杨宪益英译鲁迅的散文.docxVIP

. 杨宪益英译鲁迅的散文《从百草园到三味书屋》 From Hundred-Plant Garden to Three-flavour Study Behind our house was a great garden known in our family as Hundred-Plant Garden. It has long since been sold, together with the house, to the descendents of Zhu Xi; and the last time I saw it, already seven or eight years ago. I am pretty sure there were only weeds growing there. But in my childhood it was my paradise. I need not speak of the green vegetable plots, the slippery stone coping round the well, the tall honey-locust tree, or the purple mud berries. Nor need I speak of the long shrilling of the cicadas among the leaves, the fat wasps couches in the flowering rape, or the nimble skylarks who suddenly soared straight up from the grass to the sky. Just the foot of the low mud wall around the garden was a source of unfailing interest. Here field crickets droned away while house crickets chirped merrily. Turning over a broken brick, you might find a centipede. There were stink-beetles as well, and if you pressed a finger on their rear orifices. Milkwort interwove with climbing fig which had fruit shaped like the calyx of a lotus, while the milk mort had swollen tubers. Fork said that some of these had human shapes and if you ate them you would become immortal, so I kept on pulling them up. By uprooting one I pulled out those next to it, and in this way destroyed part of the mud wall, but I never found a tuber shaped like a man. If you were not afraid of thorns you could pick raspberries too, like clusters of little coral beads, sweet yet tart, with a much finer color and flavor than mulberries. I did not venture into the long grass, because a huge brown snake was said to inhabit the garden. Mama Chang had told me a story: Once upon a time a scholar was staying in an old temple to study. One evening while enjoying the cool of the courtyard he heard someone call his name. Responding he looked round and saw, over the wall, the head of a siren. She smiled, then disappeared. He wa