原创 资深英语自由翻译
2024年10月24日 12:39
The Solace of Open Spaces
旷野之慰
It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep—sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me on the head. I’m trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-mile trip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won’t budge until it’s cool. Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state.
时维五月，我方才从一午间小憩中醒来。于山艾树丛中，我蜷缩成一团，正如爱犬教我的睡姿那般，避风而卧。一道冷锋进击着我头顶的长空，天色昏暗之中，一块冰雹砸中了我的脑袋。当时，我正赶着两千头羊穿行在怀俄明州的一片荒地上。炎炎烈日下，羊群会躲进荫凉之处，直至气温转凉，才肯施施而行，故而，这段五十英里的行程，却耗费了五日之久。此刻，绵羊聚成一团，在暴风骤雨中，兴奋地狂奔起来。它们似水一般，漂过干涸的土地，坠入沟壑，而后又涌上崎岖不平的高原。而高原恰是构成怀俄明州的基本地貌。
The name Wyoming comes from an Indian word meaning “at the great plains,” but the plains are really valleys, great arid valleys, sixteen hundred square miles, with the horizon bending up on all sides, into mountain ranges. This gives the vastness a sheltering look.
“怀俄明”这一名称源自印第安语，意为 “在大平原之上”。但这些平原实际上是山谷，巨大的干旱山谷，面积达1600平方英里，地平线于四周向上弯曲，形成山脉。这使得怀俄明州那广袤无垠的景象有了一种庇护感。
Winter lasts six months here. Prevailing winds spill snowdrifts to the east, and new storms from the northwest replenish them. This white bulk is sometimes dizzying, even nauseating, to look at. At twenty, thirty, and forty degrees below zero, not only does your car not work, but neither do your mind and body. The landscape hardens into a dungeon of space. During the winter, while I was riding to find a new calf, my jeans froze to the saddle, and in the silence that such cold creates I felt like the first person on earth, or the last.
这里的冬天持续六个月之久。盛行风将雪堆吹向东方，而来自西北方的新一轮暴风雪又为这里填上了新雪堆。白茫茫的雪有时让人头晕眼花，甚至令人作呕。在零下二十度、三十度甚至四十度中，不仅你的汽车无法启动，就连身心亦难以自持。周遭变得如同一间坚硬的地牢。冬日里，当我骑着马儿去寻找新生的小牛犊时，牛仔裤却被冻在了马鞍上。在一片冷寂中，我感觉自己是这天地间的第一人，或是这世界上的最后一人。
Today the sun is out—only a few clouds billowing. In the east, where the sheep have started off without me, the benchland tilts up in a series of eroded red-earthed mesas, planed flat on top by a million years of water; behind them, a bold line of muscular scarps rears up ten thousand feet to become the Big Horn Mountains. A tidal pattern is engraved into the ground, as if left by the sea that once covered this state. Canyons curve down like galaxies to meet the oncoming rush of flat land.
今天，太阳探出头来，天空中，唯有几朵云彩在翻腾。在东边，羊群已先行一步，自行出发了。河滩逐阶向上，呈现出一座座被侵蚀的红土台地，台地顶端被百万年的流水冲刷磨平；其后，一排高达一万英尺的巍峨峭壁拔地而起，形成大角山。大地上镌刻着潮汐的纹路，恍若是曾经淹没怀俄明的海洋所遗留的痕迹。峡谷宛若银河般蜿蜒，向下延伸，与扑面而来的平地犬牙相接。
To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming’s openness, he said, “It’s all a bunch of nothing—wind and rattlesnakes—and so much of it you can’t tell where you’re going or where you’ve been and it don’t make much difference.” John, a sheepman I know, is tall and handsome and has an explosive temperament. He has a perfect intuition about people and sheep. They call him “Highpockets,” because he’s so long-legged; his graceful stride matches the distances he has to cover. He says, “Open space hasn’t affected me at all. It’s all the people moving in on it.” The huge ranch he was born on takes up much of one county and spreads into another state; to put 100,000 miles on his pickup in three years and never leave home is not unusual. A friend of mine has an aunt who ranched on Powder River and didn’t go off her place for eleven years. When her husband died, she quickly moved to town, bought a car, and drove around the States to see what she’d been missing.
