韩素音翻译原文(1)

老来乐Delights in Growing Old六十整岁望七十岁如攀高山。

不料七十岁居然过了。

又想八十岁是难于上青天，可望不可即了。

岂知八十岁又过了。

老汉今年八十二矣。

这是照传统算法，务虚不务实。

现在不是提倡尊重传统吗?At the age of sixty I longed for a life span of seventy, a goal as difficult as a summit to be reached. Who would expect that I had reached it? Then I dreamed of living to be eighty, a target in sight but as inaccessible as Heaven. Out of my anticipation, I had hit it. As a matter of fact, I am now an old man of eighty-two. Such longevity is a grant bestowed by Nature; though nominal and not real, yet it conforms to our tradition. Is it not advocated to pay respect to nowadays?老年多半能悟道。

孔子说“天下有道”。

老子说“道可道”。

《圣经》说“太初有道”。

佛教说“邪魔外道”。

我老了，不免胡思乱想，胡说八道，自觉悟出一条真理: 老年是广阔天地，是可以大有作为的。

An old man is said to understand the Way most probably: the Way of good administration as put forth by Confucius, the Way that can be explained as suggested by Laotzu, the Word (Way) in the very beginning as written in the Bible and the Way of pagans as denounced by theBuddhists. As I am growing old, I can't help being given to flights of fancy and having my own Way of creating stories. However I have come to realize the truth: my old age serves as a vast world in which I can still have my talents employed fully and developed completely.七十岁开始可以诸事不做而拿退休金，不愁没有一碗饭吃，自由自在，自得其乐。

走出幽谷此番美国经济复苏比以往都要缓慢，各种政府措施也是收效甚微。

“美利坚，汝欲何去何从？”美国垮掉一代的代表杰克凯鲁亚克半个世纪前发出的这一问，也是如今威胁世界经济的最大不确定因素。

美国的选民最担忧的便是。

他们即将顶着近10%居高不下的失业率，去参加十一月二号中期选举。

他们要准备好了，前路会异常艰辛漫长。

三十年代以来最严重的经济衰退在一年前终于止步。

原本起步乏力的复苏在年初又急剧放缓。

第二季度GDP缓慢爬升了1.6%，过后更是徘徊不前。

临时购房优惠政策截止后，房市也随之暴跌。

私人企业可提供的就业岗位很少，失业率看似不降反升。

整个夏季担忧与日俱增，如果复苏的脚步继续放慢，美国经济有可能再次步入衰退。

幸运的是，现在看来这些忧虑似乎有点夸大其词。

第二季度GDP 的乏力表现部分是由对中国进口额暂时激增引起的。

据最新统计，八月份还不错的零售额，失业救济申请人数也有所减少，这些都表明，尽管经济依旧疲软，但至少不会继续下滑。

经验表明，虽然经济复苏在起初一两个季度内都会出现动荡，但是很少再次陷入衰退。

目前，最有可能的情况是，美国的经济会在大概2.5%左右缓慢爬升，不至于止步不前，却也远远不足以改善失业率。

以往美国都能走出经济衰退，为何此次前景这般不堪？因为以往经济衰退多数是由紧缩的货币政策引发的。

一旦放宽货币政策，需求便随之回弹。

而这次衰退则是由金融危机引发的。

由于需要修复银行体系，重组资产负债表，金融危机后的复苏一般都显得疲缓。

通常，这种减债期会长达七年之久，也就是说美国要到2014年才能走出经济衰退。

民众可以通过一些方式更快地减少负债，但即使是乐观的市场分析人也认为行程尚未过半。

政治博弈美国最大的问题在于，政客们尚未认识到经济将长期处于缓慢发展的状态，更别提去应对其后果了。

少数敢于直言的官员们开始呼吁：失业率可能居高不下。

但是政治辩论更多的是在归咎经济衰退的责任而不是提出有建设性的方法给此次复苏注入活力。

Are We There Y et?美国经济复苏道路漫长America’s recovery will be much slower than that from most recessions; but the government can help a bit.美国此次经济复苏所需的时间比以往所遇到的绝大多数经济衰退都要慢得多，但是政府可以采取相关措施。

