《瓦尔登湖·第七章·豆田·The Bean-Field》第7节
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them,—the last was the hardest of all,—I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds,—it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor,—disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. That’s Roman wormwood,—that’s pigweed,—that’s sorrel,—that’s piper-grass,—have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don’t let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he’ll turn himself t’other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
注释摘要
梭罗在这一段里把种豆劳作写成了一场漫长的亲密关系，从播种、锄草、收获、打谷、拣选到售卖，整个过程被他郑重其事地罗列出来，像在历数一段感情的各个阶段。他还特意补上一句“吃也算，因为我确实尝过”，仿佛整个实验不只是为了算账，也是为了真正认识豆子——“我决心要了解豆子”，这句话里有一个微妙的双关，know beans 在口语里本来就有“懂行”的意思，梭罗在此既是…