THE REFRIGERATOR AWAKES Сейчас бывает сложно заснуть из-за отвлекающего телефона. В былые времена спать мешал грохочущий холодильник (технологии были такими, что охлаждение требовало интервалов шумной работы). О том, каково это — провести ночь в компании подобного прибора, можно узнать из стихотворения Набокова The Refrigerator Awakes. Crash! And if darkness could sound, it would sound like this giant waking up in the torture house, trying to die and not dying, and trying not to cry and immediately crying that he will, that he will, that he will do his best to adjust his dark soul to the pressing request of the only true frost, and he pants and he gasps and he rasps and he wheezes: ice is the solid form when the water freezes; a volatile liquid (see "Refrigerating") is permitted to pass into evaporating coils, where it boils, which somehow seems wrong, and I wonder how long it will rumble and shudder and crackle and pound; Scudder, the Alpinist, slipped and was found half a century later preserved in blue ice with his bride and two guides and a dead edelweiss; a German has proved that the snowflakes we see are the germ cells of stars and the sea life to be; hold the line, hold the line, lest its tale be untold; let it amble along through the thumping pain and horror of dichlordisomethingmethane, a trembling white heart with the frost froth upon it, Nova Zembla, poor thing, with that B in her bonnet, stunned bees in the bonnets of cars on hot roads, Keep it Kold, says a poster in passing, and lo, loads, of bright fruit, and a ham, and some chocolate cream, and three bottles of milk, all contained in the gleam of that wide-open white god, the pride and delight of starry-eyed couples in dream kitchenettes, and it groans and it drones and it toils and it sweats-- Shakelton, pemmican, penguin, Poe's Pym-- collapsing at last in the criminal night. Перевод с комментариями доступен здесь: https://ru-nabokov.livejournal.com/337288.html