nvs1408: переводы

→“No, no—that’s quite enough. Thank you. You may return to your place now, Fischbein. Of course, my system is still at an early stage of development, and there are anomalies in all schemes of classification. Nothing is ever one hundred per cent perfect. Racial throwbacks occur from time to time . . . Very well, the class may dismiss. That will be all for today.”

→“With respect, quite sure, Herr Professor. If you would care to look . . .” He started to unbutton his trousers.

→“Are you quite sure of that?”

→“One of my aunts became a Catholic, Herr Professor.” “That’s not what I meant,” he snapped. “Are you a Jew, then?” “Why of course, Herr Professor.”

→“Were any of your family converts perhaps?”

→“Splendid; perfect Nordic stock: well-developed reasoning and cre-ative powers combined with strongly formed faculties of courage and loyalty and accompanied by modest development of the basal area, indi-cating restraint in the bodily appetites and a correspondingly high degree of moral sensibility. What’s your name, boy?”

→The gauge caliper was produced and clamped on to his head, the same measurements were taken and noted down, and the calculations were made as he stood there watching with interest.

→The cadet stepped forward, a Greek god of a boy: blond, blue-eyed and with the sort of arrogantly handsome features which, a generation later, might have been seen on posters in occupied Europe, glowering out from under the brim of a steel helmet and inviting suitably qualified persons to volunteer for the Waffen SS.

→His eyes scanned the rows of cadets seated cross-legged on the deck. At last he lit upon a suitable candidate. He pointed. “Come forward if you please.”

→“Index seventy-eight; facial angle eighty degrees—hmm, rather on the high side so let’s correct that downwards by making allowance for spheno-ethmoidal angle; cranial capacity estimated at 970 cc, corrected to take account of age and body weight; basi-occipital depth thirteen cen-timetres—yes, we’d better correct that by a factor for petrous-temporal depth I think . . . There, an over-all racial index of 1.89, absolutely me-dian for a Jew: powerfully developed calculating abilities as shown by the formation of the occipital area of the brain—a sort of cash register on legs—but stunted moral development as shown by the abnormally small frontal lobes, and atrophy of the spheno-temporal area leading to a near-total absence of the manly virtues such as courage, fidelity and endurance. Now . . .”

→Gauss stood there like Regulus in the hands of the Carthaginians as the scale was clamped across his head and the Professor adjusted screws and slides, scribbling figures down on a notepad as he did so. When he had finished he removed the device and sent Gauss back to his place while he busied himself with a slide-rule and a pencil.

→“Remove your cap, boy.” Gauss took off his cap. “Now, pray stand still a moment: this won’t hurt.” The Professor produced his combined boxwood scale and calipers, now elaborated by an arm projecting forward so that facial angle could be read.

→The Professor grinned, and a half-hearted, rather embarrassed titter went up from the audience: Max Gauss might be Jewish but he was not flat-footed. He got up and made his way forward, his face like thunder.

→“What I am endeavouring to do,” he informed us, “is to isolate those cranial features that make a Swede a Swede and a Kalahari Bushman a Kalahari Bushman. By careful study and measurement of skulls originat-ing from various races and historical epochs I am gradually identifying those constant factors that lead some racial types to produce great civili-sations while others remain permanently mired in the crassest barbarism: what it is, for example, in the formation of the typical Chinese skull that has allowed that race to build one of the world’s most inventive and in-genious cultures—then allow it to sink back into the hopeless morass of sloth and complacent ignorance in which we see it today.Why is it that the Japanese race has suddenly emerged from centuries of slumber to create within a few decades a nation justly described as the Prussia of the Orient? Why did the Spanish race degenerate so utterly once it gave itself over to miscegnation with the Indian peoples of South America?Why is the Jew everywhere and in all epochs an anti-cultural element; a parasitic growth upon other civilisations, incapable of creating anything of his own? Why is the Dane sober, brave and loyal, the Italian excitable and treacherous, and the Negro stupid, slow and credulous? What became of the Ancient Greeks?All these, I say, are questions that will be of the utmost relevance in this new century, and ones that science will surely answer now that the work of the immortal Darwin has finally rid us of the pernicious Judaeo-Christian doctrine that all men are equal.My own modest researches, far from demonstrating that all men are equal, have led me to doubt whether all men are in fact even men, and whether a revision of the crude category ‘homo sapiens’ may not be long overdue. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Cadet Gauss: step forward if you please—and try not to walk flat-footed even if you can’t help it.”

→It seemed that as a result of his skull-collecting activities the Professor was now a great deal nearer than he had been when we left Pola to producing a set of tables which would allow the whole of mankind to be measured and graded according to race, using a set of complicated formulae based upon index of width to length, parietal frontal and occipital breadth, cubic capacity, foramino-basal depths, lobal formation, facial angle and a host of other such factors.

→The course would be entitled “Racial Hygiene.”
We soon found that the afternoon lectures on the poop deck com-prised a good deal more than an exposition of the Professor’s system of cranial measurement—though naturally we went into that in some depth, accompanied by a series of blackboard calculations so recondite that even Linienschiffsleutnant Svoboda declared himself baffled by them.

→But now we were at sea he was back on form, striding about the decks in his loden plus-fours and interfering in everybody’s work. In the end he became such a nuisance that the Captain invited him to give a series of daily lectures to the cadets; more out of a desire to keep him occupied each afternoon than in the hope that he would impart anything likely to be of much use to us in our chosen profession.

→While we were lying at Callao we had at least been spared the company of Professor Skowronek. He had gone off for three weeks up into the Andes and had returned to the ship just before we sailed, laden down with skulls and artefacts ransacked from Inca tombs. He had even brought back two complete mummies, shrivelled and crouched like two ancient, eyeless babies.

→I saw Zaleski glancing nervously at the rifle in the corner. Our own weapons were outside.

→“The contract from Herr Karczag at the Theatr an der Wien. I keep up with the Austrian papers, you know? There isn’t much that goes on in Vienna that I don’t know about here in Tierra del Fuego I can tell you. My emissaries have shown the draft score and libretto to Herr Karczag. So where’s the contract?”