Vocabulary

地形；地貌

"A shadow economy has also etched itself onto Tigray’s postwar topography: new mining pits and the heavy machinery that comes with them."

不断侵蚀；蚕食

"On the drive from Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, to Shire, we passed dozens of orange diggers gnawing away at terraced hills where crops once grew."

关键词；最具关键意义的词

"A senior Tigrayan official described the sites as ‘large-scale’ artisanal mines – a contradiction in terms, as he acknowledged."

最大的份额；绝大部分

"In exchange, the ex-soldier told me, they took the lion’s share of the profits."

使（某人）中饱私囊；让（某人）捞到好处

"They are said to have lined the pockets of military men and smugglers, who stashed the money in offshore accounts."

强烈反对的，敌对的

"Bryce’s upbringing left him politely but steadfastly antagonistic to church establishments and privileges."

（态度或政策的）大转变

"In the great crisis over Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule over 1885-86, Bryce ... supported Gladstone’s volte face – primarily on the pragmatic grounds that the Nationalists would make any other option unworkable."

半吊子，浅尝辄止的人

"In Manchester legal circles he was thought of as a dilettante."

冷静地，不带感情地

"The plan was to look at the modern democracies ‘in a dispassionately scientific spirit’, to see in what respects they had developed differently..."

令...恼怒，使...感到烦躁

"...it is scrupulously fair without turning a blind eye to those opinions which grate on modern sensibilities, particularly as relating to race."

对...来说是天降之物，意外之喜

"Offices, honours and lecture invitations fell into his lap, irresistible for someone who had always sought prizes."

对...视而不见，故意忽略

"Primarily a contextual study of Bryce’s political thought, it is scrupulously fair without turning a blind eye to those opinions which grate on modern sensibilities..."

在死后（被记住）

"If historians are remembered posthumously, it tends to be for their book titles, while the books themselves gather dust."

一丝不苟的，严谨的

"In truth, no one has pushed these partisan readings very far, because Bryce was too fastidious a writer to scatter wild generalisations through his writing."

审慎地、严谨地

"Primarily a contextual study of Bryce’s political thought, it is scrupulously fair without turning a blind eye to those opinions which grate on modern sensibilities, particularly as relating to race."

真实性；诚实。文中指将形而上学问题视为‘伪问题’会导致我们误以为这些问题（或关于它们的答案）具有真实性。

"this is an intellectual move descending from the Buddha, for whom all metaphysical and quantitative questions ... are redundant or avyākata questions (to believe otherwise is to give veracity to “pseudo problems”) that distract from the tricky matter..."

偏离常规；反常现象。在文中指‘差异’（difference）最初被认为是对普遍规范（如白人中产异性恋男性）的偏离，从而被标签化。

"aberration from what came to be seen as the universalist norm—white, male, middle-class, heterosexual—constituted “difference.”"

(这里指)被驯化、被引入主流话语并失去其颠覆性力量。在此指‘差异’（difference）这个批判理论的概念已经变得过于熟悉、常规，以至于它原本构成挑战的锋芒被磨平了。

"“Difference” was domesticated early on through sets of identifying markers..."

指细节被强行拉入、征用或被利用来服务于某个更大的目的（在这里是为故事提供象征意义）。

"their refusal to be co-opted into ‘symbolizing’ it in any way."

细节对故事情感暗流所表现出的孤立、冷漠和不参与的姿态。它们拒绝被拉入情感或象征解释的漩涡中。

"The otherness had to do with the self-sufficiency of the details; an aloofness to the story’s emotional undertow; their refusal to be co-opted into ‘symbolizing’ it in any way."

作者杜撰的词（neologism），指事物存在时那种纯粹的、不加修饰的‘就在那儿’的特性，不带有任何符号性或寓言性的附加意义。强调一种现象学意义上的直接在场。

"The ‘there’ constituted an inner weather and outlines familiar to us from European towns... The otherness had to do with the self-sufficiency of the details; an aloofness to the story’s emotional undertow; their refusal to be co-opted into ‘symbolizing’ it in any way."

这里指构成故事细节的多种特质（如‘此在性’与‘他异性’）的汇聚或融合，形成一种复杂而独特的整体效果。

"The first was its delicate specificity, the confluence, in its details, of what I’ll call thereness and otherness."

位置；中心点。这里指作者的名字“Nirmal Verma”不再只是作者名称，而是故事中一切游戏性行为的中心或焦点。

"This was the author, but now those words became a locus not of origination and ownership but of the story’s play with everything it might have been but wasn’t."

