注：根据大赛所设项目，本汉语原文可被译为英语、法语、俄语、西班牙语、阿拉伯语，参赛者可任选一项或多项。
春节，让世界感知中华文化
在澳大利亚，当地知名巧克力制造商为庆祝中国农历新年，特地推出了小猪造型的巧克力；在阿根廷，“欢乐春节”庙会已经成为当地的“新节日”；在芬兰，人们观看舞龙舞狮表演，与中国同步庆贺新年……刚刚过去的春节假期，不仅中国涌动着浓浓的年味，全球也都遍布着中国元素，洋溢着中国年的气息。
春节文化在世界竞相绽放，为外国人带去不一样的生活烟火与文化意趣。喝一碗腊八粥，体验“过了腊八就是年”；穿一身红衣，讨个红红火火的好彩头；逛一场庙会，感受中国春节热闹的氛围。不断“走出去”的春节文化，为世界节日文化带去独特的风景；在“身临其境”中领略中国文化，也为各国人民观察和感知中国打开了一扇窗口。世界对中国充满兴趣、对中华文化更加认同，这其中既有文明交往的需求，可能也不乏经济的联系、市场的驱动，但从根本上说，还是因为中国综合国力的不断增强、中华文化影响力的不断提升。
文化不只是生活方式，更是一种精神理念。如今，越来越多外国人被中国的传统习俗所吸引，也为中华文化传递出来的价值理念和精神追求所触动。春联、窗花、爆竹，年夜饭、守岁酒、拜年送福，这些带着强烈仪式感的习俗，寄寓着中国人对美好生活的希冀、对家庭价值的坚守、对团圆共享的追求。而无论身在哪里、说着何种语言，这些朴素的情感，都是人们内心共同的祈愿。所以，第一次写春联的英国小伙，会对着手机里保存的汉字一笔一画地写下“幸福”和“爱”；对中国书法充满新奇的摩洛哥姑娘，也坚持要为家里每个人都求个毛笔字。春节文化能够跨越山海，正在于它串起了人们心中共同的情愫。
英国哲学家罗素说过，“中国至高无上的伦理品质中的一些东西，现代世界极为需要”。中华优秀传统文化所蕴含的思想观念、人文精神、道德规范，不仅涵养了中国人的精神生活、架构起中华民族的心灵空间，也对解决人类共同面临的问题具有重要价值。从“道法自然”“天人合一”的发展理念，到“协和万
邦”“讲信修睦”的世界想象，再到“同舟共济”“休戚与共”的命运共同体意识，这些由中华优秀传统文化不断滋养润泽的伦理品质，在世界各地激发更多共鸣，为解决人类共同面临的问题提供了“新的可能”。这正是春节文化在世界各地广受欢迎的深层次原因。
当然，今天中国文化“走出去”，不只要宣介优秀传统文化，还要传播优秀当代文化，展示当代中国的发展进步、当代中国人的精彩生活。今年春节期间，不少展现新形象、新风采的活动走出国门，让国外民众眼前一亮。比如，“欢乐中国年·魅力京津冀”活动亮相美国洛杉矶，让当地人近距离了解到京津冀协同发展的成果；点亮2022冬奥主题文化活动走进瑞士，与雪国人民一起见证中国的“冰雪奇缘”与“3亿人上冰雪”的憧憬与努力。而中国图书“越洋”、影视节目“出海”以及各种海外公益与志愿服务，也与春节文化相得益彰，让“走出去”的中国故事、中国文化更加鲜活生动，为国外民众呈现一个更加立体、更加全面、更加丰富的中国。
“共欢新故岁，迎送一宵中”。中华文化积淀着中华民族最深沉的精神追求，是中华民族生生不息、发展壮大的丰厚滋养。以春节文化“走出去”为契机，把更多优秀中华文化推向世界，让其“活起来”“热起来”，我们就能不断增强中华文化的世界感召力，为解决人类问题贡献更多中国智慧。
Irritability is the tendency to get upset for reasons that seem – to other people – to be pretty minor. Your partner asks you how work went and the way they ask makes you feel intensely agitated. Your partner is putting knives and forks on the table before dinner and you mention (not for the first time) that the fork should go on the left hand side, not the right. They then immediately let out a huge sigh and sweep the cutlery onto the floor and tell you that you can xxxx-ing do it yourself if you know better. It was the most minor of criticisms and technically quite correct. And now they’ve exploded. There is so much irritability around and it exacts a huge daily cost on our collective lives, so we deserve to get a lot more curious about it: what is really going on for the irritable person? Why, really, are they getting so agitated? And instead of blaming them for getting het up about “little things”, we should do them the honour of working out why, in fact, these things may not be so minor after all.
