一个自由译者的生命记录

Keep Dogs

                                      

It used to be that you could tell just about how poor a family was by how many dogs they had. If they had one, they were probably doing all right. It was only American to keep a dog to represent the family’s interests in the intrigues of the back alley; not to have a dog at all would be like not acknowledging one’s poor relations. Two dogs meant that the couple were dog lovers, with growing children, but still might be members of the middle class. But if a citizen kept three, you could begin to suspect he didn’t own much else. Four or five irrefutably marked the household as poor folk, whose yard was also full of broken cars cannibalized for parts. The father worked not much, fancied himself a hunter; the mother’s teeth were black. And an old bachelor living in a shack might possibly have even more, but you knew that if one of them, chasing a moth, didn’t upset his oil lamp some night and burn him up, he’d fetch up in the poorhouse soon, with the dogs shot. Nobody got poor feeding a bunch of dogs, needless to say, because the more dogs man had, the less he fed them. Foraging as a pack, they led an existence of their own, but served as evidence that life was awfully lonesome for him and getting out of hand. If a dog really becomes a man’s best friend his situation is desperate.

 

(from Dogs, and the Tug of Life by Edward Hoagland, 翰唐 录入)

【作者: 翰唐】【访问统计:】【2005年11月28日 星期一 11:52】【 加入博采】【打印】