(单词翻译:单击)
中英文本
He and his crew break away from a companion ship to forge on alone, determined to be first to find the elusive passage. For weeks the 17 men fight off polar bears that rear up from nowhere, attacking until they are slaughtered or driven away. The ship tacks endlessly and desperately to escape floating “mountains of steel”: icebergs so impenetrable that the only way through is to drill holes and pray they will split apart. By mid-September the vessel is frozen fast, and the men resign themselves to overwintering “in great cold, poverty, misery and griefe”. Poorly clad and ravaged by scurvy, they are “phenomenally unprepared” for the ordeal, Ms Pitzer observes. Yet the remains of the shelter they managed to build stood for nearly 300 years.
巴伦支和他的船员们脱离了同伴的船只独自前行,他们下定决心第一个发现难以找到的通道
Of the men themselves, 13 live through this long polar night—eight months of what the author neatly terms “the monotony of survival”. They dig out from continual blizzards, scavenging for fuel and Arctic foxes whose meat contains just enough vitamin C to sustain them. Still, the journey is filled with wonders: optical phenomena and mysteries unravelled, such as where European songbirds go each summer. Ms Pitzer’s descriptions of the region sing. “Bits of floating ice released tiny bubbles of air, hissing like oil in a skillet,” she writes. “The many languages of water surrounded them day and night.”
他们这群人中有13个人活着度过了这漫长的极夜,作者巧妙地将这8个月称为“求生的单调”
Barents’s heroism helped make the Arctic explorer a mythically resilient figure. The fantasy that drove him, meanwhile, has nearly come to pass. Arctic ice has been shrinking for several decades, with a sharp drop-off after 2006. Human ingenuity, epitomised by expeditions like his, has in 400 years made the Dutchman’s dream a terrifying reality.
巴伦支的英雄主义使这位北极探险家成为一个具有神话般韧性的人物
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词语解释
1. fight off战胜(疾病);击退;打退
The jeweller was stabbed as he tried to fight the robbers off.
珠宝商在试图抵抗强盗时被刺伤了
。2. be filled with 充满
When she died I was filled with a sense of loss.
她去世后我心里充满了失落感
。