在这视野开阔，绵延百里风光的地方，生活和工作，前景与背景的界限已不再泾渭分明。我曾请一位年长的牧场工人将怀俄明州的空旷进行一番描述，他开口道：“这里除了风和响尾蛇，空空如也，空旷得让人分不清要去往何方，或曾从哪里而来，况且分清了，也意义全无。” 约翰是我认识的一位牧羊人，他身材伟岸，容貌俊朗，脾气火爆，对人与羊了然于胸。大家都叫他“瘦高个”，因为他双腿修长，走起路来，大步流星，适合赶远路。他说：“空旷未影响我丝毫，反倒是这儿的人愈来愈多。” 他出生的巨型牧场占据了一个县的很大一部分土地，甚至绵延至邻州；他三年内驾着皮卡车行驶了十万英里，却从未踏出过家的方圆之外，这在怀俄明不足为奇。我一好友的姑妈在波德河畔经营牧场，她十一年来深居简出。但在丈夫离世后，她立即迁居到镇上，买了辆车，驾车环游全美，一睹她曾错失的风景。
Most people tell me they’ve simply driven through Wyoming, as if there were nothing to stop for. Or else they’ve skied in Jackson Hole, a place Wyomingites acknowledge uncomfortably because its green beauty and chic affluence are mismatched with the rest of the state. Most of Wyoming has a “lean-to” look. Instead of big, roomy barns and Victorian houses, there are dugouts, low sheds, log cabins, sheep camps, and fence lines that look like driftwood blown haphazardly into place. People here still feel pride because they live in such a harsh place, part of the glamorous cowboy past, and they are determined not to be the victims of a mining-dominated future.
好些人告诉我，他们只是驾车途经怀俄明罢了，似乎此地并没有什么值得其为之而驻足的。他们顶多就是在杰克逊霍尔滑过雪，但对于此地，怀俄明人并不以为然。那儿不仅苍翠欲滴，而且富裕别致，相较于该州的其他地方，显得格格不入。怀俄明大多数地区看起来极其“简陋”。这里没有高大宽敞的谷仓和维多利亚式的房屋，只有地窖、矮棚、木屋、羊圈以及一处处好似是由浮木被风而随意吹就的栅栏。但当地人却引以为傲，因为他们生活之地虽然艰苦，却散发着往昔牛仔的迷人魅力。对于采矿业主宰的未来，他们予以坚决拒绝。
Most characteristic of the state’s landscape is what a developer euphemistically describes as “indigenous growth right up to your front door”—a reference to waterless stands of salt sage, snakes, jack rabbits, deerflies, red dust, a brief respite of wildflowers, dry washes, and no trees. In the Great Plains the vistas look like music, like Kyries of grass, but Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect—tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded, deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into a pure light.
该州最富特色的景观，恰如一位开发商婉转的描述，“家门口的原生态”， 即：一簇簇耐旱山艾树、蛇、长耳兔、鹿蝇、赤土、瞬息凋谢的野花、干涸的河床、难觅的林木。在大平原上，极目远望，景色宛如动人悦耳的音乐，似广袤草地的一首首慈悲曲， 但怀俄明州好比出自一位疯狂的建筑师之手--跌宕起伏，扭曲变形，若绑着淡淡死灰色的丝带，扶摇直上又急转直下，恍如刚从沉睡中惊起，又跃入一抹清光。
I came here four years ago. I had not planned to stay, but I couldn’t make myself leave. John, the sheepman, put me to work immediately. It was spring, and shearing time. For fourteen days of fourteen hours each, we moved thousands of sheep through sorting corrals to be sheared, branded, and deloused. I suspect that my original motive for coming here was to “lose myself” in new and unpopulated territory. Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up. The vitality of the people I was working with flushed out what had become a hallucinatory rawness inside me. I threw away my clothes and bought new ones; I cut my hair. The arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me.
四年前来到此地，我原本未打算羁留，却又舍不得离开。牧羊人约翰旋即给我安排了活干。那是春日，正值剪羊毛的时节。整整十四天，每天工作14小时，我们把成千上万头绵羊分拣至畜栏，按部就班地剪羊毛、打烙印并除虱子。我真心怀疑自己来此的初始动机就是想在这块人迹罕至的陌生之地“迷失自我”。牧羊场的生活非但未让我那心心念念的麻木感得逞，反而唤醒了我。工友们个个朝气蓬勃，冲淡了我内心深处虚妄的粗糙感。我扔掉旧衣，买了新装，还剪了头发。这片干旱之地就是一块干净的石板。它的超然让我踏踏实实地安定下来。
Sagebrush covers 58,000 square miles of Wyoming. The biggest city has a population of fifty thousand, and there are only five settlements that could be called cities in the whole state. The rest are towns, scattered across the expanse with as much as sixty miles between them, their populations two thousand, fifty, or ten. They are fugitive-looking, perched on a barren, windblown bench, or tagged onto a river or a railroad, or laid out straight in a farming valley with implement stores and a block-long Mormon church. In the eastern part of the state, which slides down into the Great Plains, the new mining settlements are boomtowns, trailer cities, metal knots on flat land.
