英语名篇汉译精粹（36段）.doc

英语文选精粹
Selected Readings in English
（英汉对照）

1. Age
The same space seems shorter as we grow older… in youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of long-drawn out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the week smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and years grow hollow and collapse.
n William James (1842—1910): Principles of Psychology
参考译文：
年岁
年纪愈大，就愈感觉时间短促……年轻时，我们在每天的每个时刻里，都可能有全新的主观或客观经验。那时领悟力佳，记忆力好，那段时期的回忆就像一场快脚步的有趣旅游，内容杂乱而丰富，时间也被拉长。但随着岁月一年一年的过去，这种经验变成了一种无意识的例行生活，我们一点也不再留心它们。时间一天天一周周地流逝，没有在记忆里留下些什么，一年也就比一年变得更加空洞虚掷。
美国哲学家及心理学家威廉·詹姆斯：《心理学原理》
2. Alienation
By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts—but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.
Erich Fromm (1900—1980)：The Sane Society
参考译文：
疏离
疏离，指的是人在体验自己时，把自己视为外人的一种体验模式。有人说，这是自己疏远了自己。这种人不觉得自己是个人世界的中心，不认为自己的行为是自己所做的，相反地，行为和行为的后果才是他的主宰，他必须服从甚至崇拜。疏离的人疏远自己，就好像是他在疏远别人一样。他就像其他人，别人对他的感受方式和人们对事物的感受方式一样；他用感官和常识来体验，却无法同时与自己或外在世界产生明确的关联。
德国精神分析学家及社会哲学家弗罗姆：《健全的社会》
3. American Dream
I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dram. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed：“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by color of their skin but by content of their character. I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, through places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
Martin Luther King (1929—1968)：I Have a Dream
参考译文：
美国梦
朋友们，我今天要对你们说，尽管眼前横阻着困难和挫折，但我仍然有一个梦想。这是一个深植于 “美国梦”梦想。
我有一个梦想：将来有一天，这个国家会站起来，实践其信条的真谛：“我们认为这些真理是不言而喻的:人人生而平等。”
我有一个梦想：将来有一天，在乔治亚周的红土山丘上，昔日奴隶的孩子和昔日奴隶主的孩子，能够情同手足地同坐一堂。
我有一个梦想：将来有一天，甚至在密西西比州——备受不公平与压迫所熬煎地州郡，能够改造成一片自有又公平的绿洲。
我有一个梦想：将来有一天，我的四个孩子所住的国家，是以品性而非肤色来评判人的。我今天有这么一个梦想!
我有一个梦想：阿拉巴马州州长口口声声说干预和废除，将来有一天，这个州能够变成这种情况：黑人小男孩和小女孩，能够和白人小男孩及小女孩携手同行，如同兄弟姐妹。我今天有这么一个梦想!
我有一个梦想：将来有一天，每个山谷都能被填平，每座山岳丘陵都能被铲平，崎岖之处变为平原，弯处变直，圣光披露，众生一同目睹。
这就是我们的希望。这就是我重返南方所抱持的信念。有了这个信念，我们就能够在绝望之山挖掘出一块希望之石。有了这个信念，我们就可以把国家的嘈杂不谐之音变成一首歌颂手足之情的美妙交响曲。有了这个信念，我们就能够一道工作，一同祈祷，共同奋斗，一起入狱，并肩捍卫自由，明天我们总有一天终会自由。
美国黑人民权领袖马丁·路德·金：《我有一个梦想》
