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白鲸|Moby Dick (The Whale)

1.海与鲸的诱惑|CHAPTER 1. Loomings.

属类: 双语小说 【分类】双语小说 -[作者: 赫尔曼·麦尔维尔] 阅读:[11995]
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很多年以前,那时我的钱包瘪瘪的,陆地上看来没什么好混得了,干脆下海吧,去在我们这个世界上占绝对面积的大海里逛逛吧!

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这已是我惟一的去处了。

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每当我心烦气躁、肝火直升脑门时;每当我心忧绪乱、眼前一片11月的愁云惨雾时;每当我身不由己,跟着不相干的送葬队伍走向墓地时;每当我忍无可忍,马上就要在街上像脱缰的野马一样横冲直撞时,我都得赶紧去出海!

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只有出海可以阻止我对自己举起枪!

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我没有伽图那一边吟诵诗歌一边拔剑自刎的勇气,只能悄悄地走上船去。

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怎么样,朋友,你有类似的感情经历吗?我始终相信,不论是谁,在某一个特定的时刻,他都会对海洋产生类似的情绪的。

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噢,我的姓名!其实这无关紧要,好了,你就叫我以实玛利吧。

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我们现在看到的就是曼哈顿岛,它的四周布满了商业味儿十足的码头,城里的每一条街道几乎都能引导你走向码头、走向海边。

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炮台前的防浪堤迎击着海浪,观海的人们远远地散着步。

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我们不妨找一个安息日的下午,在那种如诗如梦的阳光下,去城里转上一圈。可你首先看到的还是海边上那一群群对着大海伫立凝望的人。

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他们或站或坐、或倚柱或靠墙,遥望着自中国而来的船只的船舷,入迷地欣赏着开进开出的大小船舶。

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这些平常生活在柜台、凳子、写字台和墙壁之间的人,他们怎么都跑到海边来了?难道田畴原野、一马平川的陆地都消失了?

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看,又来了一大群人,他们直奔海边,要跳海吗?

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噢,真有意思,他们要尽可能地靠近大海,他们要走到陆地的边缘。这些来自内陆的人们,站满了海边,绵延十几海里。

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我甚至怀疑,是不是船上的指南针的磁力把他们吸来的啊!

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肯定有什么类似磁力的神奇力量!就是在陆地上,我们不也是有这样的经验吗!沿着随便一条路走下去,早晚会走到河边、湖畔、溪流之侧。

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你可以实验一下,随便找一个哪怕完全心不在焉的人,让他信马由缰地走动起来,他准会走到有水的地方。

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如果这个人在思索着什么形而上学的东西,那结果就更是如此了。如果你在沙漠中迷失了方向,身边又恰巧有一位哲学教授,那你就不必惊慌了,因为思索是与水有着天然的联系的。

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一位出色的风景画家为牧羊人画了一幅画儿,有白云有原野、有森林有羊群、有袅袅的炊烟和在山峦间起伏的小路,可是,如果这位牧羊人不注视着他眼前的一条河,那么这幅画儿就会失去任何活力的。

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如果六月的草原没有一滴水,如果尼亚加拉瀑布流下来的只是些没有生命的黄沙,那么,你还会去那魂牵梦绕的草原、瀑布吗?

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没有了水,就没有了一切。

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有位徒步旅行的穷诗人,在意外地得到了一点钱以后,犹豫了,是买一件衬衣?还是去海边远足一趟?

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每一位身强力壮的小伙子几乎都想出海去闯一闯;而每一位上了船的人,在知道望不见陆地了的时候,心里都会咯噔一下。

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古代波斯人以海为神,希腊人更把海看作神的亲兄弟,而那位被迫在水边顾影自怜的美男子那西萨斯,终于投身水底。

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每一个人都会在水中留下永远抓寻不到的影子,它喻示着我们人类的什么奥妙吗?

