修的公路和桥梁更让你寸步难行。空气不够，光线不足，不是热度过头，便是热气不足。但这个城市尽管有麻烦、多匾乏，却给市民注人了大剂量的维他命补充剂，使纽约人感到自己所属的城市很独特，很强大，有国际格局，又无与伦比。