Френсис Фицджеральд - Великий Гэтсби / The Great Gatsby

There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.

‘And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering – look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful – ’

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace – or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons – rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left – the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident, and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

a adjective прилагательное

adv adverb наречие

cj conjunction союз

n noun существительное

num numeral числительное

past past tense прошедшее время

pl. plural множественное число

pron pronoun местоимение

p.p. past participle причастие прошедшего времени

prep preposition предлог

pr.p. present participle причастие настоящего времени

v verb глагол

abortive– a скоротечный

abyss– n бездна

addenda– n pl. добавление, приписки

adjustment– n приспособление; привыкание

adjust oneself v приходить в себя

Airedail– n эрдельтерьер

ajar– a приоткрытый

alignment– n расположение

anti-climax– n упадок

apparition– n явление

armistice– n перемирие

ascertain– v устанавливать, выяснять

ash– n вулканическая лава

ash-heap n сопка

assert– v доказывать

assumption– v предположение

astounded– a изумленный

baffled– a озадаченный, сбитый с толку

bat– n бита

beaux– n ухажер

benediction– n благословение

bizarre– a причудливый

blankly– adv тупо, безучастно

bona-fide– a настоящий

boom– n грохот

bootlegger– n торговец контрабандным спиртным

borough– n городок

bow– n бант

brace– n коловорот

brakes– n pl тормоза

breath-giving– a животворящий

brewer– n пивовар

brittle– a ломкий

brothel– n публичный дом

buck– n щеголь

bunch– n компания (разг.)

caddy– n мальчик, подносящий клюшки и мячи на поле для гольфа

cahoots—, in– в сговоре (амер. жарг.)

caravansary– n караван-сарай

caterer– n поставщик продовольствия

cease– v прекращать

cellar– n подвал

chambermaid– n горничная

chandelier– n канделябр

chasm– n бездна, пропасть

checker– n шахматная фигура