《了不起的盖茨比》开篇：英文原著带中文翻译

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

在我年纪更轻、见识更浅时，父亲曾给我一个忠告，它至今仍在我脑海萦绕。

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

「每当你要批评别人，」他告诉我，「要记住，世上不是每个人都有你这么好的条件。」

He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

他的话到此为止，但我们向来话虽不多，却善于心照不宣，所以我明白他指的远不止这些。于是，我倾向于对所有评判都保留态度，这个习惯让我见识了许多古怪的性格，也让我成了不少资深无聊人士的受害者。当正常人身上出现这种特质时，反常的人会很快察觉并缠上他，因此我在大学时被不公正地指责为政客，因为我了解那些狂野而陌生的人隐秘的悲伤。大多数信任都是不请自来的，我常常假装睡觉、心不在焉或摆出敌意的轻浮，当我从某个确凿迹象意识到一场私密倾诉正在地平线上颤动时，因为年轻人的私密倾诉，至少他们表达时的措辞，通常是剽窃来的，并被明显的隐瞒所损害。保留评判是一种无限希望的表现。我仍然有点害怕错过什么，如果我忘记了我父亲傲慢地暗示、我也傲慢地重复的话：基本的体面感在出生时就被不平等地分配了。

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

而且，在这样夸耀我的宽容之后，我得承认它有限度。行为可能建立在坚硬的岩石上，也可能建立在潮湿的沼泽上，但过了某个点，我就不在乎它建立在什么上了。去年秋天我从东部回来时，我觉得我希望世界永远统一，处于一种道德上的立正状态；我不再想要那些喧闹的远足，去特权般地窥视人心。只有盖茨比，这个给本书命名的人，免于我的这种反应，盖茨比代表了我发自内心鄙视的一切。如果人格是一系列不间断的成功姿态，那么他身上有某种华丽的东西，某种对生活承诺的高度敏感，仿佛他与那些能记录万里之外地震的精密机器相连。这种反应与那种被冠以「创造性气质」之名的软弱易感毫无关系，它是一种非凡的希望天赋，一种浪漫的准备，我从未在任何人身上发现过，也不太可能再次发现。不，盖茨比最终没事；是那些捕食盖茨比的东西，那些漂浮在他梦想尾流中的污浊尘埃，暂时让我对人们那些夭折的悲伤和短促的兴奋失去了兴趣。

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

我的家族在这个中西部城市已经三代显赫富裕。卡拉韦家算是个氏族，我们有个传统，说我们是布克卢公爵的后裔，但我这一脉的实际创始人是我的祖父的兄弟，他在五一年来到这里，花钱找人替他去打内战，并开创了批发五金生意，我父亲今天仍在经营。