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The City Planner
作者Author  /  Margaret  Atwood  瑪格莉特.愛特伍德

The City Planner《都市規劃師》

 
 
 
Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted            5
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt                10
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.
 
But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display                15
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things:
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,            20
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows
 
give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster?               25
 
when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.
 
That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators          30
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;
 
guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders            35
on a wall in the white vanishing air
 
tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows
 
   
Annotation
 

行數

註釋

1

cruise  漫遊、開車閒逛
residential  住宅(區)的

5

pedantic  賣弄學問的、炫學的,這裡有彰顯賣弄及炫耀的意思

7

rebuke  指責、非難

8

dent  凹痕、塌陷

11

the rational whine of power mower  除草機規律的隆隆馬達聲

12

swath  長度、收割的寬度

14

sidestep  橫跨一步迴避

22

vicious coil  在此以蛇的意象指水管

25

cracks in the plaster  外牆灰泥上的裂痕

13-28

為一完整句,說明全然秩序中的失序形成整齊市容中最鮮明的對比。

33

private blizzard  各自領域的風暴

 
   
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