By Lord Dunsany
THE FIELD WHERE THE SATYRS DANCED, by Lord Dunsany, in The Atlantic Monthly, an American magazine, Vol. CXLI, pp. 830,831, June, 1928.
Lord Dunsany, the 18th Baron Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett （1878-1957）, Irish dramatist and author of several collection of tales. His work is in fantastic vein; his characters god and men. His style is Biblical in its simplicity.
There is a field above my house in which I sometimes walk in the evening. And whenever I go there in summer I always see the same thing, very small and far off, the tiniest fraction of the wide view that one has, and not appearing until one has looked for it a little carefully—a field surrounded by woods, a green space all among shadows, which suggested to me, the very first time I saw it, an odd idea. But the idea was so evanescent, and floated by so like a traveling butterfly, that by the time I went again a few days later to look at the view at evening I barely remembered it. But then the idea came again, coming as suddenly as a wind that got up soon after sunset, bringing the chill of night a little before its time. And the idea was that to that field at evening satyrs slipped out of the woods to dance on the grass.
This time I did not forget the idea at all; on the contrary it rather haunted me, but down in the valley it grew to seem so unlikely that one put it away as one puts away lumber of old collections, scarcely counting it any more, though knowing that it was there.
And then one evening, the nightingale\'s song being over for many days, and hay ripening, it struck me that if I wanted to see the wild roses I must go soon or they would all be over, and I should have to wait another year to see what we can only see for a limited number of times; so I went up to the field again behind my house, on the hill. It is a perfectly ordinary field, even though at one end the hedge has run a bit wild and is one bank of wild roses. I do not know why one calls it an ordinary field, nor why one sometimes feels of another field that it lies deep under enchantment, yet ordinary it was; one felt sure of that as one walked in it.
On my way to the wild roses at the far end of the field, with my back to the view of the valley, I almost felt as though something behind me and far away were beckoning. For a moment I felt it and the feeling passed, and I walked on toward the wild roses. Then it came again, and I turned round to look; and there was the view over the valley the same as it ever looked, rather featureless from the loss of the sunlight and not yet mysterious with night. I moved my eyes left-handed along the far ridge. And soon they fell on the field where the satyrs danced. Of this I was certain: they danced there. Nothing had changed in the view; the far field was the same as ever, a little mysterious around its edges and flat and green in the middle, high up on the top of a hill;but the certainty had grown and become immense. It was just too far to see if anything moved in the shadows, too far to see if anything came from the wood, but I was sure that this was a dancing ground for those that lurked in the dark of the distant trees, and that they were satyrs. And all things darkened towards the likely hour, till the field was too dim to see at that great distance, and I went home down the hill. And that night and all the next day the certainty remained with me, so that I decided that evening to go to the field and see.
The field where the satyrs danced was some way from my house, so I started a little before sunset, and climbed the far hill in the cool. There I came by a little road scarce more than a lane that ran deep through a wood of Spanish chestnut and oak, to a great road of tar.
Down this I walked for a bit, while the twentieth century streamed by me, with its machinery, its crowds, and its speed;flowing from urban sources. It was as though for a while I waded in a main current of time. But soon I saw a lane on the other side of it that ran in what should be the direction of my field; and I crossed the road of tar, and soon I was in a rural quiet again that time seemed scarcely to bother about. And so I came to the woods that I knew surrounded the field. Hazel and oak they were and masses of dogwood, on the right, and on the left they were thinning down to a hedge; and over the hedge I suddenly saw the field.
Ahead of me, on the far side of the field, the wood was dense and old. On my right lay, as I have said, oak, hazel, and dogwood, and on the left, where the field dipped down to the valley, I saw the tops of old oaks. It was an idyllic scene amongst all that circle of woods. All the more so by contrast with the road of tar. But the moment I looked at the field I realized that there was nothing unearthly about it. There were a few buttercups growing in a very sparse crop of hay; dog daisies farther off and patches of dry brown earth showing through, and unmistakably over the whole field an ordinary air of every day. Whatever there is in enchantment is hard to define, or whatever magic is visible from the touch of fabulous things, but amongst these buttercups and dog daisies and poor crop of hay it certainly was not.
I looked up from the field over the tops of the oaks that grew on the slope of the valley, to be sure by looking across that I had come to the right field. If I could see, and only just see, the field of the wild roses, then this field and these woods must be the ones that I sought. And sure enough, I saw the unmistakable hills from which I had come, and the woods along the top of them, and above these woods a field. For a moment I could not be sure. So strange it looked, so haunted, —not by shadows, for the sun was long set, but by a certain darkness gathering under the hedges while the gloaming still shone on its center, —that I did not immediately know it. And, as I watched it and recognized it by many landmarks as my very ordinary field, the mystery deepened and deepened, until before the gloaming faded away it was obviously touched by that eeriness that is never found far from the haunt of fabulous things.
It was too far to get there to-night, and I looked once more at the field by whose edges I stood, to see if anything lurked at all of the magic that it had. No, nothing; it was all gone. At this moment a rustic boy skipped out of the wood and came over the field towards me. And something about him made him seem so much at home in that field and so knowing of all its neighboring shrubs and shadows that, clinging still to a last vestige of my fancy, I hailed him, and he pricked up his ears. Then I asked, just as I might have asked if the busses were running: 「Do the satyrs dance here to-night?」
「Here? No!」 he said with such certainty that I knew for sure I was wrong.
I mumbled something like that I thought they were going to.
「No,」 he said, shaking his head and pointing away to my field of wild roses, gleaming only faintly now, a dim gray green before nightfall, 「they are dancing there to-night.」
Notes
evanescent, fleeting; quickly fading in impression or appearance.
satyrs, Greek woodland deities in human form with horse\'s ears and tail （or, as represented by the Romans, with goat\'s ears, tail, legs, and budding horns）. Satyrs are, in other words, spirits that live in woods.
lumber, disused or discarded articles that still take up room.
nightingale\'s song. The nightingale is noted for the sweet song of the male, often heard at night during the breeding season.
hay ripening, in autumn.
the likely hour, twilight.
in the cool, weather of twilight.
road of tar, a road paved with tar or asphalt.
the twentieth century, our present civilization with our automobiles, and masses of people going from one place to another, and the great speed with which automobiles are driven on the roads.
dogwood,a low shrub of the genus Cornus.
idyllic scene, pleasing and picturesque in its natural simplicity.
unearthly, supernatural; not of this earth.
buttercups,yellow-flowered crowfoot of the genus Ranunculus.
dog daisies, plants with fleshy leaves and pink and white flowers, of the aster family.
haunted, inhabited with supernatural spirits.
gloaming, twilight.
landmarks, conspicuous marks on the land that serve to locate or identify the place.
eeriness, strangeness, weirdness.
rustic boy, country lad.
busses, automobile busses, contracted from the word omnibus.
Questions
1. What does this story mean?
參考譯文
【作品簡介】
《薩梯跳舞的田野》，作者鄧薩尼勳爵，載於1928年6月出版的《大西洋月刊》雜誌第141卷，830、831頁。
【作者簡介】
鄧薩尼勳爵，第18世男爵愛德華·約翰·莫頓·德拉克斯·普倫基特（1878—1957），愛爾蘭劇作家，也創作過幾部故事集。他的作品充滿奇幻色彩，作品的主角既有神也有人，作品具有聖經風格，非常簡潔。