Chapter I
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
在我年轻幼稚的岁月里，父亲给了我一些忠告，从那以后我一直铭记在心。
"Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
"每当你想要批评任何人时，"他告诉我，"只要记住，这个世界上并非所有人都拥有你所拥有的那些优势。"
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I was under the impression that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me.
他没有再多说什么，但我们之间一直以一种矜持的方式保持着非同寻常的交流，我的印象是他要表达的意思远不止于此。结果，我倾向于保留所有的判断，这种习惯让我接触到了许多古怪的性格。
The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.
当这种品质出现在正常人身上时，异常的头脑会迅速察觉并依附其上，因此，在大学时我曾被不公正地指责为政客，因为我知道那些狂野、陌生人的隐秘悲伤。
Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was trembling on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
大多数这些信任是不请自来的——当我通过某种明确的迹象意识到一个亲密的揭示即将出现时，我经常假装睡觉、心不在焉，或者表现出一种敌意的轻浮；因为年轻人的亲密揭示，或者至少他们表达这些揭示的方式，通常是抄袭的，并且因明显的压抑而受损。
Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
保留判断是一种无限的希望。我仍然有点害怕如果我忘记这一点会错过什么——正如我父亲势利地建议的那样，我也势利地重复着——一种基本的体面感在出生时是不平等地分配的。
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.
在我这样夸耀了自己的宽容之后，我必须承认它有一个限度。行为可能建立在坚硬的岩石上，也可能建立在潮湿的沼泽上，但在某一点之后，我不关心它建立在什么之上。
When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
去年秋天从东部回来时，我希望世界永远穿着制服，永远处于一种道德上的立正状态；我再也不想要那种带着特权窥探人心的狂野远足了。
Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.
只有盖茨比，那个将名字借给本书的人，免除了我的这种反应——盖茨比代表了我所真诚蔑视的一切。如果个性是一连串成功的姿态，那么他身上就有某种华丽的东西，某种对生活承诺的高度敏感。
Chapter II
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
在西蛋区和纽约之间大约一半路程的地方，公路匆忙地与铁路汇合，沿着它跑了四分之一英里，以便避开某片荒凉的土地。这是一个灰烬之谷——一个奇异的农场，那里的灰烬像小麦一样长成山脊和山丘，长成怪诞的花园；灰烬在那里形成房屋、烟囱和升起的烟雾的形状，最终，通过一种超然的努力，形成那些在粉末般的空气中隐约移动、已经开始崩塌的人形。
Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
偶尔，一列灰色的汽车沿着一条看不见的轨道爬行，发出可怕的吱吱声，然后停下来，立刻那些灰白色的人影蜂拥而上，挥舞着铅灰色的铲子，扬起一道不可穿透的云雾，遮蔽了他们模糊的操作，让你无法看见。
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.
但是，在那片灰色土地之上，在那不断飘浮着的凄凉尘土的痉挛之上，你会立刻看到T·J·艾克尔堡医生的眼睛。T·J·艾克尔堡医生的眼睛是蓝色的，巨大无比——它们的视网膜有一码高。它们不从任何脸上望出来，而是从一副巨大的黄色眼镜后面望出来，这副眼镜架在一个不存在的鼻子上。
Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
显然，是某个眼科医生的狂放之徒把它们放在那里，为了在皇后区扩大他的业务，然后他自己也沉入了永恒的盲目，或者把它们忘了，搬走了。但是他的眼睛，经过无数风吹雨打、没有油漆的日子，稍微有些暗淡，仍然庄严地凝视着那片庄严的垃圾场。
Chapter III
There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
整个夏天的夜晚，从我邻居的房子里传来音乐声。在他蓝色的花园里，男男女女像飞蛾一样来来往往，穿梭在低语、香槟和星光之间。
At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam.
下午涨潮时，我看着他的客人们从他木筏的塔楼上跳水，或者在他海滩的热沙上晒太阳，与此同时他的两艘摩托艇划破海湾的水面，拖着滑水板在瀑布般的泡沫上飞驰。
On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains.
每逢周末，他的劳斯莱斯就变成了一辆公共汽车，从早上九点到午夜过后，载着一拨又一拨的人往返于城市之间，而他的旅行车则像一只敏捷的黄色甲虫一样匆匆去迎接所有的火车。
And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.
到了周一，八个仆人，包括一个额外的园丁，整天拿着拖把、洗刷刷、锤子和修枝剪忙碌着，修补前一夜留下的破坏。
Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves.
每个星期五，五箱橙子和柠檬从纽约的一个水果商那里运来——每个星期一，这些橙子和柠檬就变成一堆没有果肉的半个，从他的后门运走。