参赛原文： 英译汉原文 Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, a Republic of Letters When I was a boy “discovering literature”, I used to think how wonderful it would be if every other person on the street were familiar with Proust and Joyce or T. E. Lawrence or Pasternak and Kafka. Later I learned how refractory to high culture the democratic masses were. Lincoln as a young frontiersman read Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Bible. But then he was Lincoln. Later when I was traveling in the Midwest by car, bus and train, I regularly visited small-town libraries and found that readers in Keokuk, Iowa, or Benton Harbor, Mich., were checking out Proust and Joyce and even Svevo and Andrei Biely. D. H. Lawrence was also a favorite. And sometimes I remembered that God was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of 10 of the righteous. Not that Keokuk was anything like wicked Sodom, or that Proust?s Charlus would have been tempted to settle in Benton Harbor, Mich. I seem to have had a persistent democratic desire to find evidences of high culture in the most unlikely places. For many decades now I have been a fiction writer, and from the first I was aware that mine was a questionable occupation. In the 1930?s an elderly neighbor in Chicago told me that he wrote fiction for the pulps. “The people on the block wonder why I don?t go to a job, and I?m seen puttering around, trimming the bushes or painting a fence instead of working in a factory. But I?m a writer. I sell to Argosy and Doc Savage,” he said with a certain gloom. “They wouldn?t call that a trade.” Probably he noticed that I was a bookish boy, likely to sympathize with him, and perhaps he was trying to warn me to avoid being unlike others. But it was too late for that. From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early 30?s, taught that our tired old civilization was ve ry nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.
The Posteverything Generation I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one. According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s i mpossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it –naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism –that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism –what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself – is spoke to a larger question about the political and
汉译英原文： 居在巷陌的寻常幸福 隐逸的生活似乎在传统意识中一直被认为是幸福的至高境界。但这种孤傲遁世同时也是孤独的，纯粹的隐者实属少数，而少数者的满足不能用来解读普世的幸福模样。 有道是小隐隐于野，大隐隐于市。真正的幸福并不隐逸，可以在街市而不是丛林中去寻找。 晨光，透过古色古香的雕花窗棂，给庭院里精致的盆景慢慢地化上一抹金黄的淡妆。那煎鸡蛋的“刺啦”声袅袅升起，空气中开始充斥着稚嫩的童音、汽车 启动的节奏、夫妻间甜蜜的道别，还有邻居们简单朴素的问好。巷陌中的这一切，忙碌却不混乱，活泼却不嘈杂，平淡却不厌烦。 巷尾的绿地虽然没有山野的苍翠欲滴，但是空气中弥漫着荒野中所没有的 生机。微黄的路灯下，每一张长椅都写着不同的心情，甜蜜与快乐、悲伤与喜悦，交织在一起，在静谧中缓缓发酵。谁也不会知道在下一个转角中会是怎样的惊喜，会是一家风格独特食客不断的小吃店？是一家放着爵士乐的酒吧？还是一家摆着高脚木凳、连空气都闲散的小小咖啡馆？坐在户外撑着遮阳伞的木椅上， 和新认识的朋友一边喝茶，一边谈着自己小小的生活，或许也是一种惬意。 一切，被时间打磨，被时间沉淀，终于形成了一种习惯，一种默契，一种文化。 和来家中做客的邻居朋友用同一种腔调巧妙地笑谑着身边的琐事，大家眯起的眼睛都默契地着同一种狡黠；和家人一起围在饭桌前，衔满食物的嘴还发着 含糊的声音，有些聒噪，但没人厌烦。 小巷虽然狭窄，却拉不住快乐蔓延的速度…… 随着城市里那些密集而冰冷的高楼大厦拔地而起，在拥堵的车流中，在污 浊的空气里，人们的幸福正在一点点地破碎，飘零。大家住得越来越宽敞，越来越私密。自我，也被划进一个单独的空间里，小心地不去触碰别人的心灵，也 不容许他人轻易介入。可是，一个人安静下来时会觉得，曾经厌烦的那些嘈杂回想起来很温情很怀念。 比起高楼耸立的曼哈顿，人们更加喜欢佛罗伦萨红色穹顶下被阳光淹没的古老巷道；比起在夜晚光辉璀璨的陆家嘴，人们会更喜欢充满孩子们打闹嬉笑的万航渡路。就算已苍然老去，支撑起梦境的应该是老房子暗灰的安详，吴侬软语的叫卖声，那一方氤氲过温馨和回忆的小弄堂。 如果用一双细腻的眼眸去观照，其实每一片青苔和爬山虎占据的墙角，是 墨绿色的诗篇，不会飘逸，不会豪放，只是那种平淡的幸福，简简单单。 幸福是什么模样，或许并不难回答。幸福就是一本摊开的诗篇，关于在城市的天空下，那些寻常巷陌的诗。 夜幕笼罩，那散落一地的万家灯火中，有多少寻常的幸福正蜗居在巷陌……
