翻译练习：What Are The Best First Lines In Fiction(2)

What Are The Best First Lines In Fiction(2)

最好的小说开场是什么（2）

A Tale of Two Cities turns 160 this November, but though its first sentence - all 119 words of it - is by far and away its most celebrated feature, beginnings weren't much dwelled upon when Dickens penned it. The earliest English-language novels tended to favour leisurely, not to say long-winded set-ups, often deferring the start with a preface. Contrast that with a style that's been dominant for around a century now, of arriving late and dropping the reader into the narrative in medias res - in the middle of things. These days, it's not just the style of opening sentences that is different, it's the weight we give them as critics, writers, even readers. We frontload our expectations, insisting that a handful of words must contain the DNA of all that is to come, encapsulating the conflict of a 300-page story.

《双城记》到今年（2020年）11月就有160年了，尽管这个开场白——总共119个词——是如此著名的特点，其实在狄更斯在写作时，一开始并没有特别在意。最早的英语小说的开头不是从长计议，就是倾向于喜欢娓娓道来，经常用一个序言慢慢开始。与之相反的是如今已经主导了一个世纪的风格，就是最迟在故事的中间就要让读者陷入其中，无法自拨。如今，不仅仅是开场白的风格不一样了，无论是评论家、作家、甚至是作者，我们都更看重开场白了。我们前置了我们的期望，坚持寥寥数语就能囊括300页故事的全部冲突的精华。

Of course, there are as many ways of beginning a novel as there are novels, and yet themes and trends are there for the spotting. There's the sweeping statement, for instance, provocative and seductive in its certainty, of which Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is surely the best-known example - "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". And LP Hartley's The Go-Between ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there") adds a plangent note that still reverberates, well over half a century on. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - an opener almost as famous as Dickens' - subverts this epigrammatic set-up with a layer of characteristic irony: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife".

当然，有多少小说，就会有多少不同的开头，不过我们还是可以看出它们的主题和趋势。有影响广泛的句子，例如，使用煽动性和诱惑性非常明显地开场白，列夫・托尔斯泰的《安娜・卡列尼娜》就是最好的例子——“所有幸福的家庭都是一样的，不幸的家庭各有各的不幸”。还有L.P.哈特利的《送信人》（“往事犹如他乡：在那里他们与现在行事不同”）添加一个仍然回响的悲哀的音符，半个多世纪之后仍然余音绕梁。简・奥斯汀的《傲慢与偏见》——其开场白几乎和狄更斯一样出名——它用一种颇有特点的讽刺颠覆了这种警句的结构“这是举世公认的真理：凡有钱之男士，总想讨个老婆”