E73 翠叶纷下垂，婆娑绿凤尾

E73 翠叶纷下垂，婆娑绿凤尾

课程导读

在上节课中，我们从苏大学士的眼中了解了，在险象环生的三峡附近，人民生活并不容易，而这些赤贫之人的生活也引发了苏东坡对人生劳苦的思索。此外，在经过巫峡时，诗人的一番描写也极其精彩。在今天这节课中，我们要听一位年老的船夫讲故事。这个故事又带给苏东坡哪些思考呢？

英文原文

But the old boatman began to tell him stories, how in his young days he used to climb the highest peaks, bathe in a mountain pool, and hang his clothes on a branch to dry.

There were monkeys on the mountains, but as he went up to the great altitudes, the bird calls and the monkey cries stopped, and there was nothing but silence and the mountain wind.

The tigers and wolves did not go up there and he was completely alone and unafraid.

At the temple to the Fairy Maiden there was a special variety of bamboo whose soft branches bent low and touched the ground, as if in worship of the fairy spirit.

As the wind moved, the branches swayed and kept the stone altar always clean, like a servant of the goddess.

Su Tungpo was touched.

"Perhaps one can become a fairy after all. The difficulty lies in forgetting human desires."

Throughout his life Su Tungpo, like his contemporaries, was quite open-minded about the possibility of meeting fairies and becoming one himself.

When they entered the Wu Gorges, "divine birds" began to follow the boat.

These ravens were doing no more than what every bird of sense would do.

For several miles above or below the Fairy Girl's Temple, they spotted a boat coming and followed it all the way to pick up food from its passengers.

The latter usually made a game of it.

They tossed up cakes into mid-air and watched with delight how the ravens swooped down and picked them up without fail.

Naturally, these regions were uninhabited and uninhabitable.

The Sus passed through the East Dashing Rapids, where the water surged and billowed and tossed the boat about like a dry leaf in a small whirlpool, and when they thought they had gone through the worst, they came upon the even more dangerous Roaring Rapids.

Strange monster rocks lined the shore and extended to the middle of the stream.

Then they came to a place whose name, to be intelligible, can only be translated as "the Jar of Human Herrings," meaning a place where many travelers had lost their lives, like a kettle of dead fish.

This was a giant boulder occupying four fifths of the river, narrowing it down to a small passage and forcing the boat going down to take a precipitous curve.

Any traveler surviving the sudden dip around the Jar of Human Herrings would feel toward the old boatman as toward his second father.