第二十六届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛原文 英译汉竞赛原文： How the News Got Less Mean The most read article of all time on BuzzFeed contains no photographs of celebrity nip slips and no inflammatory ranting. It’s a series of photos called “21 pictures that will restore your fait h in humanity,” which has pulled in nearly 14 million visits so far. At Upworthy too, hope is the major draw. “This kid just died. What he left behind is wondtacular,” an Upworthy post about a terminally ill teen singer, earned 15 million views this summer and has raised more than $300,000 for cancer research. The recipe for attracting visitors to stories online is changing. Bloggers have traditionally turned to sarcasm and snark to draw attention. But the success of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, whose philosophies embrace the viral nature of upbeat stories, hints that the Web craves positivity. The reason: social media. Researchers are discovering that people want to create positive images of themselves online by sharing upbeat stories. And with more people turning to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s happening in the world, news stories may need to cheer up in order to court an audience. If social is the future of media, then optimistic stories might be media’s future. “When we started, the prevailing wisdom was that snark ruled the Internet,” says Eli Pariser, a co-founder of Upworthy. “And we just had a really different sense of what works.” “You don’t want to be that guy at the party who’s crazy and angry and ranting in the c orner—it’s the same for Twitter or Facebook,” he says. “Part of what we’re trying to do with Upworthy is give people the tools to express a conscientious, thoughtful and positive identity in social media.” And the science appears to support Pariser’s philosophy. In a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers found that “up votes,” showing that a visitor liked a comment or story, begat more up votes on comments on the site, but “down votes” did not do the same. In fact, a single up vote increased the likelihood that someone else would like a comment by 32%, whereas a down vote had no effect. People don’t want to support the cranky commenter, the critic or the troll. Nor do they want to be that negative personality online. In another study published in 2012, Jonah Berger, author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, monitored the most e-mailed stories produced by the New York Times for six months and found that positive stories were more likely to make the list than negative ones. “What we share [or like] is almost like the car we drive or the clothes we wear,” he says. “It
“CATTI杯”第二十七届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛 英译汉竞赛原文： The Posteverything Generation I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blasécollege-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one. According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it – naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism – that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism – what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself – is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world. In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11...at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything. And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right”? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news. On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning – a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.
