برج روباه و چند داستان دیگر 

The Fox’s Tower and Other Tales

همانطور که میدانید در زبان مادری ما یعنی فارسی خواندن قصه ها و داستان های متفاوت علاوه بر ایجاد دایره ای کامل از کلمات و ریشه های آن به ما کمک میکند که اطلاعات عمومی و تخصصی در مورد گذشته و نوع نگارش ( طرز تفکر ) قدیم اطلاعات جامع و کاملی کسب کنیم . از این رو برای افرزایش سطح آگاهی و فرهنگی داستان های کوتاه اما پند آموز را برای شما از داستان نویس معاصر یون هو لی تهیه کرده ایم . خواندن این داستان ها قطعا موجب شناخت و درک عمیق فرهنگ ها مختلف از مشکلات می شود . زبان انگلیسی نیز در اینجا همانند شاه راه متصل کننده فرهنگ ها به هم شناخته میشود . پس کافیست زبان انگلیسی خود را تقویت کنید تا با دریایی از دانش و علم رو به رو شوید . ادبیات انگلیسی یا همان نگارش انگلیسی زبان به نوعی کلید رسیدن به معنویات والای انسانی نیز میباشد .

یون هو لی متولد ۱۹۷۹ در هوستون تگزاس به دنیا آمد. او یک نویسنده داستان های علمی تخیلی است.

در اینجا چند داستان کوتاه او را اماده کرده ایم. ادبیات و نگارش لی بسیار ساده و روان بوده و از پیچیدگی و کلمات سنگین اجتناب می کند.

 

The Fox’s Tower

The prisoner had lived in the tower at the center of the wood for moons
beyond counting. Even so, the walls were notched with pale crescent marks,
crisscrossed into a tapestry of patient waiting. Sometimes dew jeweled the
rough-hewn stone floor; sometimes ice obscured the walls’ pale marks, and
he wondered if the world outside had forgotten his existence.
There was a single window, set high in the wall, too high for him to reach. It was guarded by an iron grille in the shape of tangled bones and branching arteries. He spent many hours contemplating the grille.
One night, the prisoner heard a fox’s sharp bark. “Brother fox,” he called out, “I would offer you my bones, but I am trapped behind these walls.” To his great surprise, this fox, unlike countless ones before it, answered in a young man’s voice. The fox said, “I have no need of your bones. Why do
you insist on sleeping behind stone?”
The story was an old  one, but the prisoner did not expect a fox to be familiar with it. “I offended the lady to whom I had sworn fealty,” he said.
“As a punishment, she set me here, to wait unaging until the forest should be no more.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” the fox said. “How would you know whether the
forest still exists or not when you can’t set foot outside the tower?”
The prisoner was nonplussed. It had never occurred to him that the forest might not be eternal. “Nevertheless,” he said, “I am here.”
“You must be lonely,” the fox said, “if you are talking to a fox.”
The prisoner could imagine the fox’s genial grin. “Come and join me, then,” he retorted.
The fox did not respond, but that night, as the prisoner started to drift asleep, he felt the soft touch of forsythia petals on his skin. And in his dream that night, he embraced a man in a red coat and black gloves and boots, whose teeth were very white. He woke expecting to find the man’s fingers still tangled in his hair.
On the next day, the prisoner waited for the fox to return. He heard
nothing, not even a bark. But at night, he smelled the sweet, mingled
fragrance of quinces and peaches, and once more he dreamed of the man in the red coat.
On the third day, the man knew to be patient. He spent his time counting all the crescent marks, although there were so many that he kept having to start over. That night, maple and gingko leaves fluttered from the window in a dance of red and yellow. “A night  is a lifetime, you know,” the man in the red coat said in his dream.
On the fourth day, the sun was especially bright. The crescent marks
seemed paler than ever, almost white against the stone. When nighttime came, snowflakes landed in the prisoner’s cupped palms. He fell asleep to the sound of a fox barking four times.
On the morning after, the tower still stood, but nothing was inside it but the illegible crescent marks, and soon, they, too, would fade.