4. The Battle of Waterloo
All that day, from morning until past sunset, the cannon never ceased to roar. It was dark when the cannonading stopped all of a sudden.
All of us have read of what occurred during that interval. The tale is in every Englishman’s mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its remembrance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alternations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil’s code of honor.
William Makepeace Thackeray(1811—1863)：Vanity Fair
参考译文：
滑铁卢之战
那天从早晨到日落，炮声隆隆，没有停过。到了天黑之后，炮轰才突然停止。
我们都知道当时发生了什么事。每个英国人都讲着这个故事。大战决定胜负的时候，你我都还是小孩子，我们听了又听，讲了又讲，对这场著名的战役一点也不会感到厌倦。那些当天战败的百万勇敢同胞，他们想起这件事时仍是忿忿不平，巴不得有机会雪耻。如果战后的胜利站在他们那边，他们成了得意的一方，把可怕的仇恨和愤怒留给我们，两个不甘示弱的国家就会没完没了地斗下去，光荣与耻辱，成功与失败，互相消长，没有终止。数百年后，我们法国人和英国人可能还在互相吹嘘和残杀，勇敢地维护魔鬼的“荣誉”法典。
英国小说家萨克雷：《名利场》
5. Beauty
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves’-neck luster, hovering and evanescent.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882): Essays
参考译文：
美
古人说，“美”是品德之花。瞥视它的容貌样子，谁能说明那种难以言喻的魅力呢？我们因温和满足之情而动容，但我们无法得知这种恍惚闪光般的雅兴究竟指向何方。如果想把美整理出个条理，就会破坏了美的想象。美也不在表现社会所说的友谊或爱情的关系，在我看来，美所呈现的是一个迥然不同且无法企及的领域，指出一种超越性的感觉和甜蜜的关系，说明玫瑰和紫罗兰所暗示或预示的是什么。我们无法接近美。美的本质犹如鸽子颈项上的乳白光泽，飘忽即逝。
美国散文家、哲学家及诗人爱默生：《文集》
6. The Beloved
Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-handed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
Carson McCullers (1917—1967)：The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
参考译文：
被爱者
“被爱”的人如今有各种样子。异国异域的人容易刺激恋情的发生。一个年老心智衰退的好爷爷，可能仍然爱着二十年前某个午后在齐豪街上所看到的一个陌生女孩。传教士可能爱上放荡女。被爱的这个人可能不忠、油头粉面、恶习难改。对此，爱他的人可能也和旁人一样心知肚明，可是却一点也不会影响爱情的发展。一个最平凡的人，可能成为美如沼泽毒百合的炽热爱情的对象。一个好人，可能让凶暴又品质恶劣的人对其产生爱恋；一个语无伦次的疯子，可能让某人的灵魂产生温柔朴素的田园情调。因此，任何爱情的价值或品质，都取决于爱者本人。
正因为如此，我们大多数人宁愿“爱人”而不是“被爱”。几乎人人都想成为爱别人的人。粗略地说来，很奇怪的是，很多人竟无法承受被爱的状态。被爱者有很明白的理由对爱者又怕又恨，因为爱者始终设法想把被爱者看得一清二楚。爱者渴望与被爱者有一些关系，即使这样做只会让自己痛苦。
美国女作家卡森·麦卡勒斯：《伤心咖啡馆的民谣》
7. Our Bias
The hour-glass whispers to the lion’s paw,
The clock-towers tell the gardens day and night,
How many errors Time has patience for,
How wrong they are in being always right.

