正文翻譯

Can a 40-year-old date a 20-year-old?

40歲的人能和20歲的人約會嗎？

評論翻譯

Paul Fenn, Some knowledge of women, vice, books and rough travel
At 42 I met a woman of 22, “Ms X” at the local rock climbing gym. For some months we joked around whenever we’d meet, and I suppose did something like flirt. But this woman was a serious participant with a sharp wit, also something of a tomboy, and I imagine she found the idea of flirting moronic. Especially with a man two years shy of twice her age.
I gradually got to know her on a platonic basis; we’d belay each other at the gym, go on climbing-camping trips, usually with 6–8 other climbers aged 20–50. We had nothing going on between us that I was aware of. We were just two folks out of large group of climbers who knew each other and sometimes traveled far, overseas included, to climb. It was rare for climbers at our gym to sleep together, because no one much wanted to shit where they ate. But it had happened to me once before, and though making for some uncomfortable moments, had passed, and that woman and I were able to remain cordial.
So it went, until one hot summer night, when Ms X, a mutual female friend around her age, and I went for beers and burritos after a hard climb. We had a hilarious old time, talking openly about our various failed relationships and countless idiots and psychopaths we’d all dated.

42歲時(shí)，我在當(dāng)?shù)氐呐蕩r館遇到了一位22歲的女士—X女士。幾個(gè)月來，我們每次見面都會開玩笑，要我說就是調(diào)情之類。但是這個(gè)女人是一個(gè)嚴(yán)肅的參與者，有著敏銳的智慧，也有點(diǎn)假小子的味道，我料想她會覺得調(diào)情這個(gè)想法是很愚蠢的。尤其是和一個(gè)差兩歲就比她大一倍的男人。
我逐漸在柏拉圖式的基礎(chǔ)上認(rèn)識了她；在健身房我們會互相保護(hù)、進(jìn)行攀巖野營旅行，通常與其他6-8名20到50歲的攀巖者一起。我知道我們之間什么關(guān)系都沒有—我們只是一大群相互認(rèn)識的登山者中的兩個(gè)人，有時(shí)還遠(yuǎn)行（包括海外）去登山。在我們健身房，登山者很少一起睡覺，因?yàn)闆]人想在吃飯的地方拉屎。但這在我身上發(fā)生過一次，雖然讓我感到有些不舒服，但已經(jīng)過去了，我和那個(gè)女人能夠保持熱情友好的關(guān)系。
就這樣，直到一個(gè)炎熱的夏夜，在艱難的攀爬后，X女士、一位和她年齡相仿的女性朋友和我一起去喝啤酒和墨西哥煎餅。我們度過了一段歡樂的往日時(shí)光，公開談?wù)撐覀兏鞣N各樣的失敗的關(guān)系，以及我們都約會過的無數(shù)白癡和精神病患者。

At around 1am, I invited them back to my bachelor pad. I lived on the ground floor of a cool old house a few blocks away, and they came up. It was a school night, but no matter. We smoked a joint, got well baked and the mutual friend was soon snoozing on my sofa, leaving Ms X seated at my computer, doing something useful to it for me — she worked as an IT tech at a downtown white-shoe law firm.
I should back up here to explain what else had already caught my imagination about Ms X. Not only had she fled her religion-stupefied parents back east in the Maritimes at age 20, but had come to Toronto more or less penniless, on her own, having only attended secretarial college post-high school. Once here she’d realized that being able to type, use MS-Word and file alphabetically does not a great career make, and so had worked crap jobs and taken to going to the local big-box book store to crib notes from computer manuals for the various software programs used in the legal industry. This was in about 2001, before the internet had everything under the sun freely available on it.
With the knowledge gleaned from doing that, she’d managed to get herself this job at this firm, a place with hundreds of the smartest, attack-dog litigators and so on in the country. Ms X was that driven she’d BS’d her way into a good paying gig there with no paper qualifications.

