the fields 字段

The faintly orange headlight of the car slashed open a wedge of glow on the long and narrow road that cut through the vast field of corns. The crops were flickering in the wind of early November, and looming over the broad and vacant horizon were silhouettes of tall and exuberant poplars and wobbly cottages. A classmate later would tell me that the winter in Illinois this year was extraordinarily warm— “global warming,” he commented, with a sarcastic smirk tingling from the corner of his mouth. A politically ambiguous sense of humor in our chaotic time.
汽车微弱的橙色大灯在穿过广阔的玉米地的狭长道路上划开了一道楔形的光芒。庄稼在11月初的风中摇曳，在广阔而空旷的地平线上若隐若现的是高大而茂盛的杨树和摇摇晃晃的小屋的剪影。一位同学后来告诉我，今年伊利诺伊州的冬天格外温暖——“全球变暖，”他评论道，嘴角露出讽刺的笑容。在我们这个混乱的时代，一种政治上模棱两可的幽默感。

That night we were driving aimlessly for no reason and decided to pull an all-nighter on a whim. Before stumbling into the fields, we were at McDonald’s getting coffees. In the serenity of the night, a McDonald’s was there, a golden dome smiling against a scarlet prairie, like in the painting Nighthawks, when the light-heartedness of the fluorescent lights and brightness of the color falls back on the blue of the urban night, you see a touch of solitude, melancholy, nostalgia, if not of a sense of imminent crisis on the brink of eruption. Through the drive-thru machine, we talked with the employees in dialogues broken by technologies; two large coffees? Caramel vanilla? —an allegory all-too-neat for late capitalism?
那天晚上，我们无缘无故地漫无目的地开车，一时兴起决定通宵达旦。在跌跌撞撞地走进田野之前，我们在麦当劳喝咖啡。在宁静的夜晚，麦当劳在那里，一个金色的圆顶在猩红色的草原上微笑，就像在画《夜鹰》中一样，当荧光灯的轻松和颜色的明亮落回城市夜晚的蓝色时，你会看到一丝孤独、忧郁、怀旧，如果不是一种即将爆发的危机感。通过得来速机器，我们与员工进行了被技术打断的对话;两杯大咖啡？焦糖香草？——一个对晚期资本主义来说太简洁的寓言？

We went to the fields that day because we had seen deer in a park nearby once before. That night we saw the deer again. A pair of shimmering eyes floating amid the darkness, direct, naked, and intimidating. Derrida contemplates the fuzzy boundary between man and animal when seen by his cat in the bathroom. Throughout the circuits of shame, trace, and reflexity, the man and the animal meet again since their first rendezvous under the apple tree; a scene of primal encounter that opens up the corridor of temporalities, a flash of illumination of the human race’s pasts as well as futures. On the fields, the gaze from the Other without a body.
那天我们去了田野，因为我们以前在附近的公园里见过鹿。那天晚上，我们又看到了鹿。一双闪闪发光的眼睛漂浮在黑暗中，直接，赤裸，令人生畏。德里达在浴室里被他的猫看到时，思考了人与动物之间模糊的界限。在羞愧、痕迹和反射的循环中，人和动物自从第一次在苹果树下会合以来再次相遇;一个原始相遇的场景，打开了时间的走廊，照亮了人类的过去和未来。在田野上，没有身体的他者的目光。

Shen Congwen, the Chinese writer condemned as reactionary in the revolutionary years, the lyrical novelist, the self-titled “countryman,” wrote to his newly-wed wife in the early 1950s from a boat on the river that nurtured his hometown. He heard the wind howling, the workers on the boat singing, the goats on the bank chiming in. And he wrote, “Sansan, that was me, too.” What he was exactly, Shen did not say; perhaps he was saying, he, too, was a man of the people, of the “countrymen” who were singing on the boat. But perhaps he was also saying he was the wind, the goat, and the river.
中国作家沈从文在革命年代被谴责为反动派，抒情小说家，自称“乡下人”，1950年代初在河上的一艘船上写信给他的新婚妻子，这条船养育了他的家乡。他听见风在呼啸，船上的工人在唱歌，岸边的山羊在鸣叫。他写道：“三三，那也是我。他到底是什么，沈没有说;也许他是在说，他也是人民的人，在船上唱歌的“乡下人”。但也许他也在说自己是风、山羊和河流。

I remember last year, around the same time, I was on a train from Beijing to Xuzhou to take a GRE test. Through the window I saw the fields of China, I saw a farmer standing amid the crops, and perhaps for the first time I, a kid who grew up in the atrocious historical tide of postmodern globalization, got a vague sense of what it meant to be “Chinese.” Me, and the farmer, we were separated by the glasses of the window, by the steel wall of the high-speed train, by the mediation of technologies as well as culture and politics, yet we were both Chinese. We were both folded, and was being folded, into the thing that for centuries had been called “China.”
我记得去年，大约在同一时间，我在从北京到徐州的火车上参加GRE考试。透过窗户，我看到了中国的田野，我看到一个农民站在庄稼中间，也许是我这个在后现代全球化的残酷历史浪潮中长大的孩子，第一次模糊地感受到了什么是“中国人”。我和农民，我们被窗户的玻璃隔开，被高铁的钢墙隔开，被技术、文化和政治的中介隔开，但我们都是中国人。我们俩都被折叠起来，并且正在被折叠成几个世纪以来一直被称为“中国”的东西。

