The Telephone
电话
Anwar F.Accawi
安瓦尔·F.阿卡维
When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the terraced, rocky mountains east of Sidon, time didn't mean much to anybody, except maybe to those who were dying. In those days, there was no real need for a calendar or a watch to keep track of the hours, days, months, and years. We knew what to do and when to do it, just as the Iraqi geese knew when to fly north, driven by the hot wind that blew in from the desert. The only timepiece we had need of then was the sun. It rose and set, and the seasons rolled by and we sowed seed and harvested and ate and played and married our cousins and had babies who got whooping cough and chickenpox—and those children who survived grew up and married their cousins and had babies who got whooping cough and chickenpox. We lived and loved and toiled and died without ever needing to know what year it was, or even the time of day.
我是在黎巴嫩的马格达路纳长大的,那是西顿东部梯田环绕的多石的村庄,那里,除了那些将要死亡的人,时间对于所有的人来说都是无关紧要的。那时候,人们根本不需要日历或者钟表来计时、计日、计月、计年。我们知道什么时候该做什么事情,就像伊拉克雁群一样,在从沙漠刮来的热风的推动下,它们知道何时飞往北方。那时,我们需要的唯一计时器就是太阳。日升日落,冬去春来,我们播种、收获、吃饭、玩耍,与表兄妹结婚生子,孩子患了百日咳和水痘——存活下来的孩子长大后又与他们的表兄妹结婚生子,他们的孩子又患了百日咳和水痘。我们过日子、相爱,辛勤劳作,直到最后生命结束,都不需要知道这是哪一年,甚至哪一天。
It wasn't that we had no system for keeping track of time and of the important events in our lives. But ours was a natural or, rather, a divine—calendar, because it was framed by acts of God: earthquakes and droughts and floods and locusts and pestilences. Simple as our calendar was, it worked just fine for us.
这并不是说我们没有记录时间和生活中大事的方法。只是我们是用一种自然的,确切来说是一个天赐的日程表,因为它是根据上帝的行动来制订的,比如说:地震、旱灾、水灾、蝗灾和瘟疫。尽管我们的日历很简单,但对于我们来说已经足够了。