第11届韩素音青年翻译比赛英译汉原文及参考译文
原文

The Treasures in Store at the Shore

Todd R. Nelson

Beachcombing is my emblem for summer. Each summer, our family migrates back to a small coastal town in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Maine where we mess around in boats, pick blueberries, fish for mackerel, lounge bookishly in the hammock by the grandfather elm, and comb the pebbled shore. Life ebbs and flows with the rhythm of tides and daylight, versus the clock or jobs that govern the rest of the year.

It’s not perfect: The harbor master may be seen wearing an electronic pager as he regulates sailors tying up at the dock, and even the tentacles of FedEx reach down the peninsula two days a week. “Here too in Arcadia.” I overheard one schooner passenger pleading to her husband, as he headed for the grocery store: “Oh, please don’t buy a newspaper.” We, too, seek blissful ignorance. To construct the illusion of 19th-century living, the world must be kept at bay.

This is the season and the place for gathering news of our interior world. Our beach is a repository for the tides of the bay at the mouth of the mighty Penobscot River. And our harbor is the site of several ship sinkings during military skirmishes in the 17th and 18th centuries, when world powers vied for access to Maine’s forested interior.

In our first summers here, we had a romantic notion that the worn china and sanded blue glass we gleaned on the shore had washed out of a British frigate decaying on the harbor bottom. When we learned that it was only the old town dump sunken 100 yards offshore, we felt cheated. All our porcelain was trash, not treasure.

But our collecting has not slowed. The children love these humble vestiges of former times. A shard of blue filigree china remains exotic. “Treasure” is defined by provenance and the current collector. It is not intrinsic.

Summer’s intertidal zone collects and gathers us as much as we collect and gather what the tides deposit. My hammock reading yielded this thought: “A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder,” writes Edward O. Wilson. “He is like a primitive adult of long ago, an acquisitive early Homo arriving at the shore of Lake Malawi...”

So each summer when we arrive at our deep-water haunt, we begin a new collection to add to the old. We examine the effects of winter storms on our Maine Malawi, and we note the new moorings, new boats, and new boaters. We reconnect with people in town: the watercolor painter, the poet, the retired architect, the merchant-marine engineer. But it is really ourselves with whom we reconnect-picking up where we left off and noticing the significant ways in which we are changed, and in which we are not.

Jars of beach china line our mantel; the new album of summer photos helps to chronicle our combing. Against the consistent background of the cove shore, the foreground shows us holding hands with children who walk in taller and taller shoes. The lad who balked when setting foot in the canoe last year goes on a long paddle around the pond to see the loons; his sister now fishes solo when the mackerel are running. From year to year the changes seem immense, but the snapshots also remind me of the imperceptibleness of summer’s nonlinear growth, without a scheduled goal or level of achievement to prod or measure.

Wilson notes, “Adults...undervalue the mental growth that occurs during day dreaming and aimless wandering.”

September floods in like a full moon or high tide, and we return to our alternate rhythm: metropolitan suburbia. As we drop our young beachcombers off at school, the moment contains complex overlappings of what they were, are, and will be. Languor and aimlessness give way, with melancholy, to organization and structure.

But I always hope the kids will carry with them what they have found by the sea-the day-dreams that were the vessels of this summer’s collecting-to guide their walk toward June and the next season of beachcombing, of aimless, important wandering. As e. e. cummings wrote:

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

译文

海滨藏宝

对于我来说，海滨寻宝印是夏的象征。每年夏天，我们就举家迁回缅因州的一个海滨小镇，在那里，我们泛舟闲游，采摘浆果，捕捉精鱼，锹洋洋地摘在老榆树上的吊床里翻翻闲书，还在 那细砾满地的沙滩上寻觅珍奇，生活随着潮涨湖落、昼夜更替的节奏而流逝，不似一年中的其余的日子要受时钟或工作的摆布，

然而，这里也并非完美之境：你不时会看到腰抟传呼机的港务总监在指挥水手们泊般，甚 至联邦快运的触角每星期也会有两天延伸到这个半岛来连阿卡迪亚这样的世外桃源也是如此!” 无意中，我听到-唯乘纵钒船的女士请求正要去杂货店的丈夫说：“嗜，请别买报纸回来我们也在寻求不问世事的轻松快乐，要想构建十九世纪生活的幻景，就必须远离外面的世界。

这祥的季节，这样的地方，正适合收集我们这个小天地的信息，我们的海滩位于浩荡的佩诺布斯科特河入海口，汇聚着诲湾潮汐的冲刷物。我们的港湾是十七、十八世纪数次战船沉没的地方，当时世界列强为了取道此处进入镝因州林木繁茂的内陆地区曾多次在这里短兵相接。

初来度假的几个夏天，我们都浪漫地以为，那些在海滩上拾到的碎瓷片和经沙砾磨蚀的蓝色玻璃是从港口水底一艘正在朽烂的英国战船中冲上岸的，当得知那不过是距岸100码处被淹没的小镇旧垃圾场时，我们觉得上当了。我们捡到的只是一堆垃圾，而不是什么宝贝。

但我们收集的兴致并没有因此而减弱。孩子们喜欢这些不起眼的旧时遗物。—小片精雕细 琢的青瓷碎片仍然富于异国情调。“珍宝”之“珍”取决于其来历和现时的收集者，而并非物件本身所固有的价谊，

夏日的湖间区将我们集聚，一如我们集聚潮汐留下的“宝物”在吊床上闲读时，我为书中爱德华•奥•威尔逊的语句所动：“一个孩童来到深水之畔，一心期盼着奇迹的出现；就像一个远古时候蒙昧的成人，对一切满怀渇求的早期先人，来到了马拉维湖岸……”

因此，每年夏天回到熟悉的海湾故地，我们便开始了新一轮的收集，以充实旧有的收藏. 我们察看冬季的风暴对我们“缅因马拉维”的影响，也留意新的停泊点、新的船只和新的船客。我们和镇上的人们重建联系：水彩画家、诗人、退休的建筑师和商船轮机师，但实际上我们是与自己重建起联系——在我们去年停止的地方重新开始，审视我们在哪些方面发生了显著的变化，在哪些方面依然如故，

从海滩上收集来的一罐罐瓷片在壁炉台上排列成行，新的夏日影集串起我们寻宝过程的的点点滴滴，照片的背景是经年不变的海滨，但前景中与我们手牵手的孩子却在一天天地长高长大。去年跨上独木舟时还战战兢兢的小男孩，现在已能长时间荡桨沿着池塘看潜鸟，他的妹妹也能在鲭鱼洄游的时节独自垂钓了。年复一年，变化看似巨大；但是这些快照也提醒我，夏日这种自由随意的成长又是多么的不易察觉，因为没有預定的目标去激励它，也没有成功的标准来衡量它。

威尔逊说过：“成年人往往低估了遐思梦想和随意漫游带给人精神上的成长。月圆月缺，潮涨湖落，九月如期而至，我们又回到了另一种生活节奏——大都申=市的城郊生活。我们把年少的“海滨寻宝者”送回学校的那一刻，他们的过去、现在和来来的样子复杂地重叠在一起。慵懒和闲适黯然离去，取而代之的是组织和秩序。

然而我总是希望孩子们能铭记他们在海边寻到的一一那些满载我们夏曰收获的遐想之 舟，以此引导他们走向六月，走向下一个海滨寻宝的季节，下一个随意却重要的闲游季节。正如•爱•埃•卡明斯所言：

不管我们如何迷茫失落

在大海里我们总能寻回自我。