“Sansan, that was me, too.”
“三三，那也是我。”

The night was all too quiet. It was as if we were driving through the wasteland of our remote ancestors, too vast and vacant for language to exist. Any words, cries, or songs, can but be lost in the winds. A solitary being on the margin of regimes of signifiers, an outcast in the gaps between languages. The bitter-sweet irony of my awakening as Chinese was that the very trip on which the epiphany of Chineseness occurred was supposed to send me out of China. Yet uncannily, in the fields of the American Midwest, I saw the fields that I had seen on the train. The fields of the people, of some people.
夜晚太安静了。就好像我们开车穿过我们遥远祖先的荒原，那里太广阔，太空旷，语言无法存在。任何言语、呐喊或歌曲，都可能在风中消失。一个孤独的存在，处于能指制度的边缘，一个被抛弃在语言之间缝隙中的人。作为中国人，我觉醒的苦乐参半的讽刺是，中国人顿悟的那次旅行本应把我送出中国。然而，不可思议的是，在美国中西部的田野里，我看到了我在火车上看到的田野。人民的领域，一些人的领域。

One day I saw a violet sunset against the horizon of a desolate crop field at a local grocery store parking lot. People were coming out of the grocery store, going home with bags of milk, eggs, broccoli, walking into the vehemently colorful skyline.
有一天，我在当地一家杂货店的停车场看到一片荒凉的庄稼地的地平线上出现了紫罗兰色的日落。人们从杂货店出来，带着一袋袋牛奶、鸡蛋、西兰花回家，走进色彩斑斓的天际线。

I always remember in Beloved the mother said, if you had a taste for color, Midwest was not the place for you. But perhaps it is only against all the grayish, brownish smudges of vague non-colors, that the red and the green, the blue and the purple, can finally breathtakingly stand out. Sometimes it takes a barren cornfield for you to see the magnificence and sublimity of a blood-color sunset. And perhaps that was precisely what Beloved did. Against the gritty and rough textures of the ordinary of the Midwest, the flyover country, the hinterland of America, Toni Morison tears open, bloodily fresh, the trauma, the rememory, the inexorable intensities at the core of this nation’s history.
我一直记得在《挚爱》中，母亲说，如果你喜欢颜色，中西部不适合你。但也许只有面对所有模糊的非颜色的灰色、褐色污迹，红色和绿色、蓝色和紫色才能最终令人叹为观止地脱颖而出。有时，您需要一片贫瘠的玉米地才能看到血色日落的壮丽和崇高。也许这正是 Beloved 所做的。在中西部、天桥国家、美国腹地的平凡中，托尼·莫里森（Toni Morison）撕开了这个国家历史核心的创伤、回忆和无情的强度，血腥地撕开了。

People quite often forget that Lolita was a road-trip novel. Consisting of notes from Nabokov’s summer butterfly-capturing trip all over America, Lolita was, in quite a literal sense, Nabokov’s honeymoon, his love letter, to America. In the novel, Humbert, the handsome, erudite, and disgustingly criminal scholar who, not unlike Nabokov, has just moved from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean, takes his daughter on a scandalous and tortuous trip throughout the United States. Dispersed through the lyrical records of his crimes and the pedantic and narcissist self-defense was his melancholic observation of the American landscape, of his appreciation of the mountains, the rivers, the fields of the New Continent, and the crooning of how much they reminded him of the old world from which he came yet now could no longer return.
人们经常忘记《洛丽塔》是一部公路旅行小说。《洛丽塔》由纳博科夫在美国各地捕捉蝴蝶的夏季旅行的笔记组成，从字面意义上讲，是纳博科夫写给美国的蜜月，是他写给美国的情书。在小说中，英俊、博学、令人作呕的犯罪学者亨伯特与纳博科夫不同，刚刚从欧洲搬到大西洋彼岸，带着女儿在美国进行了一次丑闻和曲折的旅行。通过对他的罪行和迂腐和自恋的自卫的抒情记录，散布着他对美国风景的忧郁观察，他对新大陆的山脉、河流和田野的欣赏，以及它们使他想起了他来自的旧世界的吟唱，但现在再也回不去了。

At the beginning of the 1950s, the threshold to a history completely new to China, or anywhere in the world, the storm of progression was ravaging the millennia-old country in the name of history. Standing at an excruciatingly historic locus for both the nation and himself, Shen Congwen was writing to his wife from his hometown river with feelings so profound that they simply exceeded words. At such a moment, he was talking about history; he was talking about how beyond history written by and for the emperors, generals, and officials, there must be a “history with feelings.” This history is not in books, not in the imperial court, not in the hands of the powerful, it is in the river, in the mountains, in the fields. –Confucius says: “when the ritual is lost, seek it in the fields.”