4.3.2.1_每日一译_04fanny

原文：

Ferguson was not yet two when his grandmother died, which meant that he retained no conscious memories of her, but according to family legend Fanny was a difficult and erratic woman, prone to violent screaming fits and manic bursts of uncontrollable sobbing, who beat her boys with brooms whenever they misbehaved and was barred from entering certain local shops because of her vociferous haggling over prices. No one knew where she had been born, but word was that she had landed in New York as a fourteen-year-old orphan and had spent several years in a windowless loft on the Lower East Side making hats. Ferguson’s father, Stanley, rarely talked about his parents to his son, responding to the boy’s questions with only the vaguest of brief, guarded answers, and whatever bits of information young Ferguson managed to learn about his paternal grandparents came almost exclusively from his mother, Rose, by many years the youngest of the three second- generation Ferguson sisters-in-law, who in turn had received most of her information from Millie, Lew’s wife, a woman with a taste for gossip who was married to a man far less hidden and far more talkative than either Stanley or Arnold. When Ferguson was eighteen, his mother passed on one of Millie’s stories to him, which was presented as no more than a rumor, a piece of unsubstantiated conjecture that might have been true—and then again might not. According to what Lew had told Millie, or what Millie said he had told her, there was a fourth Ferguson child, a girl born three or four years after Stanley, during the period when the family had settled in Duluth and Ike was looking for work as an ordinary seaman on a Great Lakes ship, a stretch of months when the family was living in extreme poverty, and because Ike was gone when Fanny gave birth to the child, and because the place was Minnesota and the season was winter, an especially frigid winter in an especially cold place, and because the house they lived in was heated by only a single wood- burning stove, and because there was so little money just then that Fanny and the boys had been reduced to living on one meal a day, the thought of having to take care of another child filled her with such dread that she drowned her newborn daughter in the bathtub.

译文：

当祖母去世的时候，小弗格森还没有两岁大，所以几乎没有她的记忆。但根据家庭传说，芬妮是一个情绪不稳定的很难相处的人，经常会发疯似的叫喊又或者是不可抑制的抽泣。不论在哪里，当孩子们做错了事，她就会拿着扫帚打他们。而因为砍价时的声音太大声，被一些商店拒绝进入。没有人知道她在哪里出生，但据说她14岁突然出现在纽约时就是一个孤儿，常年居住在下东区一个没有窗户的阁楼里制作帽子。小弗格森的父亲，斯坦利，很少给他说起他自己的父母。当被小弗格森问起时，给他的回答也只有一些模糊，简短，谨慎的话语。所以，对于他的祖父母，小弗格森的全部消息都来自他的母亲，罗斯。她是第二代弗格森中最小的弟媳。而罗斯的消息其实都来自米莉，卢的妻子。一个很喜欢打听小道消息的女人。而她的丈夫，相比于斯坦利和阿尔诺德也是最不低调和最话痨的人。当小弗格森18岁时，她母亲给他讲了一个从米莉那听来的故事。这个故事充其量也只是个谣传，一个未经证实的猜想，所以，它可能是真的，也可能只是胡猜。根据卢告诉米莉的，或者说是米莉声称卢告诉她的，其实还有一个第二代弗格森，一个女孩，大概出生在斯坦利出生后的第三或第四年。那段时期，这个家庭搬到了德卢斯，Ike正在找一个在大湖游轮上当普通海员的活。因为家庭的穷困，那是一个漫长的月份，当芬妮生下孩子时，Ike已经走了。他们所在的州是明尼苏达州而季节是冬季，一个异常寒冷的地方的一个异常寒冷的季节。而他们居住的地方只有一个用木材加热的炉子，他们的钱也所剩无几，所以，只能缩减进餐到一天一次。还需要在这种情况下再照顾一个孩子的绝望想法充斥着芬妮的脑子，最后她终于再也受不了，将这个新生的女儿溺死在了澡盆里。