Покопавшись в своем старом рижском компе, обнаружила свой перевод моей самой любимой наверное главы из "Полдень, 22й век" Стругацких, которая называется "Свидание" и замечательно читается как отдельный рассказ (кстати все главы этой книги по-моему изначально писались как отдельные рассказы).. Не помню, существеут ли в природе английский перевод этой книги... Даже если существует, найти его сложно, а хотелось поделиться с западными друзьями любимой литературой. да и руку натренировать, хотя переводчик из меня некачественный. Дело в том что мне все время хочецца переводить как можно более точно, буквально, ну естественно со сноской на фразеологию таргетового языка, но все равно мне кажется правильнее было бы переводить не так точно, но передавать настоение. А для этого нужен переводческий талант. А его у меня по-моему совсем нет.

Arakady & Boris Strugatsky "The Meeting" (part of "Noon XXII Century") (translated from Russian by Catherine Bragina)


Alexander Grigoryevich Kostylin was standing in front of his huge desk and looking at glossy photographs.
“Hello, Lin” said the Hunter.
Kostylin raised his large bald head and shouted “Ah! Home is the sailor, home from the sea!”
“And the hunter come from the hill” said the Hunter. They embraced.
“What treat have you got for me this time?” asked Kostylin in a business-like manner. “It’s Yayla you’ve arrived from, isn’t it?...”
“Yes, straight from the Thousand Swamps.” The Hunter sat down in an armchair and stretched his legs. “And you are getting fatter and balder, Lin. This sitting life is going to be the death of you. Next time I’m taking you with me.”
Kostylin anxiously put his hands on his fat belly.
“Yes” he said. “Terrible. The barons are getting older, the barons are getting fatter… So have you brought anything interesting?”
“No, Lin. Nothing special. A dozen of bispinal snakes, several new species of polyvalve molluscs… What have you got there?” He held out his hand and picked up the photographs.
“These were brought by one of the tyros… Do you know him?”
“No.” The Hunter was looking at the photographs. “Not bad. This is Pandora of course.”
“Right. Pandora. The giant arachnocammarus. A very large specimen.”
“Yes,” said the Hunter scrutinising the ultrasound carbine that was resting against the bare yellow belly of the arachnocammarus for scale purposes. “A decent specimen for a tyro. I have seen larger, of course. How many shots did he make?”
“Two, he says. And both times he hit the main neural ganglion.”
“He should have used an anaesthetising needle. The boy got a little bit confused.” Smiling gently, the Hunter was looking at a photograph, in which the excited tyro was standing proudly with his foot resting on the dead monster’s body. “All right, and how are things at home?”
Kostylin waved his hand.
“Endless matrimony. Everybody’s getting married. Martha has married a hydrologist.”
“Which Martha is that?” asked the Hunter. “Granddaughter?”
“Great-granddaughter, Paul! Great-granddaughter!”
“Yes, the barons are getting older…” The Hunter put the photographs on the desk and got up. Well, I shall be going then.
“Again?” There was vexation in Kostylin’s voice. “Don’t you think it’s enough?”
“No, Lin. I must. We’ll meet on the same spot as usual.”
The Hunter nodded and walked out. He went down to the park and headed for the pavilions. The Museum was crowded as always. The people were walking up and down the alleys of orange Venerian palm trees, swarming around terrariums and over the pools of clear water; children were romping in the tall grass between the trees – they were playing ‘Martian hide-and-seek’. The Hunter stopped to watch. It was a very exciting game. A very long time ago mimicrodons were brought to Earth from Mars. Mimicrodons are large melancholically-tempered reptiles, brilliantly adapted to sharp environmental shifts. They had an amazingly well developed ability of mimicry. In the Museum’s park they were absolutely free to roam around. The children had a lot of fun trying to find them – this required considerable vigilance and adroitness – and then carrying them from place to place to see how they changed coloration. The reptiles were large and heavy; the children were dragging them along by the excess skin on the nape. Mimicrodons didn’t mind. It seemed, they were enjoying it.
