Bonsoir, my dear folks. This is me, Teacher Dean. I want to share with you today a piece of gem in English literature: James Joyce’s Araby, the third of the fifteen short stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners. It is an utter privilege to read to you this beautiful tale of a youthful passion, a young man’s romantic idealization of a girl, and the subsequent disillusionment and epiphany, the kind of feelings which we all, irrespective of gender, must have gone through at one time or another during our lives. I want you to get comfy and feel, with your aesthetic sensibilities, the subtle rhythm of words, the sensation of which has mesmerized me ever since I fell in love with letters.
Ready? Here goes the story …
晚安，各位。是我，Dean 老師。今天我想和您們分享英語文學中的一塊瑰寶：詹姆斯‧喬伊斯的《阿拉比》。他 1914 年出版的短篇小說集《都柏林人》總共收錄了 15 篇故事，《阿拉比》是其中的第三篇。很榮幸能為您們朗讀這美麗的故事，關於一份年少的熱情、一位少年對一名女孩浪漫的理想化以及那隨之而來的幻滅和頓悟──不論女男，我們想必都在人生的某個時刻經歷過這類感受。我希望您們能舒服下來，用您們對美的感性去意會文字那微妙的律動──自我愛上文學以來，對那脈動的感應一直令我深深著迷。
準備好了嗎？故事開始了…
Araby
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
