《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter IV》第22节
------------------------------------------------------------------------ When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the clear voices of children, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight: “I’m the Sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep—” “It was a strange coincidence,” I said. “But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.” “Why not?” “Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour. “He wants to know,” continued Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.” The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden. “Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?”
注释摘要
乔丹讲完这一段往事时，我们离开广场饭店已有半个小时，正乘着一辆维多利亚马车穿过中央公园。这里需要留意叙述时间的折叠——尼克此刻是向读者转述乔丹在广场酒店茶园的回忆，而那回忆本身又回到了一九一七年；等到马车出场，时间才重新滑回“现在”，也就是一九二二年那个暑热的黄昏。维多利亚马车（victoria）是十九世纪遗留的敞篷双座马车，到二十年代初已显得古典而迟缓，…