Английский для смелых. Истории о духах и привидениях / Great Ghost Stories

 Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.

Ah, the poet’s prophecy of Me – how admirable, how dreadfully admirable!

Backward beyond the beginning of this via dolorosa – this epic of suffering with episodes of sin – I see nothing clearly; it comes out of a cloud. I know that it spans only twenty years, yet I am an old man.

One does not remember one’s birth – one has to be told. But with me it was different; life came to me full-handed and dowered me with all my faculties and powers. Of a previous existence I know no more than others, for all have stammering intimations that may be memories and may be dreams. I know only that my first consciousness was of maturity in body and mind – a consciousness accepted without surprise or conjecture. I merely found myself walking in a forest, half-clad, footsore, unutterably weary and hungry. Seeing a farmhouse, I approached and asked for food, which was given me by one who inquired my name. I did not know, yet knew that all had names. Greatly embarrassed, I retreated, and night coming on, lay down in the forest and slept.

The next day I entered a large town which I shall not name (на следующий день я пришел в большой город, который я не буду называть; to enter – входить). Nor shall I recount further incidents of the life that is now to end (не буду я и перечислять дальнейшие события той жизни, что подходит сейчас к концу; to recount – рассказывать, излагать подробно) – a life of wandering (жизни странствий), always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of crime in punishment of wrong (всегда и везде преследуемой всепоглощающим чувством преступления, совершенного как кара за грех; to haunt – часто заезжать, навещать; неотступно преследовать; punishment – кара, наказание) and of terror in punishment of crime (и ужасом перед карой за преступление). Let me see if I can reduce it to narrative (давайте посмотрим, смогу ли я выразить это своим рассказом; to reduce – сводить, приводить к чему-либо; narrative – изложение, рассказ).