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我身上这种与水的天然联系,每每在我走投无路、愁肠百结时它都会解救我,引我到海上去。

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我到海上,不是做旅客的,因为那需要鼓鼓的钱包,我是作不起那又晕船又失眠的旅客的。

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当然,我更当不起船夫、大副甚至厨师了,尽管论资格我算得上老水手了。

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这些风光的职位,还是让那些喜欢风光的人干吧,我能把自己看好已经不错了,管不了什么桅啊帆啊的,当然更管不了那些操纵这家什的人了。

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不当厨师,那倒纯粹是因为没有兴趣。这并不妨碍我对厨师的作品感兴趣。面对一只烤好的鸡,牛油涂得均匀、胡椒撒得周到的鸡,我会第一个叫好的。

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古埃及人对烤朱鹭、烧河马之类的东西就很有好感,他们的金字塔里,现在还可以见到这些东西的木乃伊。

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我在船上只是一个普普通通的水手。

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我像只蚂蚱一样,一会儿蹦到桅杆顶上、一会儿又跳进水手舱里,他们呼来唤去地使唤我,很伤了些我的自尊心,一开始很让人不痛快。

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如果你出身名门望族,像什么范·伦斯勒家族、伦道夫家族、哈狄卡纽特族,如果你那不得不伸入柏油筒里的手,不久前还曾在教室里威严地挥舞,那你就更觉得不痛快了。

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这样的反差实在让人有点难以接受,得有点苦行学派的顽强才能挺过来,一旦挺过来了,所有的不舒服、不痛快也就烟消云散了。

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想想吧,那个大块头的船长吆喝我去打扫地板,我打扫就是了,算得了什么羞辱?在《圣经》面前,这不算什么。

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人们总是在互相拥挤,你打我、我打你,谁也脱不了被别人奴役的命运——从形而下和形而上两个角度看均是如此。

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所以,人们在互相推挤之后,还是要互相抚摸一下创口,安分下来的。

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况且,我在船上不是旅客,我是水手,我是要挣他们的钱的啊!你没听说过给旅客钱的事吧,旅客得往外掏钱。

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往外掏钱和往里挣钱是完全不同的两回事。我想,掏钱是那两个偷果子吃的贼给我们带来的最大的不幸;而挣钱,那是这世上有数的几件大好事之一了。

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想想我们接受别人给你的钱时你那温文尔雅、彬彬有礼的优雅姿态吧,对于大家公认的这种万恶之源的东西,我们接受起来是那么喜不自胜,甘心情愿地让自己沦落在万劫不复的地步去。

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大海上的劳动和大海上的空气,于我们的身心是绝对有益的。海上行船,顶风永远比顺风多,所以船头上的水手永远比船尾的船长、大副们先呼吸到新鲜空气!

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对于这一点,他们一点也不知道,还以为是自己先呼吸到的呢!在很多事情上,都是如此,老百姓经常领导他们的领袖,而那些领袖们却浑然不知。

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以前我都是在商船上当水手的,这回却鬼使神差地上了捕鲸船。命运之神在冥冥中左右着我,这是他老人家在很早很早以前就安排好了的,它是现在正上演的两出大戏之间的一出小戏,节目单大约可以这样写:

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美国总统竞选

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以实玛利出海捕鲸

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阿富汗斯坦大战

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命运之神也真逗,让别人去扮演那些雍容华贵、颐指气使、轻松愉快、悲壮英勇的角色,却让我去演这么个捕鲸的小人物。

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没办法,回想上船以前种种偶然与必然的大事小情,我当时还以为自己作出上这条船的决定是经过缜密思考的呢!

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引我上船的最大原因是那条著名的大鲸鱼。它如山的身体在波涛中滑行的神秘形象激起了我强烈的好奇心。关于它的种种惊险怪奇的传说深深地吸引了我,让我这个一向对不可知的东西充满了天然的兴趣的人心痒难熬。

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冒险和探奇是埋在我心里的种子,一有土壤与水分,它们就会迅速地发芽、生长,让我不顾一切地向那未知之物奔驰而去。

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我投身大海,迎面遇上成双成对的大小鲸鱼,与我嬉戏玩耍,掀动我灵魂深处那神秘的影子,让它活起来。动起来,成为一座铺天盖地大的狰狞的巨兽。

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对于这些航行,我真是求之不得啊!

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Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

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There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

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Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

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But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

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Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

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But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

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Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook,—though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board—yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.

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No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

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What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

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Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

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Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

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“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

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Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

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Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

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By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

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