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Subject: emotional desperation: контекст противоречит первому напрашивающемуся переводу Здравствуйте! Помогите, пожалуйста, с этим словосочетанием (из американской научно-популярной книги о бабочках). По-моему, в данном контексте desperation не годится переводить словом "отчаяние". Хотя ниже к жизни человека, о котором идет речь, и применяют определение "трагическая". Мне кажется, здесь, скорее, подходит что-то типа "безумное желание" (хотя, мне кажется, это не особо хорошо), или как-то в этом духе, не могу сформулировать более точно и не знаю, права ли.Контекст такой, с некоторыми сокращениями. H erman Strecker was a very odd man. He lived the unkempt life of a zealot, going so far as to crawl in between his bedsheets with his pants and boots on. By day, he was a poor stone carver who specialized in carving angels on children’s gravestones. But by night, Strecker descended into a deeper, darker lust—a greedy compulsion that eventually dominated his entire existence. Some people want to possess money. Others want to possess clothes or cars or stamps or houses or politicians. Strecker wanted butterflies. He yearned to own at least one specimen of every butterfly species on Earth. He came close. By the time he died in 1901, having lived a life of intense emotional desperation, he had amassed 50,000 specimens. Strecker was a product of his Victorian world. His tragic life was filled with dead babies and deprivation and women who died young and hunger and an acerbity so extreme that his tale sounds straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. Like the lover in Poe’s “The Raven,” slowly descending into madness, Strecker was a feverishly despondent man. The older he got, the more extreme he became. He was “omnivorous,” he once wrote. Never satisfied, like Midas after gold. “My soul pines,” he told a friend, when seeking an exotic butterfly that proved difficult to acquire.
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