山艾树覆盖了怀俄明州约58000平方英里的土地。最大的城市有五万人。放眼全州，仅有五个定居点可称之为城市。其余皆为小镇，间距约60英里，散布于广袤的地域上，人口多则两千，少则五十，有的甚至只有十人。小镇的分布毫无规律可言，有的盘踞在一片贫瘠的土地上，有的位于风蚀的台地，有的紧贴河畔或铁路，有的在山谷中一字排开，里面开着农具店，还有一座占满整个街区的摩门大教堂。在延伸至大草原的东部，一座座繁荣的小镇，拖车屋汇聚的小城，如同平地上的一个个金属结。它们都是新的采矿聚居点。
Despite the desolate look, there’s a coziness to living in this state. There are so few people (only 470,000) that ranchers who buy and sell cattle know one another statewide; the kids who choose to go to college usually go to the state’s one university, in Laramie; hired hands work their way around Wyoming in a lifetime of hirings and firings. And despite the physical separation, people stay in touch, often driving two or three hours to another ranch for dinner.
尽管怀俄明州看起来荒凉无比，但生活在这里还算安逸。怀俄明州人烟稀少(仅有47万人)，以至于在全州范围内买卖牲畜的牧场主们都彼此熟识；选择上大学的孩子通常都会就读位于该州拉勒米市的唯一一所大学; 雇工们则在怀俄明州四处打拼，一生皆辗转于各种雇佣与解雇之间。尽管各个牧场相距遥远，但人们仍然保持着联系。他们常常驱车两三个小时，到另一户牧场主家共进晚餐。
Seventy-five years ago, when travel was by buckboard or horseback, cowboys who were temporarily out of work rode the grub line—drifting from ranch to ranch, mending fences or milking cows, and receiving in exchange a bed and meals. Gossip and messages traveled this slow circuit with them, creating an intimacy between ranchers who were three and four weeks’ ride apart. One old-time couple I know, whose turn-of-the-century homestead was used by an outlaw gang as a relay station for stolen horses, recall that if you were traveling, desperado or not, any lighted ranch house was a welcome sign. Even now, for someone who lives in a remote spot, arriving at a ranch or coming to town for supplies is cause for celebration. To emerge from isolation can be disorienting. Everything looks bright, new, vivid. After I had been herding sheep for only three days, the sound of the camp tender’s pickup flustered me. Longing for human company, I felt a foolish grin take over my face; yet I had to resist an urgent temptation to run and hide.
七十五年前，当人们外出旅行只能依靠坐平板马车或马匹时，那些暂时失业的牛仔们便会沿着“觅食线” 骑行于牧场之间，从事修补栅栏或挤牛奶的活计，为的是换取一张床和果腹之餐。流言蜚语和灵通讯息随他们一路慢慢散播开来，从而在相隔三四周骑行路程的牧场主之间建立了一种亲密无间的关系。我认识的一对老夫妇，他们的百年老宅曾被一伙不法之徒用作盗马的中转站。他们回忆说，如果你正在旅途中，哪怕是亡命之徒，任何亮着灯的牧场房屋都是欢迎造访的标记。即便是现在，对于那些居住在偏远地区的人而言，不管是抵达一个牧场，还是去小镇上采购物资，都是件值得庆祝的事情。从与世隔绝的环境中走出来会让人迷失方向。一切看起来都是如此地明亮、焕然一新且生机勃勃。在我放羊仅三天后，营地管理员的皮卡车所发出的声响便让我感到坐立不安。我渴望有人作陪，想着想着，脸上便情难自控地露出了傻笑；但随后又不得不抑制住想跑开或躲藏起来的迫切念头。
Things happen suddenly in Wyoming, the change of seasons and weather; for people, the violent swings in and out of isolation. But good-naturedness is concomitant with severity. Friendliness is a tradition. Strangers passing on the road wave hello. A common sight is two pickups stopped side by side far out on a range, on a dirt track winding through the sage. The drivers will share a cigarette, uncap their thermos bottles, and pass a battered cup, steaming with coffee, between windows. These meetings summon up the details of several generations, because, in Wyoming, private histories are largely public knowledge.
在怀俄明州，事事皆是突如其来，譬如变幻莫测的季节和天气；对于人们而言，则是在孤独与喧嚣之间突然切换。但人心之善与严酷的环境总是相伴相生。与人为善是一种传统。与陌生人在路上不期而遇，总会挥手问好。常见的一幕是：在蜿蜒穿过山艾树丛的荒野土路上，两辆皮卡车并排停着。司机们会共吸一支香烟，然后，打开保温瓶，在车窗间传递着一只旧杯子，杯中是冒着热气的咖啡。这等相遇唤起了几代人的琐事。在怀俄明州，个人往事大多是众人的共识。
Because ranch work is a physical and, these days, economic strain, being “at home on the range” is a matter of vigor, self-reliance, and common sense. A person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place.
由于牧场工作是个体力活，如今，还面临着经济压力，所以“在牧场上安家”需要精力旺盛、自力更生与生存常识。人的一生不是由一连串值得赞许或背井离乡的戏剧性事件组成的，而是在日复一日、季复一季和年复一年的岁月中缓慢积累而成的。因家族的代代相传而变得充盈，并因一种与故土之归属感，而落地生根。
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