作品原文

张爱玲 《说胡萝卜》

有一天，我们饭桌上有一样萝卜煨肉汤。我问我姑姑：“洋花萝卜跟胡萝卜都是古时候从外国传进来的罢？”她说：“别问我这些事。我不知道。”她想了一想，接下去说道：

“我第一次同胡萝卜接触，是小时候养‘叫油子’，就喂它胡萝卜。还记得那时候奶奶（指我的祖母）总是把胡萝卜一切两半，再对半一切，塞在笼子里，大约那样算切得小了。——要不然我们吃的菜里是向来没有胡萝卜这样东西的。——为什么给‘叫油子’吃这个，我也不懂。”

我把这一席话暗暗记下，一字不移地写下来，看看忍不住要笑，因为只消加上“说胡萝卜”的标题，就是一篇时髦的散文，虽说不上冲淡隽永，至少放在报章杂志里也可以充充数。而且妙在短——才抬头，已经完了，更使人低徊不已。

英文译文

On Carrots
Eileen Chang

One day, we had a kind of turnip and meat stew on the dinner table, so I asked my aunt, “I suppose turnips and carrots came here from foreign countries in ancient times?” She replied, “I’m not the one to ask about such things. I don’t know.” She thought for a while and went on:”The first time I came into contact with carrots was when I was little and I had a pet hamster we fed with carrots. I still remember that Granny (my paternal grandmother, that is) would always cut them in half lengthwise and then in quarters before she could put them into the cage. That was how small she had to cut them. If not for the hamsters, we would never have cooked anything with carrots at all. Why we fed carrots to the hamsters I don’t understand.”

I secretly jotted down this little speech, without changing even a single word and then couldn’t help laughing to myself, because all I needed to do was add a title—“On Carrots”—and a stylish little essay appear on the page before me. It may not necessarily attain the resonant simplicity of the best short essays but will nonetheless take up a column on the page of a newspaper. And its wonder lies in brevity: by the time you start reading, it’s already over, which only makes you ponder its meaning all the more