第十三届“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛原文及参考译文（汉译英）2010-3-26 23:32|发布者: sisu04|查看: 881|评论: 0 摘要: 韩素音青年翻译奖 歌德之人生启示 宗白华 人生是什么？人生的真相如何？人生的意义何在？人生的目的是何？这些人生最重大最中心的问题，不只是古来一切大宗教家哲学家所殚精竭虑以求解答的。世界上第一流的大诗人凝神冥想，深入灵魂的幽邃，或纵身大化中，于一朵花中窥见天国，一滴露水参悟生命，然后用他们生花之笔，幻现层层世界，幕幕人生，归根也不外乎启示这生命的真相与意义。宗教家对这些问题的方法与态度是预言的说教的，哲学家是解释的说明的，诗人文豪是表现的启示的。荷马的长歌启示了希腊艺术文明幻美的人生与理想，但丁的神曲启示了中古基督教文化心灵的生活与信仰，莎士比亚的剧本表现了文艺复兴时人们的生活矛盾与权力意志。至于近代的，建筑于这三种文明精神之上而同时开展一个新时代，所谓近代人生，则由伟大的歌德以他的人格，生活，作品表现出它的特殊意义与内在的问题。 歌德对人生的启示有几层意义，几种方面。就人类全体讲，他的人格与生活可谓极尽了人类的可能性。他同时是诗人，科学家，政治家，思想家，他也是近代泛神论信仰的一个伟大的代表。他表现了西方文明自强不息的精神，又同时具有东方乐天知命宁静致远的智慧。德国哲学家息默尔（Simmel）说：“歌德的人生所以给我们以无穷兴奋与深沉的安慰的，就是他只是一个人，他只是极尽了人性，但却如此伟大，使我们对人类感到有希望，鼓动我们努力向前做一个人。“我们可以说歌德是世界一扇明窗，我们由他窥见了人生生命永恒幽邃奇丽广大的天空！ 再狭小范围，就欧洲文化的观点说，歌德确是代表文艺复兴以后近代人的心灵生活及其内在的问题。近代人失去了基督教对一超越上帝虔诚的信仰。人类精神上获得了解放，得到了自由；但也就同时失所依傍，彷徨摸索，苦闷，追求，欲在生活本身的努力中寻得人生的意义与价值。歌德是这时代精神伟大的代表，他的主著《浮士德》是这人生全部的反映与其问题的解决。歌德与其替身浮士德一生生活的内容就是尽量体验这近代人生特殊的精神意义，了解其悲剧而努力以解决其问题，指出解救之道。所以有人称他的浮士德是近代人的圣
比赛介绍：韩素音青年翻译大赛详解 韩素音其人： 韩素音，是中国籍亚欧混血女作家伊丽莎白·柯默（Elisabeth Comber）的笔名，原名周光湖（Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow）。她的主要作品取材于20世纪中国生活和历史，主要用英语、法语进行写作，1952年，韩素音用英文写就的自传体小说《瑰宝》（A Many Splendoured Thing）一出版即在西方世界引起轰动，奠定了她在国际文坛上的地位。1955年，美国20世纪福克斯公司把《瑰宝》搬上银幕，译名《生死恋》（Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing）。韩素音女士现居瑞士。 韩素音青年翻译奖： 《中国翻译》杂志从1986年开始举办青年“有奖翻译”活动，1989年韩素音女士访华，提供了一笔赞助基金，以此设立了“韩素音青年翻译奖”。至2010年，“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛已经举办了二十二届，是目前中国翻译界组织时间最长、规模最大、影响最广的翻译大赛。每年获奖人员来自社会各界，比赛并非是从所有译文中选出最好的就评为第一名，很多时候会出现第一名空缺的现象，因为评委组是按照严格的标准来筛选译文，没有最优秀的，第一名的位置就会空缺，由此可见韩素音翻译大赛的权威性和严谨性。 参与方式： 韩素音青年翻译大赛由中国译协《中国翻译》编辑部主办（https://www.doczj.com/doc/43384125.html,/），每届比赛设英译汉和汉译英两部分，每部分给出一篇要求翻译的文章，参赛者可以只选择一项，或者两项都参与。注意，参赛者年龄为45岁以下——因为是青年翻译比赛。 参赛规则、竞赛原文和报名表会刊登在每年第一期，也即一月份的《中国翻译》杂志上，中国译协网站上也会有通知，大致规则如下： 1. 参赛译文须独立完成。参赛者在大赛截稿之日前需妥善保存参赛译文的著作权，不可在书报刊、网络等任何媒体公布自己的参赛译文，否则将被取消参赛资格并承担由此造成的一切后果。 2. 参赛译文请用空白A4纸打印（中文宋体、英文Times New Roman，小四，1.5倍行距）。译文前另附一页，将填好的参赛报名表打印或剪贴在此封面上。译文正文内请勿书写译者姓名、地址等任何个人信息，否则将被视为无效译文。每项参赛译文一稿有效，不接收修改稿。 3. 需在指定截稿日期前将译文寄往《中国翻译》编辑部，时间以寄出邮戳时间为准（注：比赛不接受电子稿，因此作品必须按照要求打印好以信件形式寄出），地址：北京市阜外百万庄大街24号《中国翻译》编辑部，邮编：100037，请在信封上注明“参赛译文”字样。 参赛者在交寄参赛译文的同时，交寄报名费40元，如同时参加两项竞赛，交报名费80元。汇款地址：北京市阜外百万庄大街24号《中国翻译》编辑部，邮编：100037。请在汇款单附言上注明“参赛报名费”字样。未交报名费的参赛译文无效。
第二十六届“韩素音”青年翻译大赛 竞赛原文 来源：中国译协网 英译汉竞赛原文： How the News Got Less Mean nip slips and no inflammatory ranting will restore your faith in humanity,” which has pulled in nearly 14 million visits so far. too, hope is the major draw. “This kid just died. What he left behind is post about a terminally ill teen singer, earned 15 million views this summer and has raised more than $300,000 for cancer research. The recipe for attracting visitors to stories online is changing. Bloggers have traditionally turned to sarcasm and snark to draw attention. But the success of sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, whose philosophies embrace the viral nature of upbeat stories, hints that the Web craves positivity. The reason: social media. Researchers are discovering that people want to create positive images of themselves online by sharing upbeat stories. And with more people turning to Facebook and Twitter to find out what’s happening in the world, news stories may need to cheer up in order to court an audience. If social is the future of media, then optimistic stories might be media’s future. “When we started, the prevailing wisdom was that snark ruled the Internet,” says Eli Pariser, a co-founder of Upworthy. “And we just had