| Brave, aggressive men of action like Colonel Cathcart left him feeling helpless and alone. | Энергичные, напористые, вроде полковника Кэткарта, вызывали у него чувство беспомощности и одиночества. |
| Wherever he went in the Army, he was a stranger. | Где бы капеллан ни появился, для всех он был чужим. |
| Enlisted men and officers did not conduct themselves with him as they conducted themselves with other enlisted men and officers, and even other chaplains were not as friendly toward him as they were toward each other. | И нижние чины, и офицеры держались с ним иначе, чем с другими нижними чинами и офицерами, и даже остальные капелланы были между собой в более коротких отношениях, чем с ним. |
| In a world in which success was the only virtue, he had resigned himself to failure. | В мире, где успех - единственная добродетель, он сам обрек себя на неудачу. |
| He was painfully aware that he lacked the ecclesiastical aplomb and savoir-faire that enabled so many of his colleagues in other faiths and sects to get ahead. | Он болезненно осознавал, что лишен апломба и ловкости - качеств, столь необходимых для духовника, помогавших идти в гору столь многим его коллегам других вероисповеданий и сект. |
| He was just not equipped to excel. | Скорее всего он не был рожден для преуспеяния. |
| He thought of himself as ugly and wanted daily to be home with his wife. | Он считал себя уродом, и единственное, о чем он мечтал денно и нощно, - оказаться дома, возле своей жены. |
| Actually, the chaplain was almost good-looking, with a pleasant, sensitive face as pale and brittle as sandstone. His mind was open on every subject. | На самом деле капеллан был почти привлекательным: у него было приятное, нежное лицо, бледное и хрупкое, как известняк, и живой, открытый ум. |
| Perhaps he really was Washington Irving, and perhaps he really had been signing Washington Irving's name to those letters he knew nothing about. | А может, он и правда был Вашингтон Ирвинг? Может, он и правда ставил имя Вашингтона Ирвинга на тех неведомых ему письмах? |
| Such lapses of memory were not uncommon in medical annals, he knew. | Он знал, что подобные подвохи памяти не раз описаны в анналах медицины. |
| There was no way of really knowing anything. He remembered very distinctly-or was under the impression he remembered very distinctly-his feeling that he had met Yossarian somewhere before the first time he had met Yossarian lying in bed in the hospital. | Но ему было известно также, что ничего нельзя знать наверняка. Нельзя знать наверняка и то, что ничего нельзя знать наверняка. Он весьма отчетливо помнил, или ему это только казалось, что он отчетливо помнил, что где-то он уже видел Йоссариана еще до того, как впервые увидел его на госпитальной койке. |
| He remembered experiencing the same disquieting sensation almost two weeks later when Yossarian appeared at his tent to ask to be taken off combat duty. | Он помнил, что испытал такое же беспокойное чувство две недели спустя, когда Йоссариан зашел к нему в палатку с просьбой помочь избавиться от участия в боевых операциях. |
| By that time, of course, the chaplain had met Yossarian somewhere before, in that odd, unorthodox ward in which every patient seemed delinquent but the unfortunate patient covered from head to toe in white bandages and plaster who was found dead one day with a thermometer in his mouth. But the chaplain's impression of a prior meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him. Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain's lean, suffering frame insatiably. | Но к тому-то времени он уже действительно встречал Йоссариана - в палатке госпиталя. Сомнения неотвязно грызли душу капеллана, мечущуюся в бренной хрупкой телесной оболочке. |
| Was there a single true faith, or a life after death? | Существуют ли единая, истинная вера и загробная жизнь? |
| How many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God occupy himself in all the infinite aeons before the Creation? Why was it necessary to put a protective seal on the brow of Cain if there were no other people to protect him from? | Сколько ангелов или чертей могут усесться на острие булавки? Чем занимался господь бог в безбрежном океане вечности, до того как сотворил мир? |
| Did Adam and Eve produce daughters? | Производили Адам и Ева на свет дочерей или нет? |
| These were the great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. | Словом, множество вопросов мучило капеллана. |
| Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners. | И все же ни один из них не был для него столь тяжким крестом, как вопрос доброты и умения держаться с людьми. |
| He was pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. | До седьмого пота он бился в тисках труднейшей дилеммы: с одной стороны, он был не в состоянии разрешить свои проблемы; с другой - он не желал отбросить их как неразрешимые. |
| He was never without misery, and never without hope. 'Have you ever,' he inquired hesitantly of Yossarian that day in his tent as Yossarian sat holding in both hands the warm bottle of Coca-Cola with which the chaplain had been able to solace him, 'been in a situation which you felt you had been in before, even though you knew you were experiencing it for the first time?' Yossarian nodded perfunctorily, and the chaplain's breath quickened in anticipation as he made ready to join his will power with Yossarian's in a prodigious effort to rip away at last the voluminous black folds shrouding the eternal mysteries of existence. 'Do you have that feeling now?' Yossarian shook his head and explained that déjà vu was just a momentary infinitesimal lag in the operation of two coactive sensory nerve centers that commonly functioned simultaneously. The chaplain scarcely heard him. He was disappointed, but not inclined to believe Yossarian, for he had been given a sign, a secret, enigmatic vision that he still lacked the boldness to divulge. There was no mistaking the awesome implications of the chaplain's revelation: it was either an insight of divine origin or a hallucination; he was either blessed or losing his mind. Both prospects filled him with equal fear and depression. It was neither déjà vu, presque vu nor jamais v |