yangang1120 2008-4-18 17:08
跪求帮忙翻译一下啊，急，谢谢啊
[size=10pt]Nobody can accuse T.C. Boyle of being an economical writer. Like a greedy child piling up mashed potatoes, Boyle dollops on as many words as a sentence will bear, turning a simple description into a cascade of imagery. An early passage from "Riven Rock," Boyle's latest novel, shows the writer in peak form. ". . . . he had a vision, a sudden vivid recollection of a place there, date palms shimmering beneath the golden liquefaction of the sun and orange trees with fruit like swollen buttocks and a little bungalow or whatever they called it snug in the corner."[/size]
[size=10pt]We are inside Edward O'Kane's mind but it could be Leopold Bloom's. And that is the problem. In previous novels, it has often been difficult to make out Boyle's characters underneath all that neo-Joycean layering. In "Riven Rock," however, the main characters are largely spared Boyle's descriptive mummification, even if minor ones like O'Kane are not Stanley McCormick and his wife Katherine consequently emerge as the writer's most memorable creations in an epic novel that spans almost four decades but nevertheless retains its human scale.[/size]
[size=10pt]Stanley is 2 years old when his sister goes insane, nine when his father, the millionaire inventor of the Reaper, dies and thirty-three when his own insanity makes him a prisoner in Riven Rock, the McCormicks' California mansion where he will remain until his death in 1937. As a rich lunatic, Stanley is a good living for his head nurse, Eddie O'Kane, a "reclamation project" for Katherine and a test case for the psychiatrists she employs. "Sex is the root and cause of every human activity," one Freudian tells O'Kane, "We are animals."[/size]
[size=10pt]At Riven Rock, all the human animals are male because Stanley attacks any woman he sees. " ... he loved them with an incendiary passion that was like hate," Boyle writes, describing the "psychopathia sexualis" diagnosed in 1908. Stanley's humiliation by a French prostitute, his violent reaction to Katherine's sexual advances and his subsequent outbursts are traced back to his emasculating mother.[/size]
[size=10pt]It is a dull explanation, but Boyle dramatizes it effectively and portrays Katherine's frustration with particular acuity. A gifted young Boston scientist, she is also "a newlywed who might as well have been a widow" and who visits Riven Rock to " . . . watch her handsome husband through a pair of binoculars like a field biologist studying the habits of some rare creature in the wild."[/size]
[size=10pt]We first see Katherine through the roving eye of virile, amoral Eddie O'Kane who marvels at "the cold hard glittering shell of her Back Bay beauty." Habitually drunk on alcohol or sex, O'Kane witnesses McCormick's progress over the years from catatonic to manageable lunatic and Katherine's development into a suffragette, agitator for birth control and politician. He is a crude lens, however and, in the novel's most eloquent chapters, Boyle wisely takes us inside Stanley's mind, back to the turning point- when the beginning of love marked the beginning of insanity.[/size]
[size=10pt] 第二页[/size]