Seeking the Translation of George Orwell's Marrakesh

George Orwell

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A corpse was carried, and swarms of flies buzzed out of the urn on the dining room table, chasing after it and didn't come back for a few minutes.

A small funeral procession-all men, old and young, but no women-walked along the market, squeezing through piles of pomegranate stalls, taxis and camels, repeating short lamentations as they walked. The reason why flies flock to chase is that the bodies in this place are never put into coffins, but wrapped in rags and put on a hastily made wooden shelf, which is carried by four friends to attend the funeral. When friends arrived at the cemetery, they dug a rectangular pit one or two feet deep underground and poured the body into the pit. Throw some Japanese, dry clods are like broken bricks. No tombstone, no name, no identification mark. The cemetery is just a wilderness with mounds, just like an abandoned construction site. A month or two later, no one could tell where their relatives were buried.

When you walk through such a small town-at least 20,000 of its 200,000 residents have nothing but rags-when you see how those people live and how they die easily, you can never believe that you are walking among human beings. In fact, this is the foundation of all colonial empires. Everyone here has a brown face, and there are so many books! Do they really belong to human beings in your sense? Do they also have names? Maybe they are just indistinguishable things like bees or corals. They grew out of the soil, cried and starved for several years, and then were buried in those nameless little graves. No one will notice their departure. Even those small mounds themselves will soon flatten out. Sometimes when you go out for a walk and walk through cactus bushes, you will feel something stumbling on the ground. Only after many times, when you find its general law, will you know that you are stepping on the skeleton of a dead man.

I am feeding a gazelle in the park.

Of all the animals, I'm afraid the gazelle is delicious only when it is still alive. In fact, people just look at their hind legs and think of mint sauce. The gazelle I am feeding now seems to read my mind. Although it has a piece of bread in its hand, it obviously doesn't like me. He chewed bread, at the same time, his head leaned over to me, and then he chewed bread and leaned over again. Probably because the bread will still hang in the air after I am driven away.

An Arab digger, who was working in a nearby path, put down his heavy hoe and came shyly sideways to us. He turned his eyes from the gazelle to the bread, and from the bread back to the gazelle, with a little surprised look, as if this country had never been established before. Finally, he said timidly in French, "Let me have some bread."

I tore off a piece of bread, and he gratefully put it next to the worn-out clothes. This man is an employee of the municipal authorities.

When you walk through the Jewish ghetto here, you will know what the Jewish ghetto was like in the Middle Ages. Under Moorish rule, Jews can only keep land in some designated areas. After centuries of this treatment, they no longer worry about overcrowding. Many streets here are less than six feet wide, houses have no windows at all, and children with red eyes are everywhere, like swarms of flies, countless. The street is often a river of urine.

In the market, all Jews wear black robes and hats, and work in booths that look like caves, which are crowded with flies and elk. A carpenter sat cross-legged beside an old lathe, spinning his chair legs quickly. He started the lathe with a bow in his right hand and a rotary knife in his left foot. The result of keeping this posture for a long time is that the left foot has been bent and deformed. One of his little grandchildren, who is only six years old, also began to help with some simple work.

I was passing a coppersmith's shop when someone found me lighting a cigarette. Suddenly, Jews gathered around them from dark caves in all directions, many of whom were old people with white beards, clamoring for a cigarette. Even a blind man climbed out from behind the telephone booth when he heard the sound of begging for cigarettes. Reach out and touch in the air. In about a minute, all my cigarettes were distributed. I don't think any of these people will work less than 12 hours a day, but they all regard a cigarette as a very rare luxury when they first see it.

Jews live in a self-sufficient society. They are engaged in the industry that Arabs are engaged in, and there is no agriculture. Among them are fruit buyers, potters, silversmiths, butchers, shoemakers, tailors, water carriers, beggars and porters-Jews are everywhere. In fact, as many as 13000 Jews live in this space of only a few acres. Fortunately for these Jews, Hitler has never visited here. However, he may be ready to come. You often hear gossip about Jews, not only from Arabs but also from poorer Europeans.

"My brothers, they took my job from the Jews. You must know these Jews, too They are the real masters of this country. All our money went into their pockets. Banking, finance-everything is under their control. "

"But," I said, "don't you realize that most ordinary Jews work hard for a little money?"

"oh! That's just a show. In fact, they are all money lenders. These Jews are just ghosts. "

Just like this, hundreds of years ago, some evil old women were often burned alive as witches, but in fact they didn't even have witchcraft to create a decent meal for themselves.

All do-it-yourself people are generally a little humble. The more important the work they do, the less noticeable it is. However, fair skin is always conspicuous. In northern Europe, if you find a worker working in the field, you will probably look at him again. In tropical countries, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of the Suez Canal, you may not see people working in the fields. I have noticed this situation many times. In the tropical scenery, everything can be seen at a glance, but no one can be seen. Dry soil, cactus, palm trees and distant mountains can be seen at a glance, but farmers who cultivate geographically often see them. Their skin color is the same as the soil in the field, and it is far less than the appearance of the soil.

Because of this, extremely poor Asian and African countries have become tourist attractions. No one will be interested in taking a worthless trip to a poor local area. But where brown people live, no one can pay attention to their poverty at all. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? It's just a place where you can buy an orange circle or get a government job. What about the British? It's just romantic words such as camel, castle, palm tree, foreign legion, brass plate and gangster. Even people who have been there for many years may not notice. For 90% local residents, real life only means endless and exhausting struggle, the purpose of which is to make something to eat from poor soil.

