「《英語世界》杯」翻譯大賽肇始於 2010 年,由北京商務印書館《英語世界》雜誌社主辦。為推動翻譯學科的進一步發展,促進中外文化交流,我們將秉承「給力英語學習,探尋翻譯之星」的理念,於 2014 年 5 月繼續舉辦第五屆「《英語世界》杯」翻譯大賽,誠邀廣大翻譯愛好者積極參與,比秀佳譯。
詳情請見第五屆「《英語世界》杯」翻譯大賽啟事。
【翻譯大賽原文】
Limbo
By
Rhonda Lucas
My
parents’ divorce was final. The house had been sold and the day had come to
move. Thirty years of the family’s life was now crammed into the garage. The
two-by-fours that ran the length of the walls were the only uniformity among
the clutter of boxes, furniture, and memories. All was frozen in limbo between
the life just passed and the one to come.
The
sunlight pushing its way through the window splattered against a barricade of
boxes. Like a fluorescent river, it streamed down the sides and flooded the
cracks of the cold, cement floor. I stood in the doorway between the house and
garage and wondered if the sunlight would ever again penetrate the memories
packed inside those boxes. For an instant, the cardboard boxes appeared as
tombstones, monuments to those memories.
The
furnace in the corner, with its huge tubular fingers reaching out and
disappearing into the wall, was unaware of the futility of trying to warm the
empty house. The rhythmical whir of its effort hummed the elegy for the
memories boxed in front of me. I closed the door, sat down on the step, and
listened reverently. The feeling of loss transformed the bad memories into
not-so-bad, the not-so-bad memories into good, and committed the good ones to
my mind. Still, I felt as vacant as the house inside.
A
workbench to my right stood disgustingly empty. Not so much as a nail had been
left behind. I noticed, for the first time, what a dull, lifeless green it was.
Lacking the disarray of tools that used to cover it, now it seemed as out of
place as a bathtub in the kitchen. In fact, as I scanned the room, the only
things that did seem to belong were the cobwebs in the corners.
A
group of boxes had been set aside from the others and stacked in front of the
workbench. Scrawled like graffiti on the walls of dilapidated buildings were
the words “Salvation Army.” Those words caught my eyes as effectively as a
flashing neon sign. They reeked of irony. “Salvation - was a bit too late for
this family,” I mumbled sarcastically to myself.
The
houseful of furniture that had once been so carefully chosen to complement and
blend with the color schemes of the various rooms was indiscriminately crammed
together against a single wall. The uncoordinated colors combined in turmoil
and lashed out in the greyness of the room.
I
suddenly became aware of the coldness of the garage, but I didn’t want to go
back inside the house, so I made my way through the boxes to the couch. I
cleared a space to lie down and curled up, covering myself with my jacket. I
hoped my father would return soon with the truck so we could empty the garage
and leave the cryptic silence of parting lives behind.
(選自 Patterns: A Short Prose Reader, by Mary Lou
Conlin, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1983)
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