Saul Bellow describes his impressions of the seemingly endless cornfields of Illinois.

索尔*贝娄描绘了自己对伊利诺伊看似无边无际的玉米地的印象。

ILLINOIS JOURNEY

Saul Bellow

伊利诺伊之旅

索尔*贝娄

The features of Illinois are not striking; they do not leap to the eye but lie flat and at first appear monotonous. The roads are wide, hard, perfect, sometimes of a shallow depth in the far distance but so nearly level as to make you feel that the earth really is flat. From east and west, travelers dart across these prairies into the huge horizons and through cornfields that go on forever; giant skies, giant clouds, an eternal nearly featureless sameness. You find it hard to travel slowly. The endless miles pressed flat by the ancient glacier seduce you into speeding. As the car eats into the distances you begin gradually to feel that you are riding upon the floor of the continent, the very bottom of it, low and flat, and an impatient spirit of movement, of overtaking and urgency passes into your heart.

伊利诺伊的地貌平平常常，没有引人注目之处。平坦的地势，初初看来单调乏味。道路宽阔坚实，毫无损毁，有时遥看有个不深的凹陷，可差不多全是那么平坦，你禁不住以为地球实际上是平的。从东到西，从西到东，旅人飞快地驶过茫茫大草原，驶向苍茫天际，穿过一望无际的玉米地；高不可测的苍穹，硕大的云朵，老是几乎平淡无奇、千篇一律。你很难缓慢地行驶。被古冰川挤压得平平坦坦的无尽长路诱使你加快车速。汽车渐行渐远，你这才开始逐步意识到自己正穿行在北美大陆的底部，地势最低之处，既低又平坦，这时一种亟欲行进、急着想超车的焦躁情绪在心头滋生。

Miles and miles of prairie, slowly rising and falling, sometimes give you a sense that something is in the process of becoming, or that the liberation of a great force is imminent, some power, like Michelangelo's slave only half released from the block of stone. Conceivably the mound-building Indians believed their resurrection would coincide with some such liberation, and built their graves in imitation of the low moraines deposited by the departing glaciers. But they have not yet been released and remain drowned in their waves of earth. They have left their bones, their flints and pots, their place names and tribal names and little besides except a stain, seldom vivid, on the consciousness of their white successors.

连绵不断的大草原徐徐起伏，有时会让你觉得有什么东西正在是生成，或是即将有伟力释放，某种力，一如米开朗基罗的奴隶雕像只浮现半个身形。可以想象，擅长构筑土墩的印第安人相信人的死而复生与某种类似的释放同时发生，所以他们在建造坟墓时候模仿离去的冰川积下的低矮冰碛。然而，他们迄今未能复苏，仍掩埋在泥土中。他们留下了自己的尸骸、燧石、壶罐、地名和部落名，此外就没留下什么，除了白人后继者的意识中并不清晰的污痕。

The soil of the Illinois prairies is fat, rich and thick. After spring plowing it looks oil-blackened or colored by the soft coal which occurs in great veins throughout the state. In the fields you frequently see a small tipple, or a crazy-looking device that pumps oil and nods like the neck of a horse at a quick walk.... Along the road, with intervals between them as neat and even as buttons on the cuff, sit steel storage bins, in form like the tents of Mongolia. They are filled with grain. And the elevators and tanks, trucks and machines that crawl over the fields and blunder over the highways--whatever you see is productive. It creates wealth, it stores wealth, it is wealth.

伊利诺伊大草原上，土壤肥沃、丰产而深厚。春耕之后，泥土油亮而乌黑，像是被遍布全州的大矿脉里松软的烟煤染过似的。田野上你常常看到一种小型翻卸车，一种样子滑稽的抽油用的装置，就像飞奔中马匹的劲部上下抖动……沿途耸立着形似蒙古包的铁皮谷仓，它们之间的间距如同袖口的纽扣般排列得整齐划一。里面储满了谷物。还有升降机、储藏罐、卡车、机器缓慢地行驶在田野上，笨拙地奔走在公路上——你所见到的一切都能产生经济效益。这块土地创造的财富，这块土地储存的财富，这块土地本身就是财富。

As you pass the fields, you see signs the farmers have posted telling in short code what sort of seed they have planted. The farmhouses are seldom at the roadside, but far within the fields. The solitude and silence are deep and wide. Then, when you have gone ten or twenty miles through cornfields without having seen a living thing, no cow, no dog, scarcely even a bird under the hot sky, suddenly you come upon a noisy contraption at the roadside, a system of contraptions, rather, for husking the corn and stripping the grain. It burns and bangs away, and the conveyor belts rattle....

