Barva a rytmus

Každý dobrý text má jistou pravidelnost - ať už jsou to paralelní struktury, rytmus slov, výběr a řazení přívlastků... Při překladu hledáme rytmus rodné řeč, který by v čtenáři evokoval stejný dojem jako originál.

1. Přečtěte si celý následující úryvek. Pokuste se charakterizovat autorský styl. Kdo byl Gerald Durrell? Najděte si podrobné informace o autorovi.
2. Vyberte neobvyklá slovesa a navrhněte jejich překlad. Hrajte si s jazykem, nespěchejte, hledejte barvy a rytmus.
3. Přeložte tučně vyznačenou část načisto a překlad vložte do komentáře k tomuto blogu.


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GOLDEN BATS AND PINK PIGEONS

Gerald Durrell, 1977

Chapter 1

MACABEE AND THE DODO TREE

When you are venturing into a new area of the world for the first time, it is essential – especially if you are an animal collector – that you do two things. One is to get as many personal introductions as you can to people on the spot; the second to amass as much information as possible, no matter how esoteric or apparently useless, about the place that you are going to. One of the ways you accomplish this latter is by contacting the London Embassy or High Commission of the country concerned. In many cases, this yields excellent results and you are inundated with maps and vividly coloured literature containing many interesting facts and much missing information. In other cases, the response is not quite so uplifting. I am, for example, still waiting for all the information promised me by a charming Malay gentleman in the London High Commission when I was going to that country. My trip there was eight years ago. However, the response you get from the Embassy or High Commission generally gives you some sort of a clue as to the general attitude prevailing towards life in the country concerned.

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The Mascarene Islands, of which Mauritius is the second largest, lie embedded in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Forty miles by twenty, Mauritius gleams in a million tropical greens, from the greens of dragon wing and emerald, to delicate dawn greens and the creamy greens of bamboo shoot. All this is encrusted with a rainbow of flowers from the great trees that flame like magic bonfires of fragile violet-shaped magenta blooms, lying like a thousand shed butterfly wings among the grass, which itself can be green or yellow, or as pink as the sunset.

In the dawn of the world, Mauritius was formed – when the great volcano pustules were still bursting and spilling out fire and lava. In a series of cataclysmic convulsions, the island was wrenched from the sea bed and lifted skywards, the hot rocks glowing and melting so that cyclone and tidal wave, hot wind and great rains, moulded and fretted it, and tremendous earth shudders shook it and lifted it into strange mountain ranges, churning the tender rocks as a chef whips egg whites until they become stiff and form weird peaks when lifted up on a fork tip. So the strange-shaped mountains of Mauritius grew; miniature mountains all under 3,000 feet, but as distinctive, unique and Daliesque, as if carefully designed for a stage backdrop. A multitude of coral polyps, as numerous as stars, then formed a protecting roof round it and contained the lagoon, which encircled the island as a moat encircles a fortress.

Gradually, as the earth formed, seeds arrived, either sea or air-borne, to send their roots into the volcanic soil, now soft and rich, watered by many bright rivers. Following, came birds and bats carried by errant winds, tortoises and lizards like shipwrecked mariners on rafts of branches and creepers from other lands. These settled and prospered and gradually, over millions of years, their progeny evolved along their own lines, unique to the islands.

So the Dodo came into being; and the big, black, flightless parrot. The tortoises grew larger and larger until they were the size of an armchair and weighed over two thousand pounds, and the lizards vied with each other in evolving strange shapes and rainbow colours. There being no major predators except an owl and a small kestrel, the creatures evolved without defence. The Dodo became flightless, fat and waddling, nesting on the ground in safety, as did the parrot. There was nothing to harass the slow, antediluvian life of the tortoise; only the quick, glittering lizards and the golden-eyed geckos needed to fear the hawk and the owl.

There, on this speck of volcanic soil in the middle of a vast sea, a complete, unique and peaceful world was created slowly and carefully. It waited there for hundreds of thousands of years for an annihilating invasion of voracious animals for which it was totally unprepared, a cohort of rapacious beasts led by the worst predator in the world, Homo sapiens. With man, of course, came all his familiars: the dog, the rat, the pig, and, in this instance, probably one of the worst predators next to man, the monkey.

In an incredibly short space of time, a number of unique species had vanished – the Dodo; the giant, black, flightless parrot; the giant Mauritian tortoise, rapidly followed by the Rodrigues tortoise; and that strange bird, the Solitaire. The dugong, which used to throng the reefs, vanished and all that was left of a unique and harmless fauna was a handful of birds and lizards. These, together with what is left of the native forest, face enormous pressures.  Not only is Mauritius one of the most densely populated parts of the globe, but as well as dogs, cats, rats and monkeys, a number of other things have been introduced in that dangerous, unthinking way that man has.

There are, for example, 20 introduced species of bird, which include the ever-present house sparrow and the swaggering, dominating mynah. There is the sleek and deadly mongoose and less damaging but still out of place, the hedgehog-like tenrec from Madagascar. Then there are the introduced plants and trees, so that the native vegetation is jostled and strangled by Chinese guava, wild raspberries, privet and a host of other things. In the face of all this, the indigenous flora and fauna of Mauritius can be said to be hanging on to its existence by its finger nails.