The Third Song

It was midway in the morning of the world, in the great middle desert,
and a woman knelt beneath a tree beneath the wide, wondering sky. Her eyes were wet, her throat was dry, her feet as rough as the sand.
Sing to me, the woman said to the sky. It showed her dry, clear, blueness
and dry, clear air, and never a song at all, for this was before the sky learned
the rain-song, the storm-song, the thunderbird wing-song. And the woman
went thirsty.
Sing to me, the woman said to the tree. It showed her pale, deadly spines
and pale, threadlike roots, and never a song at all, for this was before the tree
learned the leaf-song, the fruit-song, the oasis wind-song. And the woman
went hungry.Then a crow came out of the west wind, the evening wind. He was blacker than burnt wood, blacker than unbroken night. Sing to me, the woman said to the crow. He showed her the fluid of her eyes and the marrow of her bones, for this was what the crow knew. As he drank and ate, the crow sang her the mystery of her muscles, the wonder of her womb.
Under that beak, those talons, the woman died. In her womb, the crow found an egg-child, pale and wondering. The crow carried the unborn eggchild away and placed it in a nest in the tree, under the sky.

Then the sky learned rain and the tree learned fruit and gave them to the egg-child to drink and eat. From the rain, the fruit, the crow’s lullaby, all things came to be born. The crow had no song left for himself, and so in the evening of the world, he finds its echoes in eggshells and carrion, in his own raucous croak.

The Crane Wife

Once a peasant woman found a crane with a wounded wing in the woods.
“It is a hungry winter,” the woman said to the crane, “but it must be just
as hungry for you as it is for me.”
“The highborn claim that my flesh is excellent,” the crane said matter-offactly.
“I should not like to deprive you of that delight.”

“You think rather too highly of yourself, friend crane.” But the woman
was smiling, and she shared her rice and water with the crane.
On the next day, the crane was still there. “Aren’t you worried about
wolves?” the woman asked. “I am a prey animal,” the crane said. “One might as well meet one’s end with a certain dignity.”
 “Dignity nothing,” the woman said. And she shared her meal with the
crane again. On the third day, the crane cocked its head at the woman and said, “You know, my cousins tell stories of a crane wife. Are you doing this because you’re in need of a wife? I would think that there are easier ways to get one than by wandering in the woods.” The crane flexed its wing experimentally.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman said tartly. “I helped you because you ought to fly again, not because I wanted to take you home and tie you to a loom.”
“You’re assuming that the two things are mutually exclusive,” said the crane. “They say crane wives make excellent lovers, you know.” “I see your vanity is intact,” the woman said. But she did have to admit that the crane was likely to be beautiful in any guise it took.

“I shall just have to prove it to you the old-fashioned way, then,” the
crane said, undeterred. “Now, which way is home?”

Harvesting Shadows

They say the mountains in this land are so numerous that the smallest of
them have no names. This is not true; it is just that mountains are circumspect
about the people they tell their names to.
On one of these mountains, where snow lies in wing-shaped drifts
beneath the sweet pines, there is a temple. Its timbers are painted with the
emblems of lantern and candle, sun and moon. Most import antly, it has
windows open wide, so that whatever light travels through the pines can find
its welcome there.

The priests of this temple are diligent in their worship, which centers around harvesting shadows. Nothing escapes their notice: the shadows of tumbling tiger cubs, the shadows of the great boulders that record the passing seasons on their faces, the shadows of fallen azaleas. The shadows of discarded straw sandals. Lost celadon pendants grown over with moss.

Mismatched chopsticks worked into magpies’ nests.
It is a common misconception that the temple serves some god of dark
places, as even mountains have their roots in the earth’s hidden halls, or
perhaps the queen of dead things. But the truth is simpler than that. The dead
have no need of shadows. It is the living who require them to remember the
importance of sunlight and moonlight and heartlight.