当你穿过田野时，你见到了农场主张贴的指示牌，上面用简短的标记写明他们播下的是什么种子。农舍通常不在路边，而是建在田野深处。那份寂寥和静谧既深沉有广大。当你穿行在玉米田间，行驶了十里，二十里，却看不到一个活物，看不到牛看不到狗，连晴热天空下的飞鸟也难见到，这时，突如其来地，你会见到路旁有个发出噪声的新奇的机械装置，或者说是一组机械装置，那是用来剥玉米壳碾谷的。它热得烫手，不停地砰砰作响传送带咯嚓咯嚓地在运行……

When you leave, this noise and activity are cut off at one stroke: you are once more in the deaf, hot solitude of trembling air, alone in the cornfields.

你一口开，这声响，这动静就倏然消失：你重新回到那份无声的灼人的寂寥之中，呼吸颤动的空气，回到玉米田间，孤身一人。

North, south, east and west, there is no end to them. They line roads and streams and hem in the woods and surround towns, and they crowd into back yards and edge up to gas stations. An exotic stranger might assume he had come upon a race of corn worshipers who had created a corn ocean; or that he was among a people who had fallen in love with infinite repetition of the same details, like the builders of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago who have raised up bricks and windows by the thousands, and all alike. From corn you can derive notions of equality, or uniformity, massed democracy. You can, if you are given to that form of mental play, recall Joseph's brethren in the lean years, and think how famine has been conquered here and super-abundance itself become such a danger that the Government has to take measures against it.

东南西北，四面八方的玉米地望不到边。路边、溪边、都种了玉米，林子、城镇四周也都种了玉米，玉米种满后园，甚至挤到了加油站。异乡客会以为自己来到了一个创建起玉米海洋的对玉米顶礼膜拜的民族，或以为自己身处那些偏爱无休止地重复同样细节的人们之中，就如同纽约、芝加哥那些摩天高楼的建造者，他们垒万砖安千窗，全都一个模样。在玉米田间，你可以获得平等的观念、划一的观念、大众民主的观念。如果你好做这类脑力游戏，你可以回想一下遇到荒年的约瑟夫兄弟，想一想在这里饥谨是如何被铲除的，过剩本身又如何成为一种危险，政府不得不对其采取措施。

The power, the monotony, the oceanic extent of the cornfields do indeed shrink up and dwarf the past. How are you to think of the small bands of Illini, Ottawas, Cahokians, Shawnee, Miamis who camped in the turkey grass, and the French Jesuits who descended the Mississippi and found them. When you force your mind to summon them, the Indians appear rather doll-like in the radiance of the present moment. They are covered in the corn, swamped in the oil, hidden in the coal of Franklin County, run over by the trains, turned phantom by the stockyards. There are monuments to them... throughout the state, but they are only historical ornaments to the pride of the present...

玉米地所展现的那种震撼力、那种千篇一律、浩瀚无垠的确使过去变得渺小。你不妨回想一下那些在草地设营的小群印第安人：伊里尼人、奥塔瓦人、卡豪凯扬人、肖尼人、迈阿密人，也不妨回想一下顺密西西比河而下、发现他们的法国耶稣会教徒。当你凝神回顾这些昔日的印第安人时，他们在今日的辉煌之前显得犹如玩偶。他们被玉米掩埋，被石油淹没，被富兰克林县的煤埋没，被火车碾过，化作了在牲畜围场近旁出没的幽灵。为他们建的纪念碑……遍布全州，但这些不过是为今日的荣耀添彩的历史点缀……