a really different sense of what works.” “You don’t want to be that guy at the party who’s crazy and angry and ranting in the corner —it’s the same for Twitter or Facebook,” he says. “Part of what we’re trying to do with Upworthy is give people the tools to express a conscientious, thoughtful and positive id entity in social media.” And the science appears to support Pariser’s philosophy. In a recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers found that “up votes,” showing that a visitor liked a comment or story, begat more up votes on comments on the site, but “down votes” did not do the same. In fact, a single up vote increased the
Are We There Yet? America’s recovery will be much slower than that from most recessions; but the government can help a bit. “WHITHER goest thou, America?” That question, posed by Jack Kerouac on behalf of the Beat generation half a century ago, is the biggest uncertainty hanging over the world economy. And it reflects the foremost worry for American voters, who go to the polls for the congressional mid-term elections on November 2nd with the country’s unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at nearly one in ten. They should prepare themselves for a long, hard ride. The most wrenching recession since the 1930s ended a year ago. But the recovery—none too powerful to begin with—slowed sharply earlier this year. GDP grew by a feeble 1.6% at an annual pace in the second quarter, and seems to have been stuck somewhere similar since. The housing market slumped after temporary tax incentives to buy a home expired. So few private jobs were being created that unemployment looked more likely to rise than fall. Fears grew over the summer that if this deceleration continued, America’s economy would slip back into recession. Fortunately, those worries now seem exaggerated. Part of the weakness of second-quarter GDP was probably because of a temporary surge in imports from China. The latest statistics, from reasonably good retail sales in August to falling claims for unemployment benefits, point to an economy that, though still weak, is not slumping further. And history suggests that although nascent recoveries often wobble for a quarter or two, they rarely relapse into recession. For now, it is most likely that America’s economy will crawl along with growth at perhaps 2.5%: above stall speed, but far too slow to make much difference to the jobless rate. Why, given that America usually rebounds from recession, are the prospects so bleak? That’s because most past recessions have been caused by tight monetary policy. When policy is loosened, demand rebounds. This recession was the result of a financial crisis. Recoveries after financial crises are normally weak and slow as banking systems are repaired and balance-sheets rebuilt. Typically, this period of debt reduction lasts around seven years, which means America would emerge from it in 2014. By some measures, households are reducing their debt burdens unusually fast, but even optimistic seers do not think the process is much more than half over. Battling on the bus America’s biggest problem is that its politicians have yet to acknowledge that the economy is in for such a long, slow haul, let alone prepare for the consequences. A few brave officials are beginning to sound warnings that the jobless rate is likely to “stay high”. But the political debate is more about assigning blame for the recession than about suggesting imaginative ways to give more oomph to the recovery.