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Unit 2 A Rose for Emily
第二单元 给艾米莉的玫瑰
William Faulkner
威廉·福克纳
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years.
艾米莉·格利尔逊小姐走了，全镇的人都去送葬：男人们是出于敬慕之情，因为一座丰碑倒塌了；女人们大多出于好奇之心，都想到艾米莉屋里看个究竟。除了一个园丁兼厨师的上了年纪的男仆外，至少已经十年都没有人进去看过了。
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps--an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
那是一幢曾经漆成白色的方形大木屋，装点着19世纪70年代明亮风格的圆形屋顶、尖塔和涡形花纹阳台。房屋所在的街道曾经是全镇最为繁华之地。但这里早已被附近的汽修厂和扎棉机侵占了，就连那些庄严的名字也被吞噬得一干二净；岿然不动的，只有艾米莉小姐的房子，虽有破败之势，却依然显得执拗不驯，风韵犹存，与周围的四轮棉花车和汽油泵一样，太过碍眼了。如今艾米莉小姐也进人了那些具有代表性的庄严的名字行列之中，他们长眠在雪松环拥的墓地里，那是南北战争时期杰斐逊战役中阵亡的联邦联盟军军人之墓：有的是南方军人，有的是北方士兵；有的是高职位，有的是无名氏。
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron--remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.
生前，艾米莉小姐代表着一个传统、一种职责；她既是人们关注的目标，也是全镇传承下来对她应尽的义务，这种义务是从1894年开始的，当时的镇长萨特里斯上校一他还颁布了一道命令：严禁黑人妇女不系围裙上街——豁免了她各种税款；这种特惠政策从她父亲去世之日开始，一直到她不在人世之时为止。这并不是说艾米莉爱占人们的便宜，而是萨特里斯上校编造了一套不清不楚的瞎话，说什么艾米莉的父亲曾贷款给镇政府，而镇政府，作为交易，以这种方式偿还。这种瞎话，只有萨特里斯上校那一代人以及像他那样的脑袋的人才瞎编得出来，也只有女人们才会相信这种瞎话。
