Nineteen Eighty-Four 一九八四 Part 1, Chapter 1

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile ¹ wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions ², though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl ³ of gritty dust from entering along with him., ,The hallway smelt ⁴ of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked ⁵ to the wall. It depicted ⁶ simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly ⁷ handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer ⁸ above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived ¹⁰ that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption ¹¹ beneath it ran., ,Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque ¹² like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail ¹³ figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls ¹⁵ which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine ¹⁶, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended., , ,Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling ²¹ away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously ²². Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized ²³., ,Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry ²⁴ of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous ²⁵ of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas ²⁶ of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated ²⁷ iron, their crazy garden walls sagging ²⁸ in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled ²⁹ in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble ³⁰; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid ³¹ colonies of wooden dwellings ³² like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux ³³ occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible ³⁴.#p#分页标题#e#, ,Her talk was full of vile curses.她的话里充满着恶毒的咒骂。,Fifth Avenue was boarded up where the rich had deserted their mansions. 第五大道上的富翁们已经出去避暑，空出的宅第都已锁好了门窗 ，钉上了木板 。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