凌晨1點(diǎn)左右，我邀請他們回到我的單身公寓。我住在一棟很酷的老房子的一樓，就在幾個(gè)街區(qū)之外，他們來了。那天晚上要上學(xué)，不過沒關(guān)系。我們抽了根大麻煙，喝得爛醉，這位共同的朋友很快就在我的沙發(fā)上打盹，讓X女士坐在我的電腦前，為我做一些有用的事情—她在市中心的一家為特權(quán)階層服務(wù)的律師事務(wù)所做IT技術(shù)員。
在這里，我應(yīng)該回過頭來解釋一下，還有什么東西已經(jīng)勾起了我對X女士的想象。她不僅在20歲時(shí)脫離了對宗教感到震驚的父母管控，回到了東部的沿海地區(qū)，而且?guī)缀跎頍o分文，只身一人來到多倫多，高中畢業(yè)后只上了秘書學(xué)院。一到這里，她就意識到自己僅僅能夠打字、使用MS-Word和按字母順序歸檔，這并不能成就一份偉大事業(yè)，因此她做了沒有公正待遇的工作，去當(dāng)?shù)氐拇笮蜁陱挠?jì)算機(jī)操作手冊中暗中抄寫下法律行業(yè)需要使用的各種軟件程序，這大約是在2001年，在互聯(lián)網(wǎng)上還無法免費(fèi)得到一切資料。
憑借從中獲得的知識，她成功地在這家公司找到了這份工作，這家公司在全國擁有數(shù)百名最聰明，最厲害的訴訟律師等等。X女士正是因?yàn)檫@個(gè)原因，才在沒有文憑的情況下，說了半天的廢話之后找到了這份薪水不錯(cuò)的工作。

Moreover, she spoke in complete, articulate sentences, read law books and the classics — meaning she actually sounded enough like an intelligent young female lawyer that she fit right into the firm’s highbrow culture. She also dressed well, looking comparatively snazzed up in that professional environment, in spite of her far lower (than a lawyer) income.
The most remarkable thing about her, however, was she did all this while also being a chronic pothead. By chronic I mean, wake and bake, blunts at coffee and lunch time in the BMO tower’s underground parking garage with another woman on her tech team — the full-on daily stoner package.
I had a lot a respect for all of it. I’m no stoner, but I’m self-taught, a high school dropout, and had gone through my share of struggles to achieve what I had. I could barely handle more than a puff of weed before either falling asleep or drifting off in my own thoughts to the point of social isolation or embarrassment.
She was, of course, very attractive: Blonde, with wild curly long hair, very fit and perfect skin, ever-so-slightly bucktoothed such that she flashed her clean ivories whenever she smiled, which she didn’t often do, being already toughened up and self-protectively cynical about the hard old world as she was. Oh, and she was perpetually clad in Lululemon when at the gym.
As she gazed into my computer screen, I tapped her shoulder, then lowered my face to hers, lips ajar. She looked up, a bit shocked at the gesture, set her lips in a similar pose and moved her face toward mine. In an instant we’d crash-landed into my bed. I heard the other girl let herself out at some point later. We went nuts on each other for hours.
She roused herself early the next morning, scooting off home to shower and change, making it to work on time.

