優(yōu)美英文散文:In Springtime
下面是學習啦小編為大家?guī)碛⒄Z優(yōu)美散文:In Springtime,希望大家喜歡!
Each spring, the urge to plant something—a flower or vegetable or anything that would blossom and produce—pulled at her. It must have been a legacy from her grandmother who had, long ago, kept a garden of small and neat proportions.
There had been cabbage-sized roses and delicate white pea blossoms. And in the fertile earth hid golden carrot spears and round white onions, layered and pearly.
The garden gave forth its best from early spring, when the frost still powdered the ground, until late autumn amidst the flaming leaves. And Alice came to believe her grandmother had found the secret to life itself buried deep in the soft black earth.
There had been space and light for things to grow at her grandmother’s house—unlike here in the city where even weeds had a difficult time breaking through the ever-present asphalt.
There was no place for Alice to grow even a single flower—not in front of the brownstone building, where angled cracks only hinted at the earth below, not inside her small dark apartment where the life-giving sunlight would have to traverse an impossibly long distance just to reach her grimy windows.
She had tried, that first year she had come to the city, when hope blossomed in her heart and the future seemed filled with promise. She had carried to her rooms a red clay pot of patio tomatoes, guaranteed to produce scarlet globes hanging in abundance from the dark green stems.
But the lack of sunlight and fresh air turned the green to faded brown, and by summer’s end, the tomatoes themselves were shriveled and misshapen—a nightmare version of what nature intended.
Alice threw the plant away, and never brought home another. Instead, every spring, when the desire for life burned in her, she would stop at the flower sellers waiting patiently outside the subway entrance and buy armfuls of freesias and roses and carnations.
Tenderly, she would carry the paper-wrapped bundle home, to arrange the fragrant rootless blossoms in a crystal vase to die.
譯文:春天
每到春天,艾麗絲便渴望種點什么——鮮花,或蔬菜或一切能開花能生長的東西。很久以前,從她祖母那兒遺留下來一個整潔的小花園。
那里,春季的時候,簇簇洋白菜大的玫瑰和叢叢散發(fā)著幽香的雪白的豌豆花競相開放。肥沃的土地下埋藏著金色的胡蘿卜的幼苗以及珍珠樣又白又圓的洋蔥。
早春的花園沖破嚴寒霜凍,把最美的景色帶給人間,晚秋時節(jié)則呈現(xiàn)在一片火紅的樹葉中。艾麗絲確信祖母已經發(fā)現(xiàn)深埋在柔軟的黑色土地下的生命本身的秘密。
祖母的房屋外面有足夠的空間和陽光適合植物的生長,不像這城市里,種子要從布滿瀝青的地上破土而出非常艱難。
在城里,愛麗絲找不出一點地方哪怕是種一株花,褐石房屋外面不行,那里只是從房屋之間的夾縫中透進少許的陽光,在她狹小而黑暗的公寓更不行,哺育生命的陽光不可能穿過那么遠的距離,最多只能到達昏暗的窗戶。
來到城里的第一年,她曾努力去嘗試,那時她心中充滿希望,對未來似乎也有點盼頭。她種了一砵西紅柿放在房間外的露臺上,里面盛滿紅色的粘土,指望那深綠的枝椏上定會掛滿又圓又紅的果實。
但是因為缺乏陽光和新鮮空氣,綠葉褪變成了褐色,直到夏末,西紅柿也變得干癟且畸形,當初的美好愿望成了一場空。
愛麗絲扔掉西紅柿,從今往后不往家里帶任何其它的植物了。然而,每當春天來臨,她的心里依然充滿對生命的渴望,她耐心地等在地鐵入口處,流連于賣花人面前,買了一大束小蒼蘭、玫瑰和康乃馨,抱在臂彎里。
她小心翼翼地捧著這束用紙包裝好的花回了家,把這芬芳的無根的鮮花插在水晶瓶子里,直到枯萎。