譯/田思怡 Among the more unnerving sights a traveler may come across in distant corners of the world are giant hairballs of wires, clumped at the tops of utility poles or hanging perilously from the sides of buildings.
They speak of the exuberant, confounding and sometimes dangerous disorder of a country free of the rules and regulations that make modern life safe.
旅行到世界上某個偏遠的角落，可能會讓人比較神經緊張的景象之一，是大團大團的電線，亂糟糟的壓在電線桿頂端，或是危險地垂掛在建築物側邊。
這些透露了一個沒有法律規章來保障現代生活安全的國家，其不受限制、混亂、有時危險的失序。
For example, Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, is famous for its buzzing, swirling, incomprehensible traffic. If you dare take your eyes off the road, a glance overhead will find a representation of this same tangled, heedless, even insouciant approach to life. One Vietnamese author wrote fancifully of the huge cobweb of electrical, telephone and cable-television wires covering the city.
Utilities in most developed countries don't keep their overhead wiring tidy for tidiness' sake; safety is on the line. A crazy tangle can make repairing faults difficult and dangerous, and wiring improvised by amateurs can be a serious fire hazard.
例如，越南首都河內以吵雜、讓人頭暈和莫名其妙的交通聞名。如果你敢不看路，往上方瞄一眼，將發現一種同樣紊亂、不留心，甚至漫不經心的生活態度的呈現。一位越南作家曾以極富想像力的筆觸描繪覆蓋這個城市的電線、電話線和電視纜線交織的龐大蜘蛛網。
大部分已開發國家的電力公司維持上方接線的整潔，為的不是整潔本身；安全才是重點。瘋狂的線路交纏可能使修復故障的工作變得困難和危險，而且業餘人士隨意接線很可能引發火災。
No visitor to a place where they are common, like Vietnam, India or Pakistan, is more likely to be appalled — and intrigued — by these Gordian tangles than a traveling engineer.
"It's sometimes an intellectual challenge to look and try to figure out what's going on," said Dickon Ross, editor-in-chief of Engineering & Technology, a magazine published by an institute in London.
對常見這些「哥帝爾斯的繩結」（源自希臘神話，意指難解的結）的地方，像是越南、印度和巴基斯坦，沒有訪客比旅行中的工程師更可能驚嚇─及著迷。
倫敦一個研究機構發行的雜誌「工程與科技」總編輯迪康．羅斯說：「去看和努力想出是怎麼回事，有時是智力的挑戰。」
In July, the magazine invited its 138,000 readers to send in pictures of "the worst and most dangerous examples of electrical wiring from around the world." Out of 500 submissions, it selected 12 to publish for readers to rank, each seeming more outrageous than the last.
One from Vietnam showed a "terrifying image of a hapless Vietnamese electrician, totally entangled in the cobweb of crossed wires and hanging above the street like a giant spider in a hard-hat," wrote the magazine's features editor, Vitali Vitaliev.
去年七月，該雜誌邀請它的13萬8000名讀者傳送「世界各地最糟糕和最危險的電線線路」照片。該雜誌從500張傳送的照片中選出12張刊出，讓讀者評比，似乎一張比一張更令人吃驚。
雜誌的專題報導編輯維塔利．維塔利夫寫道，來自越南的一張照片顯示「一個倒楣的越南電工嚇人的景象，他完全陷身於錯綜複雜的電線交纏成的蜘蛛網中，高掛在街道上方，活像一隻戴著頭盔的大蜘蛛」。
By a wide margin, the readers' choice was a showy image from Madras, India, depicting a metered main power line tapped by "multiple bare, unterminated wires," all loosely hung from a wood board that already bore the scorch marks of a fire.
Ross pointed out that the survey was hardly comprehensive: Which countries were included had less to do with where the wiring is wackiest than where engineers like to take vacations.
A case in point: One of the most eye-catching pictures, he said, came from St. Tropez, in the south of France.
讀者票選大幅領先的是來自印度馬德拉斯的一張很顯眼的照片，描繪一條有量表的主電源線，連接著「多條裸露、沒有終端接頭的電線」，鬆散的掛在一塊已有火災燒焦痕跡的木板上。
羅斯指出，這項調查絕對不全面：哪些國家被列入，與電線接得最古怪較無關，而是與工程師喜歡去何處度假較有關。
舉一個恰當的例子：他說，最吸睛的照片之一來自法國南部的聖托佩。
