[Demmuel]

27.10.2017 в 20:40

Пишет  Clisson:

Howard Pyle "Раненый враг"

Оригинальное название - ‘My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings’ (A Wounded Enemy).



Это иллюстрация к книге by Harold Frederic 'In the Valley'. Прочитал только конкретно этот эпизод - в нем герой плывет куда-то с раненым врагом и, под воздействием призрачного лунного света и поэтичной красоты вокруг, начинает все воспринимать иначе, и его ненависть к пленному врагу стала постепенно исчезать. Они начали говорить, и пленный обратил внимание на тишину, такую, даже вой волков не слышно. Герой объяснил ему, что все волки сейчас на поле боя - среди них каким-то образом быстро распространяется весть о потенциальном пиршестве.
Пленного передернуло и по его лицу герой понял, что его страдания скорее моральные, чем физические.
- Весь день и всю ночь вокруг меня трупы, - сказал раненый. - Они тут постоянно - когда я закрываю глаза или сплю. Некоторые из них - мои друзья; других я не знаю, но они знают меня. Они смотрят на меня пустыми глазами - похоже, они говорят, что ждут меня.

эпизод на английском

The moon shone fair upon us, as our little bark glided down the river. We were in the deep current which pushes forcefully forward under the new pressure of the East Canada waters, and save for occasional guidance there was small need of my paddle. The scene was very beautiful to the eye--the white light upon the flood, the soft calm shadows of the willowed banks, the darker, statelier silhouettes of the forest trees, reared black against the pale sky.

There is something in the restful radiance of moonlight which mellows hearts. The poets learned this, ages since; I realized it now, as my glance fell upon the pallid face in the bow before me. We were looking at one another, and my hatred of him, nursed through years, seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings. I had scarcely spoken to him during the voyage, other than to ask him of his wound. Now a thousand gentle impulses stirred within me, all at once, and moved my tongue.

"Are you out of pain to-night?" I asked him. "The journey is a hard one at best for a wounded man. I would we could have commanded a larger and more commodious boat."

"Oh, ay! So far as bodily suffering goes, I am free from it," he made answer, languidly. Then, after a little pause, he went on, in a low, musing voice: "How deathly still everything is! I thought that in the wilderness one heard always the night-yelping of the wolves. We did at Cairncross, I know. Yet since we started I have not heard one. It is as if we were going through a dead country."

Enoch had explained the reason for this silence to me, and I thoughtlessly blurted it out.

"Every wolf for forty miles round about is up at the battle-field," I said. "It is fairly marvellous how such intelligence spreads among these brutes. They must have a language of their own. How little we really understand of the animal creation about us, with all our pride of wisdom! Even the shark, sailors aver, knows which ship to pursue."

He shuddered and closed his eyes as I spoke. I thought at first that he had been seized with a spasm of physical anguish, by the drawn expression of his face; then it dawned upon me that his suffering was mental.

"Yes, I dare say they are all there," he said, lifting his voice somewhat. "I can hear them--see them! Do you know," he went on, excitedly, "all day long, all night long, I seem to have corpses all about me. They are there just the same when I close my eyes--when I sleep. Some of them are my friends; others I do not know, but they all know me. They look at me out of dull eyes; they seem to say they are waiting for me--and then there are the wolves!"

He began shivering at this again, and his voice sank into a piteous quaver.

@темы: "литература", "лирика"