متن زیر را به فارسی بصورت دقیق و عالی ترجمه کن
London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in
Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the
streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,
and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or
so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering
down from chimneypots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot
in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might
imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.
Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers,
jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and
losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other
foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if
the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud,
sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating
at compound interest.
How can you not want to read what’s coming? The answer is, you can’t.
That’s why he was a huge bestseller in his day. What kind of story must follow
from such an opening paragraph? This is a place that’s almost mythic in its
wretchedness and misery. And then there’s the fog, which he introduces in the
next paragraph:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and
meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of
shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on
the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the
cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the
rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small
boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners,
wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the
afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog
cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy
on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a
nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a
balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
So just like that, we have a motif, a recurrent element—in this case an
image, the fog—that will hang around to remind us of a central problem in the
story. Before the chapter’s over, motif will become theme, an idea or attitude
about things, as the fog turns out to be not merely at large in the atmosphere but
in the Court of Chancery (like an American probate court, minus
expeditiousness): in the solicitors and the clerk and the Chancellor as well as in
the air of the place, a miasma of confusion and indolence, of claim and
counterclaim, of unresolved cases hovering like ghosts, like bad dreams, for
generations.
Somehow, again miraculously, all this happens in the space of five pages.
Without introducing any of the principals involved in his novel, Dickens
manages to lay out a problem, a location, the particular case (Jarndyce and
Jarndyce), a mood, a theme, and a very compelling image. It’s so good, we
practically don’t need the next 660 pages. At the very least we’re primed for the
introduction of a main character or two. And we will get them pronto.
This is what chapters do, by convention: achieve small structures in support
of the large structure of the book. A traditional chapter has a beginning, a
middle, and an end. It offers readers something: a small story within the larger
one, a scene that develops a theme or idea, a shift in the direction of the plot
attributable to a single event or accident (accidents are great narrative devices in
traditional novels).