Jack London. To Build a Fire (in English, in the original)

Предлагаю Вашему вниманию лучший рассказ Джека Лондона на английском языке, который сегодня будем читать в оригинале. Рассказ называется «Развести костер» (To Build a Fire, 1902).

Рассказ снабжен переводом наиболее трудных выражений. Красочные описания и некоторые детали подчеркнуты. Если затрудняетесь с их переводом, то не обращайте на них внимания. Главное при переводе — понимать смысл.

Не пытайтесь переводить слова дословно, оторвитесь от текста — только так вы сможете почувствовать всю его красоту….

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Jack London. To Build a Fire (read and listen online in the original)

Для вашего удобства рассказ разбит на 7 частей. К каждой части прилагается аудио. Таким образом, можно рассказ «To Build a Fire»  читать и слушать. К рассказу прилагается сокращенный текст на русском языке (для проверки понимания).

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Jack London. To Build a Fire. Part 1 (read and listen online in the original)

• trail – тропа
• fat spruce timberland – густой хвойный лес
• due to – из-за
• was used to – привык
• save for – только
• hairline – тонкая, еле заметная линия (как волос)
• spruce- covered island – островки покрытые хвойным лесом
• the tremendous cold – страшный холод
• he was long used to it – давно к нему привык
• a chechaquo – чечако (новичок – перевод с индейского)
• quick and alert – зорко видел и быстро схватывал
• the things of life – явления жизни
• frailty as a creature of temperature – уязвимость человека
• stood for – означало

Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth- bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o’clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky- line and dip immediately from view.

The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the ice-jams of the freeze-up had formed. North and south, as far as his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a dark hairline that curved and twisted from around the spruce- covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered island. This dark hairline was the trail—the main trail—that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael on the Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.

But all this – the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.

Read the story «To Build a Fire» in Russian online — «Развести костер» (часть 1) читать онлайн на русском языке