Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred.
…
[At the Red Cross,] patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and under the porte-cochère, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting. … In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt. At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town …
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another`s arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God`s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
「どうして納屋を焼くんだろう？」
「変ですか？」
「わからないな。君は納屋を焼くし、僕は納屋を焼かない。そのあいだにはいわば歴然とした違いがあるし、僕としてはどちらが変かというよりは、まずその違いがどういうものはっきりさせておきたいんだ。それに納屋の話は君が先に持ち出したんだよ」
“Why do you burn barns?”
“Do you think its weird?”
“I don’t know. You burn barns. I don’t burn barns. There’s this glaring difference, and to me, rather than say which of us is strange, first of all I’d like to clear up just what that difference is. Anyway, you were the one who brought the subject up in the first place.”
Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar. El espejo inquietaba el fondo de un corredor en una quinta de la calle Gaona, en Ramos Mejía; la enciclopedia falazmente se llama The Anglo-American Cyclopaedía (New York, 1917) y es una reimpresión literal, pero también morosa, de la Encyclopaedia Britannica de 1902. El hecho se produjo hará unos cinco años. Bioy Casares había cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demoró una vasta polémica sobre la ejecución de una novela en primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o desfigurara los hechos e incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permitieran a unos pocos lectores — a muy pocos lectores — la adivinación de una realidad atroz o banal. Desde el fondo remoto del corredor, el espejo nos acechaba. Descubrimos (en la alta noche ese descubrimiento es inevitable) que los espejos tienen algo monstruoso. Entonces Bioy Casares recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres. Le pregunté el origen de esa memorable sentencia y me contestó que The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia la registraba, en su artículo sobre Uqbar.
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the far end of a hallway in a large country house on Calle Gaona, in Ramos Mejía; the encyclopedia is misleadingly titled The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal (though also laggardly) reprint of the 1902 Encyclopædia Britannica. The event took place about five years ago.
Bioy Casares had come to dinner at my house that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go about composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book’s readers—a very few—might divine the horrifying or banal truth. Down at the far end of the hallway, the mirror hovered, shadowing us. We discovered (very late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bioy remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar: Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind. I asked him where he’d come across that memorable epigram, and he told me it was recorded in The Anglo-American Cyclopedia, in its article on Uqbar.
ワタナベ・ノボル、お前はどこにいるのだ？と僕は思った。ねじまき鳥はお前のねじを巻かなかったのか？
まるで詩の文句だな。
ワタナベ・ノボル
お前はどこにいるのだ？
ねじまき鳥はお前のねじを
巻かなかったのか？
ビールを半分ばかり飲んだところで電話のベルが鳴りはじめた。
「出てくれよ」と僕は昼間の暗闇に向かってどなった。
「嫌よ。あなたが出てよ」と妻が言った。
「出たくない」と僕は言った。
答えるもののないままに電話のベルは鳴りつづけた。ベルは暗闇の中に浮かんだちりを鈍くかきまわしていた。僕も妻もそのあいだ一言を口をきかなかった。僕はビールを飲み、妻は声を立てずに泣きつづけていた。二十回までベルの音を数えたが、それからあとはあきらめて鳴るにまかせた。いつまでそんなものを数え続けるわけにはいかない。
Noboru Watanabe, where are you? I thought. Did the wind-up bird forget to wind your spring?
It sounded almost like a poem.
Noboru Watanabe,
Where are you?
Did the wind-up bird
Forget to wind your spring?
I had barely finished half of my beer when the phone began to ring.
“Get it, will you?” I shouted towards the darkness of the living room.
“No! You get it.” She said.
“I don’t want to.”
Her reply never came. The phone continued to ring, the sound stirring up the dust that floated in the darkness. Neither I nor my wife said a word. I drank my beer, she went on crying soundlessly. I counted twenty rings before I gave up. There was no point in counting forever.
Die Ewigkeit ist bloß ein Augenblick, gerade lange genug für den Spaß.
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
The appearance of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906 spurred Congress to [pass pure food and drug laws]. Sinclair intended to recruit people to socialism by exposing the plight of workers in the meatpacking industry. The novel contained a brief but dramatic description of the slaughter of cattle infected with tuberculosis, of meat covered with rat dung, and of men falling into cooking vats. Readers paid scant attention to the workers, but their stomachs turned at what they might be eating for breakfast. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 sailed through Congress, and the Meat Inspection Act soon followed.
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