متن زیر را به بهترین شکل به زبان فارسی ترجمه کن
And what of Clarissa Dalloway? On a purely practical level, she needs
flowers for her party that evening: what, after all, is a gathering without a bit of
floral decoration? Flowers present lead to flowers past and memories of being a
girl in flower many years earlier. The imagery is more troubled than with
Wolfe’s orchids, however—perhaps to be expected of a more complex, layered
narrative. Clarissa collects the flowers at the shop as promised, of course, and
their reflection in a window catches the eye of the doomed, frantic ex-soldier
Septimus Warren Smith when the car backfires in the street. He can’t be sure
what the reflection is an image of—a tree perhaps, even the tree behind which
his dead comrade Evans hides throughout the day—but he is sure the image is
fraught with meaning especially for him. Or perhaps merely fraught. And there
is a fitting image of the reader’s enterprise: an image that catches our eye,
suggesting some secondary thing of whose meaning we can’t quite be certain
and whose significance is vague at best. We are forced, like Septimus, to invent,
to select for ourselves from a catalog of dim possibilities the one or two most
likely or most comforting or perhaps least implausible.
The holder of those flowers is herself a fading bloom, brought low to earth
in her own autumn by time and hardship (she now has a bad heart as a result of
influenza during the epidemic of 1918). Yet she hearkens back to her own
springtime, a season marked with flowers, and to other uses of them, particularly
to Sally Seton’s arrangement of stemless flower heads floating in a bowl of
water, a youthful statement that shocked their elders. Are those shocking flowers
emblematic of an equally shocking attraction between the two girls, which found
its expression in a single kiss Sally gave Clarissa? Is the brevity of floral life
emblematic of the transient nature of Clarissa’s own or an ironic commentary on
the permanence of relationships, since not only the memories of that long-ago
time but the persons involved all reappear during Clarissa’s day and evening? Is
the obvious sexual nature of flowers, which exist after all not for our pleasure
but for propagation of the species, a reminder of human sexual nature as
embodied by her blooming daughter, Elizabeth, or a commentary on the
diminished (and always ambiguous) sexuality of Clarissa, who, past the age of
childbearing, now sleeps alone in a “narrow bed”? Woolf isn’t telling. She
offers, suggests, intimates, but never explains. As with the stocking Mrs.
Ramsay knits in To the Lighthouse, of which the critic Erich Auerbach made so
much in his famous chapter, “The Brown Stocking,” in Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), where he observed that
there is no “authorized” or authorial reality in this modern novel, as there would
have been in a traditional work. Instead, external objects and events stand as
mere markers for moments in time and as occasions for the characters’ internal
realities to assert themselves. Indeed, as with the lighthouse itself, or Mr.
Ramsay’s peripatetic verse recitations, the brown stocking can and does mean
many different things, changing from moment to moment and character to
character. The same with Clarissa’s narrow bed, or Peter Walsh’s pocketknife, or
Miss Kilman’s shabby mackintosh. So what to make of all those flowers? Woolf
prudently leaves that to someone else. Any volunteers?
This is why we readers get the big money. From the merest threads, from
hints and allegations, we weave something we believe to be solid and permanent.
We find reality in characters who never existed, find internal motivation and
emotion from the things they carry, construct whole people from outlines and
sketches. It is, in the language of book reviewers, a bravura performance. Maybe
we deserve the royalty checks. Just, for safety’s sake, don’t hold your breath.