此外，她說話完整，句子清晰，閱讀法律書籍和經(jīng)典著作—這意味著她實(shí)際上聽起來很像一位聰明的年輕女律師，完全符合公司的高雅文化。盡管她的收入遠(yuǎn)低于(一名律師)，但她穿得也很得體，在那種職業(yè)環(huán)境中顯得比較時(shí)髦。
然而，最值得注意的是，她在做這一切的同時(shí)，也是一個(gè)長期的吸毒者。我說的“長期”是指，起床后烘烤面包，在蒙特利爾銀行大樓的地下停車場喝咖啡和吃午飯的時(shí)候，和她技術(shù)團(tuán)隊(duì)的另一名女性一起—每天都要吸食毒品。
我非常尊重這一切，我不是一個(gè)癮君子，但我自學(xué)成才，高中就輟學(xué)了，我也經(jīng)歷過奮斗才取得了現(xiàn)在的成就。我只能吸一口大麻，要么就睡著了，要么就在自己的思緒中迷迷糊糊地睡去，以至于被社會孤立或感到尷尬。
當(dāng)然，她非常有魅力:金發(fā)碧眼，一頭狂野的卷發(fā)，非常健康和完美的皮膚，每當(dāng)微笑時(shí)，總是看到有一點(diǎn)點(diǎn)齙牙—不經(jīng)常微笑，她已經(jīng)變得堅(jiān)強(qiáng)起來，對這個(gè)艱難的舊世界充滿了自我保護(hù)的憤世嫉俗。哦，她在健身房總是穿露露檸檬（美國瑜伽服裝品牌）的衣服。
當(dāng)她凝視著我的電腦屏幕時(shí)，我輕輕拍了拍她的肩膀，然后低下頭，嘴唇微張著。她抬起頭，被這個(gè)姿勢嚇了一跳，她的嘴唇擺出類似的姿勢，然后把臉轉(zhuǎn)向我的臉。一瞬間我們就撞到了我的床上。后來我聽到另一個(gè)女孩出去了。我們瘋狂了好幾個(gè)小時(shí)。
第二天一大早，她就起床了，飛快地趕回家洗澡換衣服，準(zhǔn)時(shí)上班。

I assumed it would be a one-off event, me being 42 and not at all believing that a female her age and I could seriously amount to anything like viable. Problem was, I already liked her, cared about her, felt invested in her welfare — at first as a friend and now as her (potential) lover. The other aspect of her that was lust-inducing was that prior to our tryst she’d had almost no sexual experience, and certainly none that was remotely good — according to her own descxtions of things. And boy, had she risen to occasion that night, beyond any fantasizable expectations.
Hell yes, I felt more than a little dirty that next day. I am not naive about how the world views these things. I have a measure of self-respect. I also have a lot of old friends who’ve known me since I was a boy. I knew if I went ahead with this, it would be huge arse-pain explaining and defending it, especially to my single female friends in my age range. Except there were none of the classic extenuating circumstances that usually infest such relationships; I had no serious money, no house, no car, nothing fancy to offer this woman by way of a lifestyle upgrade.
Thus, I decided that next day to let her hold all the cards in terms of any continuance of our dalliance.

我以為這是一次一次性的活動(dòng)，我已經(jīng)42歲了，根本不相信她這個(gè)年齡的女人和我真的有可能并可行嗎？問題是，我已經(jīng)喜歡她、關(guān)心她了，覺得自己對她的幸福感而投資—起初是作為一個(gè)朋友，現(xiàn)在是作為她的（潛在的）情人另一方面，在我們幽會之前，她幾乎沒有性經(jīng)驗(yàn)，從她自己的描述來看，也沒有遇到一個(gè)做愛很厲害的。天哪，那天晚上，她的表現(xiàn)超出了任何人的想象。
當(dāng)然了，第二天我感到有點(diǎn)下流。對于世界如何看待這些事情，我并不天真。我對世界如何看待這些事情并不天真。我有一定的自尊。我也有很多從我小時(shí)候就認(rèn)識的老朋友，他們從我小時(shí)候就認(rèn)識我了。我知道，如果我繼續(xù)這樣做，解釋和捍衛(wèi)它將是一件非常痛苦的事，尤其是對我同齡的單身女性朋友。若不是有一個(gè)經(jīng)典的例外情況，通常會困擾這種關(guān)系；我沒有錢，沒有房子，沒有汽車，也沒有什么可以讓這個(gè)女人生活方式升級的東西。
因此，我決定第二天讓她掌握我們繼續(xù)調(diào)情的所有籌碼