The Hunter passed the huge transparent cowl that covered the terrarium called ‘Planet Ruzhena Meadow’. There, in the pale bluish grass, the funny rambs were jumping and fighting. Rambs are giant, amazingly coloured insects, slightly similar to terrestrial grasshoppers. The Hunter recalled his first hunting on Ruzhena twenty years ago. He lay in ambush for three days waiting for something to appear, and huge rainbow-coloured rambs were jumping around and landing on the barrel of his carbine. The space around the ‘Meadow’ was always crowded because rambs are very funny and beautiful.
Approaching the entrance to the central pavilion the Hunter lingered at the balustrade surrounding a deep round well-like pool. In the pool, in the water illuminated by purple light, a large hairy animal was tirelessly whirling around. Ichthyomammal was the only warm-blooded animal breathing through gills. Ichthyomammal was moving continuously; it was swimming around like that a year ago, and five years ago, and forty years ago, when the Hunter first saw it. Ichthyomammal was caught with great difficulty by the famous Salier. Now Salier was dead and resting eternally somewhere in Pandorian jungle, but his ichthyomammal is still whirling and whirling in the purple water of the pool.
In the pavilion lobby the Hunter stopped again and sat down in a light armchair in the corner. The middle of the bright hall was occupied by a stuffed flying leech – ‘sora-tobu hiru’ (Martian fauna, Solar system, carbon cycle, type polyspinals, class dermarespirators, order, genus, species – ‘soru-tobu hiru’). The flying leech was one of the very first exhibits of the Capetown Museum of Cosmozoology. For one and a half centuries this disgusting monster has been baring its teeth that looked like a multi-jawed grab at anyone who entered the pavilion. Nine metres long, covered with rough shiny hair, headless, limbless… Former master of Mars.
“Yes, things did happen on Mars,” thought the Hunter. “Such things are not easy to forget. Half a century ago these monsters, almost completely wiped out, unexpectedly multiplied again and started, like in the old times, plundering the communications of Martian bases. That was when the famous global battue was carried out. I was shaking in the crawler and could see practically nothing in the clouds of sand raised by the tracks. To the left and to the right yellow sand tanks full of volunteers were scudding along, and one tank jumped out on a sand hill and suddenly turned over, and people poured out of it headlong, and then we jumped out of the dust and Ermler grabbed my shoulder and screamed pointing forward. And I saw leeches, hundreds of leeches that were swarming on the salt-marsh in the valley between the sand hills. I started shooting and others started shooting too, but Ermler was still tinkering with his self-made missile thrower and couldn’t make it work. Everybody was shouting and scolding him and even threatening to beat him up, but no one could leave their carbines. The round-up was getting tighter and we could already see the flashes of the shots from the crawlers coming from the other side, and then Ermler stuck the rusty tube of his gun between the driver and myself, there was terrible roar and rumble, and deafened and blinded I fell on the floor of the crawler. The salt-marsh was clouded with thick black smoke, all vehicles stopped, and the people stopped shooting and were only shouting and swinging their carbines. Ermler spent all his ammunition in five minutes, the crawlers all gathered on the salt-marsh and we had to finish off every living thing that survived Ermler’s missiles. The leeches were rushing about amongst the vehicles and were being crushed under the tracks, but I was still shooting and shooting and shooting… I was young then and liked shooting a lot. Unfortunately, I have always been an excellent shot, unfortunately I never missed. Unfortunately, I shot not only on Mars and not only at disgusting predators. I wish I had never seen a carbine in my entire life.”
He got up, passed the stuffed flying leech and toiled himself along the gallery. Apparently, he didn’t look very well because many people were stopping and anxiously looking at him. Finally one girl came up to him and asked shyly if she could be of any assistance. “Not at all, girl,” said the Hunter. He forced himself to smile, put two fingers in his breast pocket and took out an amazingly beautiful sea shell from Yayla. “This is for you,” he said. “I brought it from far away”. She smiled faintly and took the shell. “You look very ill,” she said. “I’m very old now, child,” said the Hunter. “We, the old men, seldom look good. We often have to carry a heavy load in our souls.”
