老外一直要2019年外教社杯高校翻译大赛英译汉初赛原文

2020年12月11日发(作者：元宣)
2019年“外教社杯”高校翻译大赛英译汉初赛原文

Whether a certain intimacy was needed or whether the whisperers
simply wanted to protect their secret conversations with horses is not known.
One thing was certain—that such men gained power over horses by
whispering. What they whispered no one knew. But the effectiveness of
their methods was renowned, and anyone for counties around who had an
unruly horse could send for a whisperer and be sure that the horse would
take to heart whatever was said and reform his behavior from that day forth.

By all accounts, my great-grandfather was like a huge stallion himself,
and when he went into a field where a herd of horses was grazing, the horses
would suddenly lift their heads and call to him. Then his bearded mouth
would move, and though he was making sounds that could have been words,
which no horse would have had reason to understand, the horses would want
to hear; and one by one they would move toward him across the open space
of the field. He could turn his back and walk down the road, and they would
follow him. He was probably drunk, my mother said, because he was
swaying and mumbling all the while. Sometimes he would stop dead-still in
the road and the horses would press up against him and raise and lower their
heads as he moved his lips. But because these things were only seen from a
distance, and because they have eroded in the telling, it is now impossible to
know whether my great- grandfather said anything of importance to the
horses. Or even if it was his whispering that had brought about their good
behavior. Nor was it clear when he left them in some barnyard as suddenly
as he’d come to them, whether they had arrived at some new understanding
of the difficult and complex relationship between men and horses.

Only the aberrations of my great- grandfather’s relationship with horses
have survived—as when he would bathe in the river with his favorite horse
or when, as my grandmother told my mother, he insisted on conceiving his
ninth child in the stall of a bay mare named Redwing. Not until I was grown
and going through the family Bible, did I discover that my grandmother had
been this ninth child, and so must have known something about the matter.

These oddities in behavior lead me to believe that when my
great-grandfather, at the age of fifty-two, abandoned his wife and family to
join a circus that was passing through the area, it was not simply drunken
bravado, nor even the understandable wish to escape family obligations. I
believe the gypsy in him finally got the upper hand, and it led to such a
remarkable happening that no one in the family has so far been willing to
admit it: not the obvious transgression—that he had run away to join the
circus—but that he was in all likelihood a man who had been stolen by a
horse.

This is not an easy view to sustain in the society we live in. But I have
not come to it frivolously, and have some basis for my belief. For although I
have heard the story of my great-grandfather’s defection time and again
since childhood, the one image that prevails in all versions is that of a
dappled gray stallion that had been trained to dance a variation of the
mazurka. So impressive was this animal that he mesmerized crowds with his
sliding step-and-hop to the side through the complicated figures of the dance,
which he performed, not in the way of Lippizaners—with other horses and
their riders—but riderless and with the men of the circus company as his
partners.

It is known that my great- grandfather became one of these dancers.
After that he was reputed, in my mother’s words, to have gone “completely
to ruin.” The fact that he walked from the house with only the clothes on his
back, leaving behind his own beloved horses (twenty-nine of them to be
exact), further supports my idea that a powerful force must have held sway
over him, something more profound than the miseries of drink or the harsh
imaginings of his abandoned wife.

Not even the fact that seven years later he returned and knocked on his
wife’s door asking to be taken back could exonerate him from what he had
done, even though his wife did take him in and looked after him until he
died some years later. But the detail that no one takes note of in the account
is that when my great-grandfather returned, he was carrying a saddle blanket
and the black plumes from the headgear of one of the circus horses. This
passes by even my mother as simply a sign of the ridiculousness of my
great-grandfather’s plight—for after all, he was homeless and heading for
old age as a “good for nothing drunk” and “a fool for horses.”

No one has bothered to conjecture what these curious emblems, saddle
blanket and plumes, must have meant to my great-grandfather. But he hung
them over the foot of his bed— “like a fool” my mother said. And
sometimes when he got very drunk he would take up the blanket and,
wrapping it like a shawl over his shoulders, he would grasp the plumes.
Then he would dance the mazurka. He did not dance in the living room, but
took himself out into the field, where the horses stood at attention and
watched as if suddenly experiencing the smell of the sea or a change of wind
in the valley. “Drunks don’t care what they do,” my mother would say as
she finished her story about my great- grandfather. “Talking to a drunk is
like talking to a stump.”

Ever since my great- grandfather’s outbreaks of gypsy-necessity,
members of my family have been stolen by things—by mad ambitions, by
musical instruments, by otherwise harmless pursuits ranging from
mushroom hunting to childbearing or, as was my father’s case, by the more
easily recognized and popular obsession with card playing. To some extent,
I still think it was failure of imagination in this respect that brought about
his diminished prospects in the life of our family.

But even my mother had been powerless against the attraction of a man
so convincingly driven. When she met him at a birthday dance held at the
country house of one of her young friends, she asked him what he did for his
living. My father pointed to a deck of cards in his shirt pocket and said, “I
play cards.” But love is such as it is, and although my mother was otherwise
a deadly practical woman, it seemed she could fall in love with no man but
my father.