once upon a time, somewhere in the universe very far from here, lived a peaceful star, which moved peacefully in the immensity of the sky, surrounded by a crowd of peaceful planets about which we have not a thing to report. this star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous: and here a reporter’s difficulties begin. we have written “very far,” “big,” “hot,” “enormous”: australia is very far, an elephant is big and a house is bigger, this morning i had a hot bath, everest is enormous. it’s clear that something in our lexicon isn’t working.

很久以前，在離這里相當遙遠的宇宙里某個地方，住著一顆平靜的星星，在浩瀚的天空靜靜地行走著。這顆星星被一群我們叫不出名的行星包圍著。它很大，也很熱，還非常重：這給記者的報道工作開始造成了麻煩。我們用“遙遠，”“很大，”“很熱，”“難以計算，”形容過下面的事物：澳大利亞很遙遠，大象很大，房子更大，今天早晨我沖了個很熱的熱水澡，喜馬拉雅山龐大無比。顯然我們使用的詞典里的詞語遠遠滿足不了我們想形容的事物。

if this story must be written, we must have the courage to eliminate all adjectives that tend to excite wonder: they would achieve the opposite effect, of impoverishing the narrative. for a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. it’s a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and as long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it’s human. it doesn’t go beyond what our senses tell us. until two or three hundred years ago, small meant the scabies mite; there was nothing smaller, nor, as a result, was there an adjective to describe it. the sea and the sky were big, in fact equally big; fire was hot. not until the thirteenth century was the need felt to introduce into daily language a term suitable for counting “very” numerous objects, and, with little imagination, “million” was coined. a while later, with even less imagination, “billion” was coined, with no care being taken to give it a precise meaning, since the term today has different values in different countries.

如果必須要寫這篇故事，我們必須要有勇氣剔除易于激發我們想入非非的所有形容詞：這些詞會使敘述貧瘠無力，起到相反的效果。因為我們人類的語言不適合論述星辰，否則會顯得可笑，就如同某些人想用羽毛去犁地一樣。語言和我們與生俱來的，適合描述和我們人類一般大小和持久存在的物體；它擁有我們的四維，它有人性。它沒有逾越我們感知的事物告知我們事情。就在兩三百年前，小指的是疥瘡上的螨蟲；沒有更小的東西了，結果呢，也就沒有形容詞來形容小了。大海和天空都很大，事實上，它們同樣大??；火是熱的。到了十九世紀，人們才感到有必要將 “很”這一詞引進到日常語言中來，以便計算無數的物體，時機一到，“百萬”這一詞便沒費吹灰之力，應運而生了。不久，也沒費多大的勁，“十億”一詞也被造了出來，也沒有介意這個詞的精確含義，因為這個詞今天在不同的國家里有著不同的價值取向。

not even with superlatives does one get very far: how many times as high as a high tower is a very high tower? nor can we hope for help from disguised superlatives, like “immense,” “colossal,” “extraordinary”: to relate the things that we want to relate here, these adjectives are hopelessly unsuitable, because the star we started from was ten times as big as our sun, and the sun is “many” times as big and heavy as our earth, whose size so overwhelms our own dimensions that we can represent it only with a violent effort of the imagination. there is, of course, the slim and elegant language of numbers, the alphabet of the powers of ten, but then this would not be a story in the sense in which it wants to be a story; that is, a fable that awakens echoes, and in which each of us can perceive distant reflections of himself and of the human race.

對于形容詞最高級形式，人們也沒有走得太遠：多高的塔算非常高的塔呢？像“巨大的，”“龐大的，”“非凡的，”這些形容詞，我們也不能希望從偽裝的最高級性用詞那里得到幫助：敘述我們想在這里敘述的事情，這些形容詞很不適宜，我們不抱有希望，因為星星從開天辟地起就比太陽大十倍，而太陽比我們居住的地球大并且重“許多”倍，其體積遠遠超出了地球，致使我們想破了腦袋也描述不出它的體積到底有多大。誠然，有許多嫻雅和優美的語言，遠比十個字母表的力量要大得多，但在某種意義上說這不是人們想要講述的故事；就是說，寓言可以產生共鳴，我們每個人在讀寓言的時候都能夠隱約看到他自己的和人類的影子。