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【關於季節對比】
原文段落:
To-day came with a flashing sun that looked through crystal-clear atmosphere into the eyes of a keen northwest wind that had dried up all of November’s fog and left no trace of moisture to hold its keenness and touch you with its chill. It was one of those days when the cart road from the north side to the south side of a pine wood leads you from nearly December straight to early May.
On the one side is a nipping and eager air; on the other sunny softness and a smell of spring. It is more than that difference of a hundred miles in latitude which market gardeners say exists between the north and south side of a board fence. It is like having thousand league boots and passing from Labrador to Louisiana at a stride.
中文書籤:
今天,伴隨著閃爍的陽光而來,穿透水晶般清澈的大氣,直視著那凜冽的西北風。這風吹散了十一月的霧氣,沒有留下一絲濕潤,使得它的銳利得以保存,觸碰到你時帶著寒意。這是那種穿越松樹林的車道,能讓你從接近十二月直接走到五月初的日子。一側是刺骨而凜冽的空氣;另一側則是陽光溫柔,帶著春天的氣息。
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【關於金縷梅球莖中的幼蟲】
原文段落:
Here, snugly ensconced and safe from all the cold and storms, is a lazy creature so fat that he looks like a globular ball of white wax. Only when I poke him does he squirm, and I can see his mouth move in protest. His fairy language is too fine for my ear, tuned to the rough accents of the great world, but if I am any judge of countenances he is saying: “Why, damme, sir! how dare you intrude on my privacy!”
After all he has a right to be indignant, for I have not only wrecked his winter home, but turned him out, unclothed and unprotected, to die in the first nip of the shrewish wind.
中文書籤:
這裡,舒適地安臥著,免受所有寒冷和風暴的侵襲,是一個懶惰的生物,胖得像個白蠟球。只有當我戳他時,他才會扭動,我能看到他的嘴在抗議地動著。他的精靈語言太細微,我這雙慣聽大世界粗魯腔調的耳朵無法聽清,但如果我懂得觀察表情,他肯定在說:「喂,該死的,先生!你怎敢侵犯我的隱私!」畢竟他有理由憤慨,我不僅毀了他的冬日之家,還將他赤裸無助地趕了出來,任他在凜冽的寒風中凍死。
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【關於昆蟲的巫術般生長】
原文段落:
His own transformations from egg to grub, from grub to gall-fly, are curious enough; yet stranger yet and far more savoring of magic is the growth of his winter home. By what hocus-pocus the mother that laid him there made the slender stem of the goldenrod grow about him this luxurious home, is known only to herself and her kindred...
The necromancy comes in the fact that every willow tip that is made the home of this grub should thenceforth forsake all its recognized methods of growth and produce a cone for the harboring of the grub during the winter’s cold... It is all necromancy out of the same book, the book of the witchery of insects that makes human life and growth seem absurdly simple by comparison.
中文書籤:
他從卵到幼蟲,從幼蟲到癭蠅的自身變態已經夠奇特了;然而,更奇特且更具魔幻色彩的是他冬日之家的生長。那個在那裡產卵的母親是施了什麼咒語,讓纖細的金縷梅莖圍著他長出這個豪華的家,只有她自己和她的同類知道...
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【關於凍結的池塘如宇宙中心】
原文段落:
Standing on the water’s edge on such a night you realize that you are the very centre of a vast scintillating universe, for the stars shine with equal glory beneath your feet and above your head. The earth is forgotten.
It has become transparent, and where before sunset gray sand lay beneath a half-inch of water at your toe-tips, you now gaze downward through infinite space to the nadir, the unchartered, unfathomable distance checked off every thousand million miles or so by unnamed constellations that blur into a milky way beneath your feet. The pond is very deep on still winter nights.
