水手比利·巴德
Billy Budd
Herman Melville · 初版 1900 年
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英俊水手的审判。在 Bellipotent 号战舰上，年轻的孤儿 Billy Budd 被称为“英俊水手”。Billy 身材高大、体魄健壮、气质高贵；他友善、纯真、乐于助人且总是兴高采烈。他既是勇猛的战士，也是忠诚的朋友。所有的水兵和军官都喜欢他……除了一位：枪炮士官 Claggart。嫉妒而狭隘的 Claggart 密谋要让 Billy 的日子不好过。然而，当一场兵变的恐慌席卷舰队时，Claggart 意识到自己不仅可以折磨这位英俊水手……他还可以陷害 Billy Budd 犯下叛国罪……
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《白鲸》（Moby-Dick）确实是一部巨著。如果你想尝尝海豚体量大小的梅尔维尔风味，不妨试试《水手比利·伯德》（Billy Budd）。
Moby-Dick really is a great book. If you want a dolphin-sized taste of Melville, try Billy Budd.
……“他们说，妻子们在此向彼此彻底敞开灵魂的最深处。……因此，在我们心灵的蜜月中，我和魁魁格便躺在那里——一对温馨恩爱的伴侣。”虽然《白鲸》写得稍微含蓄一些，但《比利·伯德》以及梅尔维尔写给霍桑的信件里，充斥的同性情欲意味甚至比《白鲸》还要浓烈得多。同性恋可不是什么新鲜事。
…wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other . ... thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair." While Moby Dick was slightly more subtle, Billy Budd and Melville's letters to Hawthorne and are even more heavily loaded with homoeroticism than Moby Dick. Homosexuality isn't a new thing.
……这得看你的专业了。比如英国文学的 GRE Subject 考试，简直就是纯靠碰运气的大赌局：很大一部分考的是辨识文段，如果你碰巧认出这段出自《比利·伯德》，那段出自《格列佛游记》，那挺好。如果没有，你就会被狂扣分，而这种丢分方式根本无法体现文学教授在学术市场上真正的衡量标准：他们撰写……的能力。
…it. Depends on your subject. The subject GRE for English lit, for example, is an incredible crapshoot: Much of it concerns passage identification, and if you happen to recognize that this one is from Billy Budd and this one is from Gulliver's Travels, great. If not, you can lose a lot of points in ways that are unlikely to reflect what lit profs are really judged by in the academic market: their ability to write…
……在何处终结，橙色又在何处开启？我们能清晰看出这几种色彩的区别，但究竟是在哪里，一种颜色第一次悄然融入了另一种？理智与疯狂亦是如此。”——赫尔曼·梅尔维尔，《比利·伯德》。我之所以喜欢这句话，是因为紫色和橙色在彩虹里其实离得那么远。
…ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity." -- Herman Melville, Billy Budd What I love about this quote is that violet and orange are so far apart in the rainbow.
读读梅尔维尔的生平可能会让人清醒不少。梅尔维尔的《白鲸》（在最好的情况下）都普遍备受冷落，以至于他在临终前几年动笔写《比利·伯德》之前，整整几十年都放弃了写散文。那时《白鲸》早就绝版了……又过了好几十年，它才被奉为“天才之作”或“伟大的美国经典”。
A Melville bio might be sobering. Melville's Moby Dick was so widely ignored (at best) that he quit writing prose for decades before starting Billy Budd a few years before his death. By that time, Moby was out-of-print ... it wasn't a 'work of genius' or a 'great American classic' for decades longer.
呵。《比利·伯德》里也有一些类似搞笑的段落（我高中时不得不读过这本。我一点也不喜欢它）。
Heh. There are some similarly funny passages in Billy Budd (which I had to read in high school. I did not enjoy it.)