The girl probabaly didn’t understand him, but he didn’t want her to understand. He stroked her hair and started walking again. But now he squared his shoulders and tried to keep straight so that people didn’t look at him.
“The last thing I need is to be pitied by young girls,” he thought. “I’m a complete mess. I probably shouldn’t come back to Earth anymore. I probably should remain on Yayla for good, settle down at the edge of the Thousand Swamps and set traps for ruby eels. Nobody knows the Thousand Swamps better than I do, I would feel at home there. There are a lot of things to do for a hunter that doesn’t shoot…”
He stopped. He always stopped here. In a long glass box on the pile of grey sandstone fragments, with three pairs of crooked limbs spread wide, there stood a small, wrinkled, uncomely, grey, stuffed lizard. Uninformed visitors never found the grey sexopus exciting. Not many people knew the miraculous story of the wrinkled sexopus. But the Hunter knew and always had this feeling of some superstitious awe for the mighty power of life when he stopped here. This lizard was killed ten parsecs away from the Sun, its body was stuffed and the dry lizard stayed at this very stand for two years. And suddenly one day to the amazement of the visitors, out of the dry wrinkled skin tens of tiny nimble sexopi scrambled out. They all died immediately in the terrestrial air though, burned from the excess of oxygen, but there was a great buzz and zoologists still can’t explain how that could happen. Indeed, life is the only thing worth worshipping.
The Hunter was shuffling down the galleries passing from one pavilion to another. Bright African sun – kind, hot sun of Earth – was shining on animals cast in transparent plastic. Animals that had been born under other suns hundreds of millions miles away. Almost every one of them was familiar to the Hunter, he had seen them many times and not only at the Museum. Time after time he halted in front of the new exhibits to read the wondrous names of wondrous animals and familiar names of the hunters. ‘The Maltese Spear’, ‘Speckled Dzho’, ‘Small Dzhi-Lin’, ‘theWeb-footed Capuchin’, ‘ the Black Scarecrow’, ‘ the Swan Princess’… Simon Kreizer, Vladimir Babkin, Bruno Bellar, Nicholas Druo, Jean Salier Jr… He knew them all and now was the oldest one among them, although not the luckiest. But he was glad to find out that Salier Jr. had finally captured a scaled gill-hider; that Volodya Babkin succeeded in delivering to Earth a living glider slug; and that Bruno Bellar shot a white-webbed humpnose on Pandora – a beast he had been trying to capture for several years…
And so he reached the tenth pavilion where many of his own trophies were exhibited. Here he halted almost at every stand, remembering and relishing. “Here is ‘the Magic Carpet’ also known as ‘the Falling Leaf’. I followed it for four days. It was on Ruzhena, where rains are so rare and where a long, long time ago an excellent zoologist Ludwig Porta lost his life. ‘The Magic Carpet’ moves very fast and has very sharp hearing. You can’t hunt for it in a car, you have to follow it day and night, searching for faint oily marks in the foliage. I got it and nobody has ever got it since, and Salier, whose pride was a little hurt, always said it was accidental luck.” The Hunter proudly touched the letters carved in the plate under the exhibit: “Captured and prepared by hunter P. Gnedykh.” “I shot it four times and never missed, but it was still alive when it was falling down, breaking branches of the green-trunked trees. This was when I still shot.”
“And here is the eyeless monster from the heavy water swamps of Vladislava. Eyeless and shapeless. Nobody knew exactly how to shape it when it was being stuffed, and finally they stuffed it using the best photograph. I chased it across the swamp towards the shore where several traps were set, and it fell into one of them and roared there for a long time, tossing and turning in the black slush, and we had to use up two buckets of beta-novocaine to put it to sleep. This wasn’t a very long time ago, ten years ago or so, and I didn’t shoot anymore at the time… This is a pleasant meeting.”
