task (1)

PROSE UNIT2:

TRANSLATING D. H. LAWRENCE

INTO RUSSIAN

THE MAN WHO WAS THROUGH WITH THE WORLD

There was a man not long ago, who felt he was through with the world, so he decided to be a hermit. He had a little mon­ey, and he knew that nowadays there are no hermitages going rent-free. So he bought a bit of wild land on a mountain-side, with a chestnut trees growing on it. He waited till spring; then went up and started building himself a little cabin, with the stones from the hill side. By summer, he had got himself a nice little hut with a chimney and one little window, a table, a chair, a bed, and the smallest number of things a hermit may need. Then he considered himself set up as a hermit.

His hermitage stood in a sheltered nook in the rocks of mountain, and through the open door he looked out on the big, staggering chestnut trees of the upper region. These trees, this bit of property was his legal own, but he wanted to dedicate it to somebody: to God, preferably.

He felt, however, a bit vague about God. In his youth he had been sent to Sunday School, but he had long been through with all that. He had, as a matter of fact, even forgotten the Lord's Prayer; like the old man in the Tolstoy parable. If he tried to remember it, mixed it up with The Lord is my Shepherd, and felt annoyed. He might, of course, have fetched himself a Bible. But he was through with all that.

Because, before he was through with everything, he had read quite a lot about Brahma and Krishna and Shiva, and Buddha and Confucius and Mithras, not to mention Zeus and Aphrodite and that bunch, nor the Wotan family. So when he began to think: The Lord is my Shepherd, somehow Shiva would start dancing a Charleston the back of his mind, and Mithras would take the bull by the horns, and Mohammed would start patting the buttery flanks of Ayesha and Abraham would be sitting down to a good meal off a fat ram, till the grease ran down his beard. So that it was very difficult to concentrate on God with a large 'g', and the hermit had a natural reluctance to go into refinements of the great I Am, or of thatness. He wanted to get away from all that sort of things. For what else had he become a hermit?

But alas, he found it wasn't easy. If you're a hermit, you’ve got to concentrate. You've got to sit in the door of your hut in the sunshine, and concentrate on something holy. This hermit would sit in the door of his hut in the sunshine right enough, but he couldn't find anything holy enough really to keep him concentrated. If he tried some nice eastern mode of meditation, he sat cross-legged with faint lotus-like smile on his face, some dog-in-the-manger inside him growled: Oh, cut it out, Henry, Nirvana's cold egg for the likes of you.

So gradually the hermit became desperate. There he was, all rigged up quite perfect as a holy man, a hermit, and an anchorite, and felt like an acrobat trying to hang on to a tight wire with his eye-brows. He simply had nothing to hold on to. There wasn't a single holiness or high-and-mightiness that interested him enough to bring concentration. And a hermit with nothing to concentrate on is like a fly in the cream jug.

Spring changed into summer. The primroses by the little stream where the hermit dipped his water faded and were gone, only their large leaves spread to the hotter days. The violets flickered to a finish; at last not a purple spark was left. The chestnut burrs upon the ground finally had melted away, the leaves overhead had emerged and overlapped one another, to make the green roof of summer.

And the hermit was bored, and rather, and rather angry with himself and everything else. He saw nobody up there: an occasional goat-boy, an occasional hunter shooting little birds went by, looking askance. The hermit nodded a salutation, but no more.

Then at intervals he went down to the village for food. The village was four long miles away, down the steep side of the mountain. And when you got there, you found nothing but the silence, the dirt, the poverty and the suspicion of a mountain hamlet. And there is very little to buy.

THINGS

They were true idealists, from New England. Several years before the war, they met and married; he a tall, keen-eyed young man from Connecticut, she a smallish, demure, Puritan-looking young woman from Massachusetts. They both had a little money; Not much, however. Still — they were free. Free!

But what is money? All one wishes to do is' to live a full and beautiful life. In Europe, of course, right at the fountain-head of tradition.

Therefore the two idealists, who were married in New Haven, sailed at once to Paris: Paris of the old days. They had studio apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse, and they became real Parisians, in the old, delightful sense, not in the modern vulgar. It was the shimmer of the pure impressionists, Monet and his followers, the world seen in terms of pure light, light broken and unbroken. How lovely! How lovely the nights, the river, the mornings in the old streets and by the flower-stalls and book-stalls, the the afternoons up on Montmartre or in the Tuilleries, the evenings on the boulevards!

They had both painted but not desperately. Art had not taken them by the throat, and they did not take Art by the throat. They painted: that's all. They knew people — nice people, if possible, though one had to take them mixed. And they were happy.

Yet it seems as if human beings must set their claws in something. To be "free," to be "living a full and beautiful life," u must, alas, be attached to something. Human beings are all vines seeking something to clutch, something up which to climb towards the necessary sun. But especially the idealist. He is a vine, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man who is а теrе potato, or turnip, or lump of wood.

Our idealists were frightfully happy, but they were all the ne reaching out for something to cotton on to. At first, Paris is enough. They explored Paris thoroughly. And they learned French till they almost felt like French people, they could speak so glibly.

Still, you know, you never talk French with your soul. And though it's very thrilling, at first, talking in French to clever Frenchmen, still, in the long run, it is not satisfying. The endlessly clever materialism of the French leaves you cold, gives a sense barrenness and incompatibility with true New England depth. So our two idealists felt.