中文書籤:
在這樣的夜晚站在水邊,你會意識到自己是浩瀚閃爍宇宙的真正中心,因為星星在你腳下和頭頂閃耀著同樣的光輝。大地被遺忘了。
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【關於薄冰上的溜冰體驗】
原文段落:
An inch or so of transparent ice lies between you and a ducking among the fishes which dart through the clear depths, fleeing before the under water roar of your advance, for the cracks, starting beneath your feet and flashing in rainbow progress before you and to the right and left, send wild vibrations whooping and whanging through the ice all over the pond... You tend to stay on your plane of motion, though the ice itself has strength to hold only part of your weight.
You are over it and onto another bit of uncracked surface before it can let go.
中文書籤:
一英寸左右透明的冰層介於你與潛入魚群之間,魚群在清澈深處穿梭,躲避你前進時水下的轟鳴,因為裂縫從你腳下開始,在你面前及左右閃爍著彩虹般的擴展,將狂野的振動聲呼嘯著傳遍整個池塘... 你傾向於保持你的運動平面,儘管冰本身只能承受你部分體重。因此,野鴨用強勁的翅膀拍打著空氣,滑翔在冰上,被同樣模糊的力量支撐著。冰沒有時間破裂讓你沉下去。在它來得及崩裂之前,你已經越過它,到達另一塊未裂開的表面了。
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【關於冬季尋找冬蕨的發現】
原文段落:
To-day I found young and thrifty plants, green and succulent, of two varieties of fern that are not common in my neighborhood and that I had never suspected in that location.
I had passed them amid the universal green of summer without noticing them, but now their color stood out among the prevailing browns and grays as vividly as yellow blossoms do in a June meadow.
中文書籤:
今天,我發現了兩種我在附近不常見、且從未想到會在那裡出現的蕨類,它們幼嫩且生機勃勃,綠油油、水嫩嫩的。夏天時,我在普遍的綠色中經過它們,並未注意到,但現在,它們的顏色在普遍的棕色和灰色中顯得格外鮮豔,就像六月草地上黃色的花朵一樣醒目。
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【關於某些植物在嚴寒中的堅持】
原文段落:
It is wonderful, though, how they stand freezing and thawing and yet remain green, firm in texture, and wholesome...
Why is the thin-leaved pyrola and the partridge berry, puny creeping vine that it is, still green and unharmed by frost when the tough, leathery leaves of the great oak tree not far off are withered and brown? Chlorophyl, and cellular structure, and fibro-vascular bundles in the one plant wither and lose color and turn brown at a touch of frost.
In another not ten feet away they stand the rigors of our northern winters and come out in the spring, seemingly unharmed and fit to carry on the internal economy of the plant’s life until it shall produce new leaves to take their places. Then in the mild air of early summer these winter darers fade and die.
中文書籤:
然而,令人驚奇的是,它們如何能經受冰凍和融化,卻依然保持綠色、質地緊實、且充滿生機... 誰能告訴我這是什麼原理?為什麼纖細的鹿蹄草和蔓生的熊果,如此弱小的藤蔓,在附近的巨大橡樹堅韌的革質葉子都已枯萎變黃時,卻依然翠綠且未受霜害?植物的葉綠素、細胞結構和維管束,在其中一種植物中會在霜凍的觸碰下枯萎、失色、變棕。
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【關於橡樹林中的雪聲】
原文段落:
But it is over on the oak hillside where the red and black oaks still hold resolutely to their dried leaves that the cry of the snow will most astonish you. It is not at all the rustle of these oak leaves in a wind. It is an outcry, an uproar, that drowns any other sound that might be in the wood. It is impossible to distinguish voices or words.
It is as if ten thousand of the little people of the wood and field and sky had suddenly come together in great excitement over something and were shouting all up and down the gamut of goblin emotion... At nightfall of this first snow of ours it happened that in the meeting of northerly and southerly currents which had brought the storm, the north wind lulled and the south began to have its way again... Then, indeed, we got outcry the most astonishing in the oak wood...
It was as if a goblin springtime had burst upon us in the white gloom of the oak wood and all the hylas in the world were piping their shrillest from the boughs.
