Vocabulary

叮当作响地奏出某种勉强算得上……的东西

"It was my first class of college, the class I walked across the quad toward on the crisp morning after Labor Day, the empty days of orientation finally over, bell tower clanging out some approximation of a song."

屏住的呼吸；（喻）紧张期待的凝滞气氛

"The room was a collective held breath."

被（光晕般的）……环绕的；如戴光环般的

"She was pale, face haloed with curly dark hair I’d learn she had a habit of nervously patting."

（大学校园内被建筑环绕的）方形庭院、广场

"It was my first class of college, the class I walked across the quad toward on the crisp morning after Labor Day, the empty days of orientation finally over, bell tower clanging out some approximation of a song."

女巫般的；古怪神秘、带点邪气的

"There was one English teacher who sentenced us to interminable months with The Scarlet Letter, and insisted we write according to a formula, but for the most part the department was witchy and weird."

（因恐惧、震惊而）脸色灰白的

"Our professor showed up late, her face ashen."

（问题、情况）难以处理的、棘手的；倔强难控的

"Or maybe, as a dyslexic kid in a culture where “dyslexia” had no name or treatment, he’d accepted writing as a site of senseless subjugation, mysterious and intractable."

杂七杂八的；五花八门、不成体系的

"Before college, my English teachers had been a motley bunch who made us put our hands on our bellies and practice belting out our voices, or do Surrealist-style automatic writing for 10 minutes of every 50-minute lesson."

（此处）热情洋溢的赞美、好评

"My advisor, the closest thing I had to a grown-up friend, left handwritten raves at the bottoms of my poems and stories, which she stuffed into my locker and signed with her initials: “EM.”"

任性的；反复无常、随性而变的

"A writer needs backbone, not capricious word choice and declarations,” she’d said; my work should portray “that cycle of human mistakes and errors of which we are all a part.”"

（女巫的）集会；（喻）一群古怪女性组成的团体

"He’d not been raised by a coven chorusing, “Be creative!” nor had he ever spent a summer offering eighth graders unpunctuated strings of words so they could invent punctuation for themselves."

（此处）反抗、抵制；（原指马）弓背猛跳试图甩下骑手

"I stuffed the memory into the contours of that recognizable narrative in an attempt to make it bearable, acceptable, an echo of the doctrine I’d been bucking against all fall: broken, then built."

（带引号的）“大写E的”体验，即被赋予重大意义、值得铭记的经历

"This is probably why, although I’d written that the course was the beginning of my “negative thinking” about college, I also told my high school advisor that “the class was one of those major Experiences. important. painful. to be remembered.” Rereading the words, I can still feel the effort of convincing myself they were true, that I would be grateful for the capital-E “Experience” in the end."

（此处）刻意设计、精心操控（自己的行为）

"For a decade I had engineered my behavior to avoid precisely a moment like this, the kind that books, movies, and a lifetime at a school more invested in athletics than academics had taught me to fear."

自我（ego）层面的；与自我认同相关的

"what I remember isn’t the egoic who-am-I of the fish who finds herself blinking among a school of identical clones, but the existential throes of the fish out of water, in the darkness adjacent to death."

存在性的阵痛、垂死挣扎般的痛苦

"what I remember isn’t the egoic who-am-I of the fish who finds herself blinking among a school of identical clones, but the existential throes of the fish out of water, in the darkness adjacent to death."

（某事物的）中心、所在、集中点

"But when I consider the locus of that despair—when I remember my surprise, the first time I visited, that a professor’s office might feature something soft as an armchair, and that I was expected to use it—when I remember that armchair’s orientation, near the door to the hallway, such that I worried people outside might hear"

酸葡萄心理的；（因得不到而）贬低其价值的

"Like my best friend back home, she disapproved of my sour-grapes attitude about this hallowed opportunity."

令人眩晕的；（喻）使人头晕目眩、天旋地转的

"The answer that first jumps to mind is the one I’m sure my mother—if not also you; if not also me, now, at age 42—read into my behavior as an 18-year-old bumpkin arriving at Yale: I was no longer the big fish in a small pond, and the unseating of that lifelong identity must have been vertiginous, terrifying."

乡巴佬；土里土气的乡下人

"The answer that first jumps to mind is the one I’m sure my mother—if not also you; if not also me, now, at age 42—read into my behavior as an 18-year-old bumpkin arriving at Yale: I was no longer the big fish in a small pond, and the unseating of that lifelong identity must have been vertiginous, terrifying."

最直白、最不加掩饰的

"To my professor it might have seemed clever that I’d chosen as my topic an election, the baldest possible manifestation of politics showing up in a person’s life."

两害相权取其轻；（两个都不好的选择中）相对不那么坏的一个

"I hadn’t known then that NO DUKES was an echo of NO NUKES, and to be honest I doubt I knew it when I was a freshman at Yale. Months of the KKK Grand Wizard’s campaigning had ingrained the chant as its own thing, memorable as the bumper stickers reading vote for the crook, it’s important, a lesson in choosing the lesser of two evils."

