（学）课外翻译练习材料

Passage 1

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar?s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men?s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must—when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.” It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy—with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused

by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago , says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see. Passage 2

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor the invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes

luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer?s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part—only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato?s and Shakespeare?s.

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office—to teach elements. But they can only highly serve, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather form far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable or wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whist they grow rich every year. Passage 3

The maple smoke of autumn bonfires is incense to Canadians.

Bestowing aroma for the nose, chroma for the eye, sweetness for the spring tongue, the sugar maple prompts this sharing of a favorite myth and an original etymology of the world maple.

The maple looms large in Ojibwa folk tales. The time of year for sugaring-off is “in the Maple Moon.” Among Ajibwa, the primordial female figure is Nokomis, a wise grandmother. In one tale about seasonal change, cannibal wendigos—creatures of evil—chased old Nokomis through the autumn countryside. Wendigos throve in icy cold. When they entered the bodies of humans, the human heart froze solid. Here wendigos represent oncoming winter. They were hunting to kill and eat poor Nokomis, the warm embodiment of female fecundity who, like the summer, has grown old.

Knowing this was a pursuit to the death. Nokimis outsmarted the cold devils. She hid in s stand of maple trees, all red and orange and deep yellow. This maple grove grew beside a waterfall whose mist blurred the trees? outline. As they peered throught the mist, slavering wendigos thought they saw a raging fire in which their prey was burning. But it was only old Nokomis being hidden by the right red leaves of her friends, the maples. And so, drooling ice and huffing frost, the wendigos left her and sought easier prey. For their service in saving the earth mother?s life., these maples were given a special gift: their water of life would be forever sweet, and humans would

tap it for nourishment. Passage 4

A little flap in the backdrop pulled open. And a young man stepped forth.

The rest of the dancers departed and left him alone. The lights took on a white hue and one saw that the young man was very pale with dark-penciled eyes. He was dressed in a light blousing shirt and tight breeches of cream-colored stain.

Stepping forward, with causal grace, he began to dance.

At first, all I could realize of him was the delicate-footed motion, the coolness and lightness of the figure. He wore soft close-fitting slippers and the insteps of his feet were so beautiful and alive that I fell in love with him them at once. He was small and perfectly formed, slender-hipped and probably quite typical of the ballet dancer. And perhaps there was something too mannered and too self-conscious in the face. His eyes were drawn to appear elongated, Oriental. The head was finely shaped, dark-haired. But the very self-conscious style of him seemed to add to the charm. What could equal the stance, the quick lightning movements of the body, or the severe control of its quietness?

But none of these features by themselves gave the full effect. The

complete harmonious accord of the moment—there was no way to explain it.

When the ballet was over and the dancers were bowing outside the curtain, I felt a terrible childish sadness, the kind that is felt only after the accidental pleasure. It is a puzzling sensation, the regret for the loss of that which one had not—no, never—even hoped for in the first place!

The young man stood a little in front of the others, bowing. I noticed that his ears were beautifully pointed and his hair was sleek. The lights in the Auditorium went up. The orchestra began to play. People put on their wraps and began to talk in matter-of-fact voices. But I was gravely occupied with the memory of the young man. Moving slowly in the large arena of the Auditorium, I felt that I would never forget him. I listened dreamily to the music and watched the audience make dignified parade to the rear exit. It seemed, to my impressionable mind, that everything existed only for the contemplation of him. Passage 5

Time was in my life when the dawn happened to other people. I was definitely not a morning person; I associated the sunrise with long plane flights across many time zones and groggy strolls around the

strange cities waiting for my hotel room to become available. Then I had children, and the first light took on new meaning. Sometimes it was the sigh at the end of a fretful night up with a feverish baby; or the opposite, the joyous cry of an exuberant 3-year-old eager to get the day going. It was only later, when mornings were taken over by the getting-to-school frenzy, that I discovered the serenity of the surprisingly fast transition from night to day. For the small price of 15 minutes of sleep I could buy 15 minutes of solitary peace—with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. Given the tidbit of time at my disposal, I developed the habit of skimming the paper, which quickly came down to a surreptitious and almost superstitious ritual checking out obituaries.

At first I attributed this new habit to advancing age—I had recently turned 40—and glumly concluded that I was becoming morbid. But why, then, was I finding my secret rite so uplifting? Finally, after many years of starting the day this way, I have figured out that I am doing it not to obsess about death but to find out about life. Real life. Obituaries capture the benchmarks of life span without passing judgment or making order out of the events. The high points are easy—Pulitzer Prize winners joke that as soon as they are named they know what the headline is going to be on their obituary—but I read most attentively for clues to the defeats and the flatline periods,

the inexplicable changes of heart and the twists of fate, the gambles and the unexpected consequences, the loose ends…

The message that comes through over and over is that although there are times in any life when things seems to be proceeding step by logical step, the whole is mostly random and askew. Life, as every biography and obit I have ever read confirms, is what happens when you are making other plans. Passage 6

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn?t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good

walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through. Passage 7

In a speech delivered in 1952, Rachel Carson warned, “Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from

the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.

Carson voiced these worries before the triumph of television or shopping malls, before the advent of air-conditioning, personal computers, video games, the Internet, cell phones, cloning, genetic engineering, and a slew of other inventions that have made the artificial world ever more seductive. Unlike Earth, the artificial world is mad before us. It feeds our bellies and minds with tasty pabulum; it shelters us from discomfort and sickness; it proclaims our ingenuity; it flatters our pride. Snug inside bubbles fashioned from concrete and steel, form silicon and plastic and words, we can pretend we are running the planet.

By contrast, the natural world was not made for our comfort or convenience. It preceded us by some billions of years, and it will outlast us; it mocks our pride, because it surpasses our understanding and control; it can be dangerous and demanding; it will eventually kill us and reclaim our bodies. We should not be surprised that increasing numbers of people choose to live entirely indoors, leaving buildings only to ride in airplanes or cars, viewing the great outside, if they view it at all, through sealed windows, but more often gazing

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