中文書籤:
然而,在橡樹的山坡上,紅色和黑色的橡樹依然堅決地抓住它們乾燥的葉子,在那裡,雪的叫聲會讓你最為驚訝。這絕不是這些橡樹葉在風中的沙沙聲。那是一種吶喊,一種喧囂,淹沒了樹林裡可能有的其他任何聲音。你無法分辨聲音或詞語。彷彿一萬個來自樹林、田野和天空的小生靈突然聚集在一起,對某事感到極度興奮,正以哥布林的各種情感高聲呼喊著... 我們第一次下雪的那個傍晚,帶來風暴的南北氣流交匯,結果北風減弱,南風再次佔了上風... 於是,在橡樹林裡我們聽到了最驚人的叫聲... 彷彿一個哥布林的春天在橡樹林白色的陰暗中爆發了,世界上所有的樹蛙都在樹枝上發出最尖銳的鳴叫。
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【關於冰暴後的仙境般景色】
原文段落:
I had been in goblin land when I fled, at twilight, from the eerie shrilling of bogle hylas among the oak trees. I had come back into fairyland with the rising sun. The demure shrubs, gray Cinderellas of the ashes of the year, had been touched by the magic wand and were robed in more gems than might glow in the wildest dreams of the most fortunate princess of Arabian tale. Ropes of pearl and festoons of diamonds weighed the more slender almost to earth.
The soft white shoulders of the birches drooped low in bewildering curtsey, and to the fiddling of a little morning wind the ball began with a tinkling of gem on gem, a stabbing of scintillant azure, so that I was fain to shut my eyes with the splendor of it.
中文書籤:
當我在黃昏時逃離橡樹間精靈樹蛙的詭異尖叫聲時,我彷彿置身於哥布林之地。隨著旭日東升,我又回到了仙境。那些溫順的灌木,像是年度灰燼中的灰色灰姑娘,被魔杖觸碰,披上了比阿拉伯故事中最幸運的公主在最狂野的夢境中閃耀的寶石還要多的華服。珍珠串和鑽石串垂掛著,壓得纖細的枝條幾乎垂到了地上。柔軟潔白的樺樹肩低垂著,行著令人眩目的屈膝禮,伴著清晨微風的琴音,舞會開始了,寶石與寶石碰撞,發出清脆的叮噹聲,閃爍著耀眼的蔚藍光芒,讓我幾乎要閉上眼睛,以免被這份輝煌所刺痛。
Perhaps to have looked at them before the changing seasons of more thousands of years had clothed the gravel and sand with humus, grown the forests all about and choked the fountains themselves with acres of the muck of decayed vegetation no one knows how deep, would have been to see them with clearer eyes and have been led to an answer to the questions.
Now I know them only as bits of the land where time seems to have stood still, fastnesses where dwell the lotus eaters of our New England woods, where winter’s cold howls over their heads, but does not descend, and where summer’s heat rims them round, but hardly dares dabble its toes in their cool retreat.
中文書籤:
我時而相信,它們的水流是通過深邃的洞穴從遠處不斷補充的北極冰川過濾而來。也許,如果在成千上萬年的季節變遷還未來得及將砂石覆蓋上腐殖質,未曾讓周圍長滿森林,也未曾用腐爛植被的淤泥堵塞泉水(那淤泥深到無人知曉),在那個時候看它們,我們的眼睛會更清晰,或許能找到這些問題的答案。
The great sheet of foot-thick, white ice is like a gigantic disk in a telephone, receiver and transmitter in one, sending and receiving messages between the earth and space... Sometimes you need to be very near the receiver to note them. It is not possible for a mile-square, foot-thick telephone disk to whisper, yet often it grumbles only a hoarse word or two at so deep a pitch that you would hardly know it was spoken...
But there are other times when the winter ice on the pond whoops and roars, and bellows and whangs as if all Bedlam were let loose and were celebrating Guy Fawkes day. A mile away, of a still winter evening, you may hear this and be dismayed, for the groanings and bellowings are such as belong to no monsters of the present day, though they might be echoes of antedeluvian battles corked within the earth for ages and now for the first time let loose.
中文書籤:
在冬天,池塘找到了聲音。