《了不起的盖茨比·Chapter VI》第1节
About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say. “Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely. “Why—any statement to give out.” It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.” It was a random shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities upon his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipeline to Canada” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say. James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolomee, and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.
注释摘要
这一节的开头很妙，菲茨杰拉德用一个记者的突然登门来测量盖茨比的声名在1922年夏天膨胀到了什么程度。记者问的是套话：“有什么要说的吗？”，盖茨比礼貌地反问：“关于什么的？”，记者答不上来——他的编辑室里流传着有关盖茨比的某种联系，但这联系究竟是什么，他要么不肯说，要么自己也搞不清楚。菲茨杰拉德用“it transpired”这个带点讽刺的措辞来描写那“混乱…