什么才是英语中的美文？
读书群这个月读的是海明威的三本小说，今天我们开始读The Old Man and the Sea。早上和大家分享了书中这样一个句子：
I can remember the tail slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the noise of the clubbing.
我评论说：tail, thwart, noise, slap, bang, break, club全都是单音节的词，读起来那个激烈的画面感就浮现了。尾巴四处拍打挣扎，船吱吱地裂开，棒子砰砰作响。这几个词准确、悦耳，一气呵成，非常漂亮。从这个表达我想到了
大学英语课老师让背的丘吉尔的演讲：
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
我能尽心奉献的别无他物，只有热血、辛劳、眼泪和汗水。
单音节的词若是再加上排比、重复等手法，会增强气势，真正做到四两拨千斤。这让我想到了之前写得一篇关于英语美文的特点的文章，编辑补充了一下，再次分享给大家。
Steven Pinker在The Sense of Style中说:
The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound.
phonaesthetics这个词是"voice-sound"和"aesthetics"的合体，我们在赏析语言的时候要注意用词的声音美，上面提到的slap, bang, break, club就是一个极好的例子。除此之外，我们在很多地方都可以看到写作者对声音美的追求，例如下面这两个《经济学人》的标题：
Does Deutschland do digital?
Old-time Pekingology makes a comeback; old-time party rule never went away.
在许渊冲先生的口语怎么样？中, 我提到了许老译的一首苏东坡的诗。他把“欲把西湖比西子，淡妆浓抹总相宜”译为：
West Lake may be compared to Beauty of the West,
Whether she is richly adorned or plainly dressed.
有人留言说这里把“西子”译为Beauty of the West不够准确。我想许老是在综合考虑之后选择了“音美”为先：不仅West Lake和Beauty of the West呼应，West和下面的dressed还有押韵。
除了“听起来很美”，还要有“画面美"。《葛传椝英文写作》中提到了 “What is beautiful language?”
Beautiful language, as I have just said, is not the same thing as “fine writing”. It consists rather in the use of plain words that create vivid images. When I say “plain words”, I do not mean that figurative language is not beautiful. Figurative language is of great value in artistic description; but then good figurative language comes of the felicitous use of plain rather than pretentious words. When a plain word is so well chosen as to create a vivid image, it is beautiful, be it figurative or not.
他举了一个例子来说明：
In a morning sharp with dew and bright with sunshine, I had climbed to a great undulating heath a rolling sea of copper-colored bracken that spread like a double tide to either margin of the moorland road and foamed about the feet of sombre firs which dotted the heath with rare islands. -- Martin Armstrong.
“Sharp” and “sombre” are here non-figurative; “rolling”, “sea”, “tide”, “foamed”, arid “islands” are here figurative. Figurative or not, however, all these words create vivid image, and the whole sentence is beautifully written.
葛老说一句话中有那么一个词准确到位就会让整个句子生动起来，例如下面这几个词：
And, instantly, at the sound of his voice, her joy died, the light was out.
He stood still in the middle of the room, frozen by a sudden thought.
There were geese marching.
The Old Man and the Sea中有很多有画面感的句子，例如这两句：
The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
第二句的fishless很有意思，一个fishless呼应了老人84天没抓到鱼的事实，又表现出了沙漠的荒凉和老人的饱经沧桑。George Orwell在Keep the Aspidistra Flying中写过一个类似的句子：
He reflected that he must go home at once if he wanted any food—for Ma Wisbeach refused to serve meals after nine o’clock. But the thought of his cold womanless bedroom sickened him.
womanless这个词就把主人公的孤独寂寞写了出来。
把Steven Pinker的一条建议分享给大家，当我们赏析语言和自己写作的时候可以作为一个提醒：
Readers who want to become writes should read with a dictionary at hand (several are available as smartphone apps), and writers should not hesitate to send their readers there if the word is dead-on in meaning, evocative in sound, and not so obscure that the reader will never see it again.
没有什么“高大上”或者是“被用烂的词" (除了cliché), 一个词用的好不好不是因为这个词是专八词汇还是GRE词汇，而是因为是否恰当，是否读起来“和谐”，是在装X炫耀还是服务于某种目的 (例如幽默，讽刺)。不考虑这些的话，简单把一个词换成它的"同义词"难免会变的很奇怪。例如《经济学人》中很多这样的表达: "It did not end well." 如果我们把end变成"teminate" "close" "complete" "finish"，读起来就会“差那么一点儿” 。
在"小黄书" The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus的扉页上引用了Mark Twain的一段话来描述用词准确是一种什么样的感受。
A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when the right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry.
小活动
上图的The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus这本书我买来之后只看过两次，9成新，我决定把它送给和它更有缘的人。在这篇文章的评论区留言，3.2日中午12:00时，点赞最高的那条精选评论（不算我），可以获得这本书。