Yet Time, however loud its chimes or deep,
However fast its falling torrent flows,
Has never put the lion off his leap
Nor shaken the assurance of the rose.
For they, it seems, care only for success;
While we choose words according to their sound
And judge a problem by its awkwardness;
And Time with us was always popular.
When have we not preferred some going round
To going straight to where we are？
Wystan Hush Auden (1907—1973)
参考译文：
我们的偏见

沙漏对着狮爪低语，
钟楼日夜倾诉花园:
时间容忍多少错误，
说它常存多么谬误。

不管沙漏流得多快，
声音多么洪亮深沉，
它也不能阻挡狮跃，
或动摇玫瑰的自信。
因它们只想着成功；
我们凭字音选字辞，
看粗劣来判断问题；
我们爱与时间相伴。
我们不都爱兜圈子
而非直达现况的吗？
英国诗人、剧作家及批评家奥登
8．Birth
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
William Wordsworth (1770—1850)：Ode: Intimations of Immortality
参考译文：
诞生
出生犹如入睡与遗忘；
伴同我们升起的灵魂，
这远方来的生命之星，
已经沉落在别的地方；
不是在全然的疏漏中，
不是在全然的裸露中，
而是在蔓生的云辉里
我们来自宇宙这家乡：
襁褓时天堂就在身旁！
英国诗人威廉·华兹华斯：《不朽的征兆》
9．Childhood
Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.
I think I have always know about my memory. I know when it is to be trusted and when some dream or fantasy entered on the life, and the dream, the need of dream, led to distortion of what happened. And so I knew early that the rampage angers of an only child were distorted nightmares of reality. But I trust absolutely what I remember about Julia.
Lillian Hellman (1905—1984)：Julia
参考译文：
童年
我小时候的记忆比许多人模糊：不知道为什么，童年一结束，我就别过脸去，但我知道决不是因为有着痛苦回忆这种常见的原因。关于这一点，多年来便困扰着我，但后来我发现，旧时儿事，通常不足以为信。有些人搬出好些昔日的盛事趣事来聊以自慰，有些人则念念不忘或真实或想象而来的痛苦，把它当成自己何以变得如此的口实。
我想我一向清楚自己的记性，知道那一段时间的记忆是可以相信的，明白生活中在何时又掺进了梦想或幻想。做过的梦和对梦想的需要，扭曲了发生的事件。我也很早就了解到，独生子之所以大吵大闹，是做恶梦之后所扭曲的结果。然而，对于茱丽亚的回忆，我百分之百相信是确实无误的。
美国女作家莉莲·海尔曼：《茱丽亚》
10. Cities and City Life
Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.
Jonathan Raban: Soft City
参考译文：
都市与都市生活
生活在都市里是一门艺术，我们需要艺术和时尚的词汇，才能描绘存在于日新月异的都市生活中的人类与物质之间的独特关系。于是我们想象的都市，充满了柔性的幻想、神话和梦魇。这样的城市，比起可按统计值绘制在地图上、可在都市社会学、人口学、建筑学专著中见到的那种生硬城市，都是同样真实的，甚或更加真实。
英国作家乔纳森·拉班：《柔性城市》
11. Conscience
When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent all ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years’ lifespan only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?
Cyril Connolly (1903—1974): The Unquiet Grave
参考译文：
良心
日积月累的内疚和悔恨，不仅来源于芝麻小事，也来源于无伤大雅的乐趣。它们就像垃圾桶，我一生却都得带着它们，一想到这里，我就感到万物之中就属人类最软弱、最天生不良。人类拥有七十年的寿命，却为何只是依然故我，无可救药地毒害自己的生命？为何人类把良心当成了死老鼠，扔进井里，任其腐烂？
英国作家康利诺：《不平静的坟墓》
12. Conservatives and Radicals
Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused, when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882): New England Reformers
参考译文：
保守派与激进派
在最没有精力或最骄奢淫逸的时候，人是保守派。在吃过晚餐尚未就寝之前，在生病或上了年纪之时，人是保守分子。但在早上，在智性良心觉醒时，在听音乐或读诗时，人又成了激进分子。
美国散文家、哲学家及诗人爱默生：《新英格兰改革家》
13. Day
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She knew how to hit to a hair’s breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
Thomas Hardy (1840—1928)：Tess of the D’Urbervilles
参考译文：
白昼
苔丝目前的惟一活动是在天黑之后；当她走进森林里，似乎才会觉得最没有孤独感。她知道怎么抓住黄昏的片刻:那时，明暗平分秋色，白天里的压抑与夜晚的牵挂相互抵消，留下绝对的心灵自由，活着的苦痛而后降至最低。她并不害怕阴暗，她仅有的念头似乎就是想规避人们，或者说，世界这个冰冷的生长物，整体看来很骇人，可是它的个体非但不足畏惧，甚至还很可怜。
英国小说家及诗人托马斯·哈代：《德伯家的苔丝》
14. Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That , to se