英语听书《白鲸记》第280期
日期:2015-03-23 15:41

(单词翻译:单击)

She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of sea-ivory.
它是一种老派的船只,如果有什么不同的地方,那就是比较小一些;那样子就象是一只古色古香的有爪的脚。它经历过了四大洋的台风和静浪,长期的风吹日晒,它那古旧的船身就象是在埃及和西伯利亚作过战的法国掷弹兵似的墨黑。它那船头的尊容好象是满面胡须。它的桅杆是从日本海岸的什么地方砍来的,因为原来那一根就在日本海岸的一次大风中折落到海里去的。它的桅杆挺直高矗,宛如古代科龙三王的三根背脊骨。它那古老的甲板已损坏和起皱了,就跟坎特伯雷大教堂里在贝克特托马斯。贝克特被刺的地方立下的一块供朝圣者膜拜的石板一样。但是,除了所有这些古老的遗物而外,它还有许多新奇的特点,说明着它五十多年来所从事的那种艰险的工作。老船长法勒,原来就是这只船的多年的大副,以后又去指挥他自己的另一条船,现在是个退休的水手,也是"裴廓德号"的主要股东之一,这个法勒老头,在他担任大副期间,曾在它那原来的奇形怪状上花过不少功夫,用一种奇特的材料和设计,把船身嵌嵌镶镶,弄得只有索基尔-黑克的雕刻的圆盾和床架才能与之媲美。这条船给打扮得跟任何一个脖子沉甸甸地挂着光亮的象牙垂饰的。野蛮的埃塞俄比亚皇帝一模一样。这条船真是集各种战利品的大成。这是一种吃人生番似的。用它猎逐到的敌人的骸骨来打扮自己的船只。它那没装嵌板的。开旷的舷墙四周都被装饰得象个连绵的下颌,用长而尖的抹香鲸齿嵌在那里当作缚住它那些旧麻绳的栓子。这些筋肋并不是穿过陆地树木的低劣木头,而是巧妙地穿过海里的象牙做出来的滑车轮。

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