Seasons 四季
Country Spring
乡间春色
One spring I went a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious spring. Not the sort of spring they give us in the mirable times, under this shameless government – a mixture of east wind, blizzard, snow, rain, slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunder-storms – but a sunny, blue-skied, joyous spring, such as we ud to have regularly every year when I was a young man, and things were different.
It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for tho golden days: and as I wandered through the waking land, and saw the dawning of the coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening each day beneath the kiss of the sun, and looked up at the proud old mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he pasd laughing by, and marked the primro yellow creep across the carpet of the woods, and saw the new flush of the field and saw the new light on the hills, and heard the new-found gladness of the birds, and heard form cop and farm and meadow the timid callings of the little new-born things, wondering to find themlves alive, and smelt the freshness of the earth, and felt the
promi in the air, and felt a strong hand in the wind, my spirit ro within me. Spring had come to me also, and stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange new hope. I, too, was part of nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and blossoms were unfolding from my heart. Bright flowers of love and gratitude were opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my limbs. New blood was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and nobler longings were throbbing through my brain.
As I walked, Nature came and talked beside me, and showed me the world and mylf, and the ways of God emed clearer.
(from Dreams by Jerome K. Jerome)
shameless 不知羞耻的
blizzard 暴风雪
slush 雪水，半融雪
hail 冰雹
sleet 冻雨，雨夹雪dawning 开始出现（春意）blush 红色，红光hawthorn 山楂
hedge 树篱
dandle 娇养小孩
myriad 无数，大量primro 报春花
creep 蔓延，开满
flush 活力，茂盛
cop 矮灌木丛
gratitude 谢意，感谢
vein 血管
throb 跳动，震动
Spring Walk
春日漫步
I’ve walked to a hill mile from the hou. It’s not really a hill but a mountain slope that heaves up, turns sideways, and comes down again, straight down to a foot-wide creak. Every-thing I can e from here ud to be a flatland covered with shallow water. “Ud to be” means veral hundred millions years ago, and the land itlf was not really “here” at all, but part of a continent floating near Bermuda. On the top is fin of rock, a marine deposition created during Jurassic times by small waves moving in and out slapping the shore.
I’ve come here for peace and quiet and to e what’s going on in this cluded valley, away from ranch work and sorting corrals, but what I get is a slap on the ass by a prehistoric wave, gains and loss in altitude and aridity, outcrops of mud compod of rotting volcanic ash that fell continuously for ten thousand years a hundred million years ago. The soils are a geologic flag – red, white, green, and gray. On one side of the hill, mountain mahogany gives off a scent like orange blossoms; on the other, colonies of sagebrush root wide in ground the color of Spanish roof tiles. And it still looks like the ocean to me. “How much truth can a man stand, sitting by the ocean, all that perpetual motion,” Mo Allison, the jazz singer, sings.
The wind picks up and blusters. Its fat underbelly scrapes the uneven ground, twisting like taffy toward me, slips up over the mountain, and showers out across the Great Plains. The a smell it ca
rried all the way from Seattle has long since been absorbed by pink grass – the rotting granite that spills down the slopes of the Rockies. Somewhere over the Midwest the wind slows, tangling in the hair of hardwood forests, and finally drops into the corridors of the cities, pas Manhattan’s World Trade Center, ripping free again as it cross the Atlantic’s green swell.
Spring jitterbugs inside me. Spring is wind, symphonic and billowing. A dark cloud pops like a blood blister over me, letting hail down. It comes on a piece of wind that ems to have widened the sky, comes so the birds have something to fly on.
(from Spring by Geetel Ehrlich) heave 起伏，隆起
fin 鳍，鳍状物deposition 沉淀，沉积cluded 孤寂的，与世隔绝的altitude 高度，海拔mahogany 花梨木
sagebrush 北美艾灌丛perpetual 永恒的，不变的buster 呼啸狂欢
underbelly 下腹部
scrape 刮擦，掠过，拂过taffy 太妃糖
tangle 纠结，缠绕
jitterbug 使激动不安，紧张billowing 翻腾的，汹涌的blister 水疱
August
八月
August is a dramatic month. Humidity is a form of madness. Writing is a form of suicide. The temptation to talk like this, in short clips, is overwhelming. Short ntences are like raindrops: splashy and desirable.
August, the most complacent month. Laziness, humidity, and utter lack of thought are its chief characteristics. Sluggish and indolent we drag our bodies through its sweaty middle like primeval crawlers.
I saw a guy, prostrate from heat, staring at an empty parking lot downtown.“There are more leaves on the trees this year,” he said. I looked at the expan of steaming cement before us and agreed. That was an August encounter and that man an August character. An ambassador of Humidity. The reason why so many people die in August is that nobody is really awake. All death has to do is pluck the unalert from the planet like overripe peaches. If you are poor and hot like me, one way to escape
August is to visit showrooms. Not only are they air-conditioned, they are educational. I went to an IBM computer showplace and a dear lady paraded me before the friendly pastels of a thousand keyboards. It was like ice cream.
Looking over the Augusts of my life, I find all sorts of delirious phenomena. Once I was mugged in a hallway. I was too irritated by the heat to pay. I screamed at the guy and he only took half the money. A few years ago, my wife produces a wonderful calendar full of uful and wonderful facts, as well as the birthdays of all our friends. I tried to talk her into leaving August out. When she wouldn’t listen moved to August. She caught me. I pleaded humidity. I don’t think she’s forgiven me yet.
(from August b Andrei Condrescu )
humidity 潮湿
suicide 自杀
temptation 诱惑
complacent 懈怠的，懒散的
