学生翻译练习材料

Passage 1

Technically, it begins next week. Actually, it began with the epic sigh of relief that could be sensed all over the U. S. right after Labor Day. Even before it arrives, Americans always manage to get into autumn. And no wonder. It is easily the most habitable season of the year.

Indeed, autumn deserves a hymn—and it has received far less tribute than it deserves. True, some mixed notices have come in over the centuries. Horace slandered autumn as a “dead” period—“harvest-season of the Goddess of Death.” He was dead wrong, of course, for as Ovid noted, once he got his mind off sex, autumn is “cum formossisimus annus”—“the fairest season of the year.” Had he lived a little later, Horace might have found out from the U. S. census Bureau that the death rate is usually lower in autumn than in winter and spring. Why? Science doesn?t know, but it is quite possible that the will to live is stronger in the fall. Conversely, the will to mayhem weakens: nobody has ever worried about a Long Hot Autumn.

So autumn is a blatantly vital season, contrary to the allegation of sorrowful pets who misconstrue the message of dying leaves. A more realistic poet, Archibald MacLeish, says that “Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.”

Autumn is also the authentic season of renewal. Yale Lecturer William Zinsser hit the nail squarely: “The whole notion of New Year?s Day as the time of fresh starts and bold resolutions is false.” In truth that time is autumn. Popular pleasure shows itself in those hastening steps and brightened smiles encountered ass the air grows nippier. Some psychiatrists have patients who grow almost alarmed at how congenial they suddenly feel. Autumn is a friendlier time.

Passage 2

There is a time in every man?s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust yourself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their

perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

Passage 3

The 20th century—the century of metamyths and of megadeaths—spawned false notions of total control, derived from arrogant assertions accepted reality as God-ordained, had given way to the secular fanatic, increasingly inclined to usurp God in the effort to construct heaven on earth, increasingly inclined to usurp God in the effort to construct heaven on earth—subordinating not only nature but humanity itself to his own utopian vision.

In the course of the century, this vision was perverted into the most costly exercise of political hubris in mankind?s history: the totalitarian attempt to create coercive utopias. All of reality—on the objective level of social organization and on the subjective level of personal beliefs—was to subject to doctrinal control emanating from a single political center. The price paid in human lives for this excess is beyond comprehension.

Adding them all up, somewhere between 167 million and 175 million individual human beings were deliberately extinguished through politically motivated carnage—the scores of millions of soldiers and civilians killed in the century?s wars, the further scores of millions killed in the concentration camps, gulags, forced collectivization, ethnic transplanting, and killing fields decreed by self-deified dictators. The tens of millions that wee killed because they were perceived, for racial or social reasons, as unworthy of living within the earthly utopia—and the many millions more that were coerced into living within these systems—all testify to the hypnotic appeal of the metamyths of Nazism and communism that postulated the end of history and the attainment of perfection within utopias of total control.

But it hasn?t happened. Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitions, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into whole other ream and other consciousness. A different social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn?t tally with the fulsome description of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them. Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact. Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications so longer limited by time or space wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms. The autonomy has a cost: the more they attend to themselves, the less they remember the past and envision a future. They have all the advantages of modernity and democracy, but

Passage 4

when the gifts of life lead to social joys, not intellectual labor, the minds of the young plateau at age 18. this is happening all around us. The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now.

Passage 5

The international dimension so the current malaise indicate that it cannot be attributed to an

American failure of nerve. Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas. It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie, long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare stare and the multinational corporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well. The science it has fostered, once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the ages, no longer provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate. Neoclassical economic theory cannot explain the coexistence of unemployment and inflation; sociology retreats from the attempt to outline a general theory of modern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Freud into the measurement of trivia. The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offers no miracle cures for social problems.

Passage 6

Light had broken on the long primeval darkness of the world. Now, as the sparks cracked upward and soared away to disappear into the great abyss of the night, as the yellow and orange flames winged their tapering and wavering beauty up into the black void, the bonds between those who belonged to each other in these small intimate communities—sharing the same conditions, problems and pleasures of life—became ever more deeply established and enriched, as their storytelling began: about the characters of the animals they hunted; the dangers, excitements, enjoyments of their discovering, and their new ways of dealing with them; the qualities—serious and funny—of their own characters and those of their comrades; the awesome million manifold stories which slowly went into the establishment of human customs and cultures, grew about the shared fire now blazing with life at the center: the source of utility in the daytime, and of comfort, pleasure, and the delights and glories of imagination at night. In some such context of hearth and home, in some such ways, were born the basic sentiments of human civilization; were primary and enduring values of human custom, the primary ideals of human nature established. And in such ways, too, they have long continued throughout the whole of human history.