看似可信地；合情合理地。文中指民族性或国际性，如果有的话，必须通过一种‘缺席’（absence）而非具体的标志（markers）来被读者或观众‘合理地’感受到。

"The national, international or the historical must, if they exist, be felt plausibly through an absence rather than the presence of elements that indicate these things."

预示；是……的预兆。这里指作者认为‘Nirmal Verma’这个名字在故事中的奇特功能，可能会预示（或让人联想到）当代一种叫做‘自虚构’（autofiction）的文学思潮。

"This might appear to presage a way of thinking about fiction that we now classify as ‘autofiction’..."

充满了（某物），极其丰富。在此语境中指故事中有大量的、具体的细节。

"The story abounded in specificity, but the specificity of identity that comes from proper names was absent..."

悬置状态；暂时中止。此处指故事在作者理解了它的结构和缺席之后，阅读过程被‘暂停’、被‘悬置’起来，等待新的解读。

"I read it now for the lucidity of what it wasn't. ... the paragraphs congealed and I began to be able to read the story even as it hung in abeyance."

（液体）凝固，（理解上的碎片）凝聚、固定成形。这里指作者脑中原本模糊、难以解读的段落，现在像液体凝固一样，形成了一个清晰、可把握的整体。

"Then, after an interval, the paragraphs congealed and I began to be able to read the story even as it hung in abeyance."

产生；导致（某种状况或结果）。此处指加尔各答中产阶级向南部迁移，进而‘产生’了结合了多种风格的混合式住宅。

"but the last century saw the main settlements of middle-class professionals move to South Calcutta, engendering houses with hybrid forms..."

轨迹；发展轨道。指艺术作品（博尔赫斯、韦尔马、毕加索、安德里奇的摄影作品）所采取的一系列发展路径或影响路线，挑战了读者/观众惯常理解的（如民族、国际等）解读坐标。

"we are moved, in their presence ... to confront a different itinerary of how tradition and particularity travel. ... the photographs in the exhibition don’t stand outside tradition and particularity; they stand outside itineraries we’ve been educated in. ... (这里的‘itinerary’是‘trajectory’的变体，泛指路径/路线，但‘trajectory’隐含的目的性和动态性更强，并且‘trajectory’比书中频繁出现的‘itinerary’更抽象和理论化)。**注**：原文在此处和上一段落使用了“itinerary”一词，因此我们找的是那个代表大概念“路线/运行轨迹”的核心词。"

从容不迫的；不动声色的；镇定的。作者用这个词来描述博尔赫斯那篇讽刺性文章《皮埃尔·梅纳德》中评论者的口吻——尽管内容离奇非凡，评论者的语气却极其冷静、泰然。

"Menard is an early twentieth-century French poet and scholar who, according to the unruffled commentator, ‘did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.’"

持续的、不停歇的（强调没有终点的连续性）

"It is there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind."

因距离过近而产生的认知偏差——由于无法拉开视角，而将局部困境误判为整体现实

"Such sentiments are errors of proximity — we live too close to the bone of our personal predicaments."

（习语）生活因资源匮乏或压力而触及生存底线，比喻处境极端窘迫或情感上毫无缓冲

"we live too close to the bone of our personal predicaments, have drawn the horizon of time too close to see the of chance."

茄子色，深紫红色

"He wore vintage Brooks Brothers pants in what he called aubergine."

开满紫藤花（如滴落般垂挂）的凉亭

"On the shorn land is a new house, enormous, a wraparound porch, a stone-edged swimming pool, a gazebo dripping wisteria."

环绕房屋四周的门廊

"on the shorn land is a new house, enormous, a wraparound porch, a stone-edged swimming pool, a gazebo dripping wisteria."

参见第18条

"I didn't press him because I wanted to stay there, to keep the arrangement copacetic."

类精神分裂的；冷淡的，逃避社交的

"My mom says schizoid, but she uses that as a catch-all for anyone crazy."

极度的，彻底的（此处修饰greed）

"At this point in my life, I longed above all else for a wealthy man. ... I was helpless, always sputtering."

旋转拨号电话机

"An old rotary dial phone, shiny and frightening, like a beetle."

惊恐的，受到惊吓的（古语/方言）

"You want some water, honey? You look affright."

（发型）蓬松高耸的

"She had an old-fashioned bouffant dyed hard black, hair that made the strangeness stranger."

康复，恢复健康

"he put the antique teddy bear into the cardboard box with the recuperating animal"

彻底摧毁，完全毁灭，消灭

"After an hour alone with the animal, the bear was annihilated."