Most of Morocco's land is desolate, and the animals on which it depends are nothing more than rabbits. The land once covered with forests has now become a bare desert, and the soil is like broken bricks. Despite this, there are still large areas of land reclaimed by people, and the labor intensity is amazing. All the work is done by hand. The women in the long line bent like upside-down capital letters L, so as to walk slowly in the field and pull out the thorny weeds by hand. When farmers collect alfalfa and feed it to livestock, they uproot it by hand instead of cutting it with a knife, so as not to waste the remaining one or two inches of stubble. Ploughs are inferior to wood. They are not strong at all, and people can carry them on their shoulders easily. At the bottom of the plow, there is a rough iron tip, which can only plow 4 inches into the ground. The strength of the cow pulling the plow is so great. Usually a cow and a donkey are tied together to pull the plow. This is because two donkeys can't pull, and if two cows are used, the feed consumption is too high. Farmers have no rakes. They instructed them to plow several times in different directions to make a series of ridges and ditches, and then used hoes to make the whole land into long strips of small beds for storing water. This place is always short of water except for a day or two after a rare rainstorm. Farmers dig ditches as deep as 30 to 40 feet at the edge of the ground to collect the trickle deep in the soil.

Every afternoon, an old woman walks on the road outside my house with firewood on her back. Because of age and sun exposure, they all became as shriveled as mummies and their bodies were so thin. In primitive society, it seems to be a common phenomenon that women will shrink to the size of children after reaching a certain age. One day, a poor man no more than four feet tall hobbled past me with his boss's bundle of firewood. I stopped her and put a coin with a face value of five sous (slightly more than 1/4 old pence) into her hand. Her reaction turned out to be a scream, which contained gratitude, mainly out of surprise. I think, in her opinion, although I will pay attention to her, it seems to violate the laws of nature. She has long accepted her position as an old woman, that is, as a pack animal. Whenever a family goes out for a long trip, it is often seen that a father and an adult son are riding a donkey in front, and an old woman is carrying a bag behind.

However, what is really strange about these people is their invisibility. For weeks, almost every day at the same time, a group of old ladies hobbled past my house carrying firewood. Although their figures caught my eye, to be honest, I have never seen them. What I saw was bundles of firewood passing outside the house. It was not until one day that I happened to walk behind them that I noticed someone below because of the strange ups and downs of the pile of firewood. For the first time, I saw the body of a poor old woman the same color as the skinny body bent over with a load. However, less than five minutes after I set foot in Morocco, I noticed that the donkey was overloaded and was angry about it. There is no doubt that the donkey was abused by the Dutch. The Moroccan donkey is as big as a Swiss snow-capped rescue dog, but the goods it carries are too heavy for a five-foot mule to carry in the British army. And often don't unload the saddle for weeks. Sadly, it is the most docile and obedient animal in the world. You don't need a saddle. It will harden the rope. It will follow its owner more like a dog. After working hard for the host for more than ten years, he suddenly fell to the ground and died. At this time, the owner put it in the ditch, and before the body was completely cold, its internal organs were pulled out and eaten by the village dogs.

This kind of thing is certainly outrageous, but on the whole, people's suffering is ignored. I'm not talking nonsense, just pointing out a fact. This kind of person is simply something without shadow and action. Everyone sympathizes with a donkey whose back has been ground to pieces, while an old woman carrying a large bundle of firewood often needs some accidental factor to attract attention.

When the stork flapped its wings, the men in black were marching south-a long line covered with dust: infantry, artillery, and then more infantry, about four or five thousand people in all, accompanied by the sound of their boots and the sound of their cars winding forward.

They are Senegalese, the blackest people in Africa-so dark that it is difficult to see where the hair on their necks comes from. Their strong bodies are covered with shabby khaki uniforms, and their feet are covered with boots that look like boards. The helmets on each head seem to be one or two sizes smaller. The weather is hot, the team has walked a long way, the soldiers are exhausted by the heavy burden, and the sweat on their unusually sensitive black cheeks is shining.

When they passed by, a slender black young man turned around and met my eyes. His eyes were completely unexpected. No hostility, no contempt, no anger, not even curiosity. It's a shy, wide-eyed black look, but it's actually a deep respect look. I understand this situation. The poor young man, who became a French citizen, was pulled out of the forest and sent to the town where the army was stationed to scrub the floor and contracted syphilis. He is really full of respect for whites. In the past, he was taught that white people were his masters, and he still believed that.

However, no matter which white man (even a self-proclaimed socialist) watches a black army pass by, he will think of the same thing: "How long can we fool them? How far are they from now? "

That's really interesting. Every white man present has this idea in his heart. I watched it, and so did other onlookers, including the policeman riding a sweaty horse and the white police officer walking in the line. This is a secret that everyone knows but doesn't understand each other. Only those black people are still at a loss about it. Watching this two-mile-long procession move quietly is really like watching a flock of cattle and sheep flying overhead and flying in the opposite direction, just like a piece of paper with silver light in the air.

(Excerpted from Rhetoric Reading, edited by Caroline Schwartz, etc. )