The further the Hunter moved through the gallery of the tenth pavilion, the slower grew his steps. Because he didn’t want to go further. Because he had to go further. Because he was approaching the spot of the most important meeting. And with every step he felt the familiar dreary anxiety grow stronger. And from the glass box the round white eyes were already watching him…
As always he walked up this comparatively small stand with his head down and first of all read the words on the plate, the words he knew by heart for years: “Kruxian fauna, system EN 92, carbon cycle, type monospinals, class, order, genus, species – three-fingered quadromanus. Captured by hunter P. Gnedykh, prepared by Dr. A. Kostylin.” Then he raised his eyes.
Under the glass cowl on a slanted polished board there lay a head – vertically flattened, naked and black, with oval face. The skin on the face was smooth like a drum, there were no mouth, no forehead, no nostrils. There were only eyes. Round, white, with small black pupils and very widely put. The right eye was slightly damaged, which gave the dead stare a strange expression. Lin is an excellent taxidermist: the quadromanus had the same expression when the Hunter first stooped over it in the mist. This was such a long time ago…
It was seventeen years ago. “Why did it happen?” thought the Hunter. “I didn’t plan to hunt there, did I? Krux was reporting that there was no life there – only bacteria and land crayfish. But still, when Sanders asked me to look around, I picked up the carbine…”
Mist was hanging over the stony screes. The small red sun was rising – red dwarf EN 92, and the mist was coloured red. Small stones were rustling under the land-rover tracks, one by one dark low rocks were floating out of the mist. Then something moved on top of one of the rocks and the Hunter stopped the car. It was hard to discern the animal from such a distance. Besides, the mist and the twilight didn’t make it easier. But the Hunter’s experience made him trust his eyesight. No doubt, some large vertebrate was making its way along the top of the rocky slopes, and the Hunter was glad to have brought his gun. “Let’s disgrace Krux, shall we?” he thought excitedly. He opened the hatch, carefully stuck out the barrel of his carbine and started aiming. When the mist became a little thinner and the humpbacked silhouette of the animal could clearly be seen against the red sky, the Hunter shot. And at that very moment a dazzling purple flash appeared at the spot where the animal was. Something cracked loudly and a long hissing sound was heard. Then clouds of grey smoke rose over the rocks and mixed with the mist.
The Hunter was very much surprised. He remembered that he had loaded his carbine with an anaesthetising needle, which could never result in such an explosion. Having given it a bit of thought, he got out of the land-rover and went to search for his prey. He found it where he had expected to find it – under the rock on the stony scree. It was indeed a four-limbed animal sized like a large Great Dane. It was terribly burnt and crippled, and the Hunter wondered once again why a simple anaesthetising needle caused such terrible effect. It was hard to imagine what the original appearance of the animal was. Only the front part of the head remained comparatively undamaged – a flat oval shape covered tightly with smooth black skin, with a pair of white dead eyes on it.
On Earth, Kostylin started working on the trophy. After a week he told the Hunter that the trophy was very badly damaged and didn’t present any particular interest – only, perhaps, as a proof of the existence of higher life forms in red dwarf systems – and advised the Hunter to be more careful with termite cartridges in the future. “It looks almost as if you shot at it in panic,” he said angrily, “as if it was attacking you.” “But I remember clearly that I shot with a needle,” objected the Hunter. “And I can see clearly that you hit its spine with a termite bullet,” answered Lin. The Hunter shrugged his shoulders and decided not to argue. It would be interesting, of course, to find out what caused such an explosion, but at the end of the day it didn’t really matter.
“Yes, at the time it didn’t seem important at all,” thought the Hunter. He was still standing and looking at the flat head of the quadromanus. “Had a laugh at Krux, had an argument with Lin and forgot everything. And then came the doubt, and with the doubt – grief.”
