Summer Before Air-Conditioning

Arthur Miller

∷莘绮 选 刘宇佳 注

酷日炎炎的日子总让人们不由地想起空调、电扇、冷饮等一系列可以去凉消暑的必备品。人们热到极致的时候，哪怕想想这些东西，或许也能感受到一丝丝凉意袭面而来。然而，空调尚未发明和流行之前，人们是如何度过夏天的呢？你能忍受汗水打湿全身，整个人热到似乎都要发霉的日子吗？

Exactly what year it was I can no longer recall—probably 1927 or ’28—there was an extraordinarily hot September, which hung on even after school had started and we were back from our Rockaway Beach bungalow.1. extraordinarily: 非常地；hang on: 持续下去；bungalow: 平房。Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies.2. 纽约所有的窗户都打开着，街道上的小贩们推着手推车叫卖东西，车上堆满了碎冰，上面散放着彩糖，售价几个便士。vender: 小贩；man: v. 操纵；mounds of: 成堆的。We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving, horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two; the ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue.3. wagon: 四轮马车；manure: 粪肥。

People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear.4. 在我所居住的西110号街里，人们或多或少有些小资性格，不会坐到安全出口的外面。然而，在111号街的拐角处以及更远的住宅区里，随着夜幕降临，人们便把床垫铺在铁阳台上，全家人穿着内衣躺在上面乘凉。bourgeois: 资产阶级的； fire escape: 防火梯，安全出口；uptown: 住宅区；mattress: 床垫。

Even through the nights, the pall5. pall: 幕，遮盖物。of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s.6. cacophony: 刺耳的音调；syncopate: 切分（节拍、音符等）。Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured7. murmur: 低声说。, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass;Harlem8. Harlem: 哈莱姆区，是纽约黑人住宅区。began above 116th Street then.

Later on, in the Depression9. the Depression: 大萧条，指1929年至1933年间源起于美国的经济危机。thirties, the summers seemed even hotter. Out West, it was the time of the red sun and the dust storms,when whole desiccated farms blew away and sent the Okies, whom Steinbeck immortalized, out on their desperate treks toward the Paci fic.10. desiccated: 干燥的；Okie: 俄克拉荷马州民，该地为印第安人聚集地；Steinbeck: 斯坦贝克（1902—1968），美国作家； immortalize: 使名垂千古； trek: 艰苦跋涉。My father had a small coat factory on Thirty-ninth Street then, with about a dozen men working sewing machines11. sewing machine: 缝纫机。. Just to watch them handling thick woollen winter coats in that heat was, for me, a torture12. torture: 折磨，煎熬。. The cutters were on piecework, paid by the number of seams they finished,13. cutter: 裁剪者；piecework:计件工作；seam: 缝合线，接缝。so their lunch break was short—fifteen or twenty minutes. They brought their own food: bunches of radishes14. radish: 萝卜。, a tomato perhaps, cucumbers, and a jar of thick sour cream, which went into a bowl they kept under the machines. A small loaf of pumpernickel also materialized, which they tore apart and used as a spoon to scoop up the cream and vegetables.15. pumpernickel: 裸麦粉粗面包；tear apart: 搅拌；scoop up: 舀起。

The men sweated a lot in those lofts, and I remember one worker who had a peculiar way of dripping.16. loft: 阁楼；peculiar: 特别的。He was a tiny fellow, who disdained scissors, and, at the end of a seam,always bit off the thread instead of cutting it, so that inch-long strands stuck to his lower lip, and by the end of the day he had a multicolored beard.17. 他个子不高，不喜欢用剪刀，总是用牙咬断接缝处的线，导致一英寸长的线头总是黏在他的下嘴唇上。一天下来，他便“长出”了彩色的胡须。disdain: 鄙视；thread: 线；multicolored：彩色的；beard: 胡须。His sweat poured onto those thread ends and dripped down onto the cloth, which he was constantly blotting with a rag.18. blot: 吸干；rag: 抹布。

Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect19. respect: 方面。, and my father, who normally had no sense of smell—no one understood why—claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from a distance. In order to make as much money as possible, this fellow would start work at half past five in the morning and continue until midnight. He owned Bronx20. Bronx: 布朗克斯区，纽约五个区中最北的地区，是纽约市有名的贫民区。apartment houses and land in Florida and Jersey,and seemed half mad with greed. He had a powerful physique,a very straight spine, a tangle of hair, and a black shadow on his cheeks.21. 他体格强大，头发乱糟糟的，腰板笔直，脸上有片黑影（疤痕）。physique: 体格；spine: 脊椎；tangle:乱作一团。He snorted22. snort: 呼哧呼哧的喷气声。like a horse as he pushed the cutting machine, following his patterns through some eighteen layers of winter-coat material. One late afternoon, he blinked his eyes hard against the burning sweat as he held down the material with his left hand and pressed the vertical, razor-sharp reciprocating blade with his right.23. 一天午后，他左手拿着布料，右手按着锋利的刀片，上下来回剪裁，滚烫的汗水滴答落下，他猛眨眼睛（咬牙）坚持着工作。razor-sharp: 锋利的；reciprocating: 往返的；blade: 刀片。The blade sliced through his index finger at the second joint.24. slice through: 割穿；index finger: 食指；joint: 关节。Angrily refusing to go to the hospital, he ran tap water over the stump, wrapped his hand in a towel, and went right on cutting, snorting, and stinking.25. tap water: 自来水；stump: 残肢；stink:散发臭味。When the blood began to show through the towel’s bunched layers, my father pulled the plug on26. pull the plug on: 突然中断。the machine and ordered him to the hospital. But he was back at work the next morning, and worked right through the day and into the evening, as usual, piling up his apartment houses.

There were still elevated trains27. elevated train: 高架列车。then, along Second, Third,Sixth, and Ninth Avenues, and many of the cars were wooden,with windows that opened. Broadway had open trolleys with no side walls, in which you at least caught the breeze, hot though it was, so that desperate people, unable to endure their apartments,would simply pay a nickel and ride around aimlessly for a couple of hours to cool off.28. 百老汇提供了周围不封闭的有轨电车，仅需五美分，那些无法忍受公寓里酷热天气的绝望的人们便可漫无目的地坐在上面乘凉，花上几个小时享受着车开动后带来的微风，尽管这些风是热风。trolley:（美国）有轨电车；nickel: 五分镍币，五美分。As for Coney Island29. Coney Island: 康尼岛，位于纽约市布鲁克林区南部，是美国最早的大型游乐城。on weekends,block after block of beach was so jammed with people that it was barely possible to find a space to sit or to put down your book or your hot dog.

My first direct contact with an air-conditioner came only in the sixties, when I was living in the Chelsea Hotel30. Chelsea Hotel: 切尔西旅馆，美国纽约市一家以众多作家、哲学家、作曲家、歌手和电影艺术家曾居住而闻名的旅馆。. The so-called management sent up a machine on casters which rather aimlessly cooled and sometimes heated the air, relying, as it did, on pitchers of water that one had to pour into it.31. 所谓的管理人员用脚轮上送来一台机器，这台机器不受控制地时而冷却时而加热，靠人们往水罐里倒水来运作。caster: 脚轮；pitcher:水罐。On the initial filling, it would spray water all over the room, so one had to face it toward the bathroom rather than the bed.

人们到有轨电车上乘凉

A South African gentleman once told me that New York in August was hotter than any place he knew in Africa,yet people here dressed for a northern city. He had wanted to wear shorts but feared that he would be arrested for indecent exposure.32. indecent: 不得体的；exposure: 暴露。

High heat created irrational solutions: linen suits that collapsed into deep wrinkles when one bent an arm or a knee, and men’s straw hats as stiff as matzohs, which, like some kind of hard yellow flower, bloomed annually all over the city on a certain sacred date—June 1st or so.33. 人们应对高温也有了荒谬的解决办法：亚麻西装，当人们弯曲手臂或膝盖时，便会出现深深的褶皱。男士草帽像无酵饼那样的硬，就像黄花一样，在每年某个神圣日——六月1号左右，盛开全城。wrinkle: 褶皱；irrational: 荒谬的； linen: 亚麻的。Those hats dug deep pink creases around men’s foreheads, and the wrinkled suits, which were supposedly cooler, had to be pulled down and up and sidewise to make room for the body within.34. crease: 褶皱；sidewise: 向一边的。

The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting “Hot enough for ya? Ha-ha!”35. 夏天的城市在恍惚间浮游，原本理智的人们没头没脑地不停地相互问道：“够热吗？哈哈！”in a daze: 恍惚中；ya: you的口语用法。It was like the final joke before the meltdown36. meltdown: 融化。of the world in a pool of sweat.ELL