听英文名着可以耳朵怀孕 | 里昂读《了不起的盖茨比》- 001

听英文名著可以耳朵怀孕

里昂读《了不起的盖茨比》

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Chapter 1

第一章

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

我年纪还轻，阅历不深的时候，我父亲教导过我一句话，我至今还念念不忘。

　　“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

"每逢你想要批评任何人的时候，"他对我说，"你就记住，这个世界上所有的人，并不是个个都有过你拥有的那些优越条件。"

　　He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.

他没再说别的。但是，我们父子之间话虽不多，却一向是非常通气的，因此我明白他的话大有弦外之音。

In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

久而久之，我就惯于对所有的人都保留判断，这个习惯既使得许多有怪僻的人肯跟我讲心里话，也使我成为不少爱唠叨的惹人厌烦的人的受害者。

The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person,

这个特点在正常的人身上出现的时候，心理不正常的人很快就会察觉并区抓住不放。

and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

由于这个缘故，我上大学的时候就被不公正地指责为小政客，因为我与闻一些放荡的、不知名的人的秘密的伤心事。

Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon;

绝大多数的隐私都不是我打听来的--每逢我根据某种明白无误的迹象看出又有一次倾诉衷情在地平线上喷薄欲出的时候，我往往假装睡觉，假装心不在焉，或者装出不怀好意的轻佻态度。

for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

因为青年人倾诉的衷情，或者至少他们表达这些衷情所用的语言，往往是剽窃性的，而且多有明显的隐瞒。保留判断是表示怀有无限的希望。

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

我现在仍然唯恐错过什么东西，如果我忘记（如同我父亲带着优越感所暗示过的，我现在又带着优越感重复的）基本的道德观念是在人出世的时候就分配不均的。

　　And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit.

在这样夸耀我的宽容之后，我得承认宽容也有个限度。

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

人的行为可能建立在坚固的岩石上面，也可能建立在潮湿的沼泽之中，但是一过某种程度，我就不管它是建立在什么上面的了。

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever;

去年秋天我从东部回来的时候，我觉得我希望全世界的人都穿上军装，并且永远在道德上保持一种立正姿势。

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

我不再要参与放浪形骸的游乐，也不再要偶尔窥见人内心深处的荣幸了。

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

唯有盖茨比--就是把名字赋予本书的那个人--除外，不属于我这种反应的范围--盖茨比，他代表我所真心鄙夷的一切。

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

假如人的品格是一系列连续不断的成功的姿态，那么这个人身上就有一种瑰丽的异彩，他对于人生的希望具有一种高度的敏感，类似一台能够记录万里以外的地震的错综复杂的仪器。

This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

这种敏感和通常美其名曰"创造性气质"的那种软绵绵的感受性毫不相干--它是一种异乎寻常的水葆希望的天赋，一种富于浪漫色彩的敏捷，这是我在别人身上从来发现过的，也是我今后不大可能会再发现的。

No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

不--盖茨比本人到头来倒是无可厚非的、使我对人们短暂的悲哀和片刻的欢欣暂时丧失兴趣的，却是那些吞噬盖茨比心灵的东西，是在他的幻梦消逝后跟踪而来的恶浊的灰尘。

　　My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

我家三代以来都是这个中西部城市家道殷实的头面人物。姓卡罗威的也可算是个世家，据家平传说我们是布克娄奇公爵①的后裔，但是我们家系的实际创始人却是我祖父的哥哥。他在一八五一年来到这里，买了个替身去参加南北战争，开始做起五金批发生意，也就是我父东今天还在经营的买卖。

①苏格兰贵族。

　　I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye—es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

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