Krux arranged two massive expeditions. He searched all the large areas on his planet. And he didn’t find a single animal larger than a crayfish as small as a little finger. What he did find in the southern hemisphere was a landing ground of unknown origin – a round area of melted basalt about twenty metres in diameter on a stony plateau. At first everybody found this discovery very interesting, but later it was found out that Sanders’s starship had landed somewhere in that area two years earlier for routine repairs, and the discovery was forgotten. It was forgotten by everybody but the Hunter. Because at that time he already had his doubts.
Once, at the Leningrad Astropilots Club the Hunter heard a story about an engineer who nearly burned alive on Krux’s planet. He got out of the ship with a faulty oxygen tank. The tank was leaky, and the atmosphere of Krux’s planet was rich in light carbohydrogenes that reacted rapidly with free oxygen. Fortunately, they managed to rip the tank off the guy’s shoulders very quickly, and he only got several slight burns. The Hunter was listening to this story and in his mind he saw the purple flash over the black rocks.
When the unknown landing ground was found on Krux’s planet, the doubt turned into a terrifying certitude. The Hunter dashed to Kostylin. “Who did I kill?!” he was shouting. “Was it a beast or a human being? Lin, who did I kill?!” Kostylin was listening to him, with his face turning red, and then he screamed: “Sit down! Cease the hysterics, old hag! How dare you say this to me? You think that I, Alexander Kostylin, am unable to tell a sapiens from a beast?” “But the landing ground!...” “You and Sanders landed on that plateau yourselves…” “The flash!.. I pierced his oxygen tank!” “You shouldn’t have used termite shells in carbohydrogene atmosphere”. “Alright, but Krux didn’t find a single quadromanus there! I know, it was an alien astropilot!” “Sissy!” screamed Lin. “Hysterical sissy! They probably won’t find any quadromani on Krux’s planet for a hundred years! A huge planet carved with caves like Dutch cheese! You simply were very lucky, you idiot, and you missed your chance and brought me charred bones instead of the animal!”
The Hunted clutched his hand so tight he could hear his fingers crack.
“No, Lin, I didn’t bring you an animal,” he mumbled under his breath. “I brought you an alien astropilot…”
“How many words you wasted, good old Lin! How many times you tried to persuade me! How many times I thought the doubts had left for good, that I can breathe freely again and stop feeling like a murderer… Like everybody else. Like the children that play ‘Martian hide-and-seek’… But it’s impossible to kill doubts with cunning logic.”
He put his hands on the box and pressed his face against the transparent plastic.
“Who are you?” he said with grief and anguish in his voice.

Lin saw him from afar and as always he felt insufferable pain seeing this formerly brave and jovial man so terribly crushed by his own conscience. But he pretended that everything was great as a great sunny Capetown day. Stepping loudly, he walked up to the Hunter, slapped him on the back and exclaimed in a deliberately cheerful voice:
“The meeting is over! I’m starving, Pauly, and now we are going to my place to have a splendid dinner! Today Martha has made real Ochsenschwanzensuppe to celebrate your arrival! Let’s go, Hunter, suppe is waiting for us!”
“Let’s go,” said the Hunter quietly.
“I have already called my family. They can’t wait till they see you and hear your stories.”
The Hunter nodded and started walking slowly towards the exit. Lin looked at his bent back and turned to the stand. His eyes met the white dead eyes behind the transparent wall. “Had a chat, the two of you?” Lin asked silently. “Yes.” “You didn’t tell him anything, did you?” “No.” Lin glanced at the plate: “… three-fingered quadromanus. Captured by hunter P. Gnedykh, prepared by Dr. A. Kostylin.” He turned to look at the Hunter and with his little finger quickly, furtively wrote after the word ‘quadromanus’: sapiens. Not a stroke was left on the plate, of course, but Lin hurriedly wiped it with the palm of his hand.
It wasn’t easy for Dr. Alexander Kostylin either. He knew for sure, knew from the very start…