（此处）突兀而意外的一束亮光；（喻）不合常规的、孤立的肯定信号

"She read my playground scene aloud to the class, her approval a rogue flare of welcome amid weeks that had been disorienting and disappointing in ways I was only beginning to let myself admit."

（此处）情感抽离、自我与经验脱节的心理状态

"I didn’t elaborate. Instead, my attempt to be honest with my one grown-up friend evinces the same dissociation that leads me, now, to rely on these emailed traces: “i talked to her,” the message continues, “cried, blah blah blah, argued her philosophy of writing, and wrote painful paper after paper.”"

（此处）华而不实的颂歌、溢美之词

"The campus was “a medieval Disneyland,” as I would soon put it, the gothic buildings fake paeans to old churches I wanted nothing less than to inhabit."

（清楚地）表明、显示出（某种特质或情感）

"I didn’t elaborate. Instead, my attempt to be honest with my one grown-up friend evinces the same dissociation that leads me, now, to rely on these emailed traces: “i talked to her,” the message continues, “cried, blah blah blah, argued her philosophy of writing, and wrote painful paper after paper.”"

（此处）一问一答式的机械互动；（原指）呼应式吟唱

"In each class there was at least one nervous freshman whose questions turned meetings into dull call-and-response sessions, which dragged on until they were satisfied with their own feats of mirroring."

（此处）显得局促无措、施展不开的

"My classmates seemed stymied, small-minded and bland."

恭敬顺从的；尊重他人意见（乃至过分顺从）的

"I sense my professor wanted me to be less “creative,” by which I mean more deferential to the norms of what we expect essays to be."

根深蒂固的；深植于心的

"I hadn’t known then that NO DUKES was an echo of NO NUKES, and to be honest I doubt I knew it when I was a freshman at Yale. Months of the KKK Grand Wizard’s campaigning had ingrained the chant as its own thing, memorable as the bumper stickers reading vote for the crook, it’s important, a lesson in choosing the lesser of two evils."

轻步慢走；（此处）拖着脚步缓缓走回

"I padded back across the lawn to my lonely dorm room—I’d been assigned a single I didn’t want—and started work on our first assignment, to write about a time when politics had shown up in our lives."

（新闻写作）把最关键的信息埋没在文中；（喻）未突出要点

"In high school, the process of composing my “idly orange essays” had taught me nonfiction didn’t need to be boring, but my professor was a journalist, keen on our immediately reporting the who-what-where-when and never burying the lede."

毫无保留地；完全地

"I wish I’d saved more, because I know that I started going to my professor’s office not only because she and I disagreed about how to revise the work I was turning in—she would never approve of another essay of mine as unreservedly as the first—but also because I’d begun sending her messages criticizing her pedagogy."

（光线、脸色）蜡黄灰暗的、病恹恹的

"The office was large, with a rug and a standing lamp whose shade permitted a sallow light."

教学法；教育理念与方法

"I wish I’d saved more, because I know that I started going to my professor’s office not only because she and I disagreed about how to revise the work I was turning in—she would never approve of another essay of mine as unreservedly as the first—but also because I’d begun sending her messages criticizing her pedagogy."

一大群（喧闹拥挤的人）

"My essay would be about the year David Duke ran for governor, how during third-grade recess I’d stood in a horde of kids shouting “NO DUKES! NO DUKES!” as we watched an airplane write D-U-K-E in the sky."

栖息地；（引申）某一物种或文化得以存续的环境

"When news of the death of a treasured poet arrives, we suffer a cultural bereavement, recognition of a diminished habitat."

文化层面的丧失之痛；某一文化传统因重要人物逝世而遭受的损失感

"When news of the death of a treasured poet arrives, we suffer a cultural bereavement, recognition of a diminished habitat."

（名词）通函；群发通知（此处指群发的电子邮件通知）

"The medium of transmission is all wrong: a working-hours phone call, an email circular fired off to potentially interested parties."

暂缓执行（尤指死刑）；缓刑；暂时的解脱

"There can be no reprieve now from necessary ceremonies, bureaucratic permissions."

退隐；撤离（此处指 Prynne 晚年退出公共生活、潜心创作）

"The famously private scholar chose this moment to consider his legacy, before a final decade of withdrawal into domestic space."

（苏联时期）地下出版物；自行出版并秘密传播的文本

"Among the warring tribe of unsponsored fundamentalist poets, rapping out samizdat communiqués from their self-imposed gulags, broadsheet obituaries are a rarity."

（为作者）笔录、抄写、代笔的人；助手

"Single Tangle Mine, his final chapbook from Face Press, was delivered by his faithful amanuensis and post-2014 publisher, Ian Heames, just in time."

末世论的；关于世界终极命运/最后审判的

"Half-moon spectacles sliding down his nose in rhythm with the raised eyebrows: eschatological horror."

（织物的）布边；为防止脱线而织密的织物边缘

"Which Scarf Match, delivered to Ferry Path in March 2026, concludes with the word ‘selvage’. I reach for the dictionary. Selvage is ‘the edge of woven fabric finished so as to prevent unravelling’."

（从墓中）掘出；引申为'（从被遗忘处）发掘出来'

"He used the tedious bus ride to St Dunstan’s, his school in Catford, to disinter the works of John Milton."