Passage 7

It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.

Americans cleave to things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet are in such a rush to snatch any that come within their reach, as if expecting to stop living before they have relished them. They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. If his private business allows him a moment?s relaxation, he will plunge at once into the whirlpool of polities. Then, if at the end of a year crammed with work he has a little spare time, his restless curiosity goes with him traveling up and down the vast territories of the United States. Thus he will travel five hundred miles in a few days as a distracting from his happiness.

Death steps in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of his futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him.

Passage 8

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time the residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Catskills and the hills of Westchester. What a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her though a pneumatic tube—pfft—just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains, and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils. Every time an incision is made in the pavement, the noisy surgeons expose ganglia that are tangled beyond belief. By rights New York should have destroyed itself long ago, from panic or fire or rioting or failure of some vital supply line in its circulatory system or from some deep labyrinthine short circuit. Long ago the city should have experienced an insoluble traffic snarl at some impossible bottleneck. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ship?s rats. It should have been overwhelmed by the sea that licks at it on every side. The workers in its myriad cells should have succumbed to nerves, from the fearful pull of smoke-fog that drifts over every few days from Jersey, blotting out all light at noon and leaving the high offices suspended, men groping and depressed, and the sense of world?s end. It should have been touched in the head by the August heat and gone off its rocker.

Passage 9

As this millennium dawns, New York City is the most important city in the world, the

unofficial capital of planet Earth. But before we New Yorkers become too full of ourselves, it might be worthwhile to glance at dilapidated Kaifeng in central China.

Kaifeng, an ancient city along the mud-clogged Yellow River, was by far the most important city in the world in 1000. And if you?ve never heard of it, that?s a useful warning for Americans-as the Chinese headline above puts it, in a language for the future that many more Americans should start learning, “glory is as ephemeral as smoke and clouds.”

……

Today Kiafeng is grimy and poor, not even the provincial capital and so minor it lacks even an airport. Its sad state only underscores how fortunes change. In the 11th century, when it was the capital of Song Dynasty China, its population was more than one million. In contrast, London?s population then was about 15,000.

An ancient 17-foot painted scroll, now in the Palace Museum in Beijing, show the bustle and prosperity of ancient Kaifeng. Hundreds of pedestrians jostle each other on the streets, camels carry merchandises in from the Silk Road, and teahouses and restaurants do a thriving business. Kaifeng?s stature attracted people from all over the world, including hundreds of Jews. Even today, there are some people in Kaifeng who look like other Chinese but who consider themselves Jewish and do not eat pork.

As I roamed the Kaifeng area, asking local people why such an international center had sunk so low, I encountered plenty of envy of New York. One man said he was arranging to be smuggled into the U. S. illegally, by paying a gang $25,000, but many local people insisted that China is on the course to bounce back and recover its historic role as world leader.

“China is booming now,” said Wang Ruina, a young peasant woman on the outskirts of town. “Give us a few decades and we?ll catch up with the U. S. , even pass it.”

Passage 10

Although art historians have spent decades demystifying Van Gogh?s legend, they have done little to diminish his vast popularity. Auction prices still soar, visitors overpopulate Van Gogh exhibitions, and The Starry Night remains ubiquitous on dormitory and kitchen walls. So complete is Van Gogh?s global apotheosis that Japanese tourists now make pilgrimages to Auvers to sprinkle their relative?s ashes on his grave. What accounts for the endless appeal of Van Gosh myth? It has at least two deep and powerful sources. At the most primitive level, it provides a satisfying and nearly universal revenge fantasy disguised as the story of heroic sacrifice to art. Anyone who has ever felt isolated and unappreciated can identify with Van Gogh and hope not only for a spectacular redemption but also to put critics and doubting relatives to shame. At the same time, the myth offers an alluringly simplistic conception of great art as the product, not of particular historical circumstances and the artist?s painstaking calculations, but of the na?ve and spontaneous outpourings of a mad, holy fool. The gaping discrepancy between Van Gogh?s long-suffering life and his remarkable posthumous fame remains a great and undeniable historical irony. But the notion that he was an artistic idiot savant is quickly dispelled by even the most glancing examination of the artist?s letters. It also must be dropped after acquainting oneself with the rudimentary facts of Van Gogh?s family background, upbringing, and early adulthood.

本文来源：https://www.bwwdw.com/article/29rx.html