从翻译的英文剧本中摘录几段台词

#开头大写的为剧中角色名

BENGTSSON The usual ghost supper, as we call it.

MUMMY Crime and secrets hold us - guilt binds us together. We have broken our bonds and gone our own ways, too many times, but we are always drawn together again.

MUMMY We are wretched creatures – us human beings. We know that. We have erred, we have sinned - we like all the rest. We are not what we seem. For at the core we are better than ourselves, since we detest our sins. But when you, Jacob Hummel, with your false name, choose to sit in judgment over us, you prove to be more contemptible than us miserable sinners. You are not what you seem. You are a slave trader, a trafficker of human souls. You once stole me with false promises. You murdered the Consul who was buried today; you strangled him with debts. You have stolen the student and shackled him with an imaginary debt of his father’s, who never owed you a penny.

STUDENT Sometimes I’m seized by a raging desire to say everything I think. But I know the world would collapse completely if people were completely candid.

STUDENT If you keep silent too long… It’s like stagnant water – when it starts to form, everything rots. That’s what’s happening in this house. Something’s rotten here. And yet I thought it was paradise itself that first time I saw you come here. It was a Sunday morning. I stood there – gazing into these rooms. I saw a Colonel who was no Colonel. I had a magnanimous benefactor who was really a thief and had to hang himself. I saw a mummy who was not a mummy and a maiden who – what of maidenhood, by the way? Where is virginity – where is beauty to be found? In nature, and in my own mind, when it is dressed up in its Sunday best.

Where do honor and faith exist? In fairy-tales and children’s fantasies. Where is anything that fulfills its promise? In my imagination. Do you see? Your flowers have poisoned me and I have given the poison back to you. I begged you to be my wife in my home. We played and we sang. We made poetry together. Then came the cook…Sursum Corda! Try once more to strike fire and majesty out of the golden harp. Try, I beg you, I implore you on my knees.

STUDENT It is dumb and deaf. Why is it that the most beautiful flowers so poisonous, the most deadly? Why? Damnation hangs over the whole of creation – all that lives – is damned. Why will you not be my bride? Because the life-core within you is rancid and dry… I can feel that vampire in the kitchen beginning to drain me. She must be a Lamia, one of those that suck the blood of children. It is always in the kitchen that children are nipped in the bud – the growth stunted - if it has not already happened in the bedroom. There are poisons that seal the eyes and poisons that open them. I must have been born with the latter kind, for I cannot see beauty in ugliness or call evil good. I can’t. They say Christ harrowed hell. That was his pilgrimage on this earth. What they mean was that he descended to this penal colony – to this mad house, this morgue of a world. And the inmates crucified Him when He tried to set them free; but the robber they let roam free. Robbers always win sympathy. Come back to us! Come back, savior of the world. Come back before we perish. We are expiring.