“WHITHER goest thou, America?”“美利坚，你，路在何方？”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.半个世纪之前，“垮掉的一代”代表作家杰克·凯鲁亚克就提及了这个悬而未决并且困扰全球经济发展的最不确定因素。

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.同时，这个问题也反映出美国选民们的最大担忧，11月2日国会中期选举在即，而美国民众几近10%的失业率仍旧平稳保持。

They should prepare themselves for a long, hard ride. 美国应该为接下来的这一场旷日持久、艰苦卓绝的斗争做好充足准备。

The most wrenching recession since the 1930s ended a year ago. 自上世纪30年代以来最严重的经济衰退于一年前结束。

The BlanketFloyd DellPetey hadn’t really believed that Dad would be doing it—sending Granddad away. “Away” was what they were calling it. Not until now could he believe it of Dad.But here was the blanket that Dad had that day bought for him, and in the morning he’d be going away. And this was the last evening they’d be having together. Dad was off seeing that girl he was to marry. He’d not be back till late, and they could sit up and talk.It was a fine September night, with a silver moon riding high over the gully. When they’d washed up the supper dishes they went out on the shanty porch, the old man and the bit of a boy, taking their chairs. “I’ll get me fiddle,” said the old man, “and play ye some of the old tunes.” But instead of the fiddle he brought out the blanket. It was a big, double blanket, red, with black cross stripes.“Now, isn’t that a fine blanket!” said the old man, smoothing it over his knees. “And isn’t your father a kind man to be giving the old fellow a blanket like that to go away with? It cost something, it did—look at the wool of it! And warm it will be these cold winter nights to come. There’ll be few blankets there the equal of this one!”It was like Granddad to be saying that. He was trying to make it easier. He’d pretended all along it was he that wanting to go away to the great brick building—the government place, where he’d be with so many other old fellows having the best of everything.... But Petey hadn’t believed Dad would really do it, until this night when he brought home the blanket.“Oh, yes, it’s a fine blanket,” said Petey, and got up and went into the shanty. He wasn’t the kind to cry, and, besides, he was too old for that, being eleven. He’d just come in to fetch Granddad’s fiddle.The blanket slid to the floor as the old man took the fiddle and stood up. It was the last night they’d be having together. There wasn’t any need to say, “Play all the old tunes.” Granddad tuned up for a minute, and then said, “This is one you’ll like to remember.”The silver moon was high overhead, and there was a gentle breeze playing down the gully. He’d never be hearing Granddad play like this again. It was as well Dad was moving into that new house, away from here. He’d not want, Petey wouldn’t, to sit here on the old porch of fine evenings, with Granddad gone.The tune changed. “Here’s something gayer.” Petey sat and stared out over the gully. Dad would marry that girl. Yes, that girl who’d kissed him and slobbered over him, saying she’d try to be agood mother to him, and all.... His chair creaked as he involuntarily gave his body a painful twist.The tune stopped suddenly, and Granddad said: “It’s a poor tune, except to be dancing to.” And then: “It’s a fine girl your father’s going to marry. He’ll be feeling young again, with a pretty wife like that. And what would an old fellow like me be doing around their house, getting in the way, an old nuisance, what with my talk of aches and pains! And then there’ll be babies coming, and I’d not want to be there to hear them crying at all hours. It’s best that I take myself off, like I’m doing. One more tune or two, and then we’ll be going to bed to get some sleep against the morning, when I’ll pack up my fine blanket and take my leave. Listen to this, will you? It’s a bit sad, but a fine tune for a night like this.”They didn’t hear the two people coming down the gully path, Dad and the pretty girl with the hard, bright face like a china doll’s. but they heard her laugh, right by the porch, and the tune stopped on a wrong, high, startled note. Dad didn’t say anything, but the girl came forward and spoke to Granddad prettily: “I’ll not be seeing you leave in the morning, so I came over to say good-by.”“It’s kind of you,” said Granddad, with his eyes cast down; and then, seeing the blanket at his feet, he stopped to pick it up. “Andwill you look at this,” he said in embarrassment, “the fine blanket my son has given me to go away with!”“Yes,” she said, “it’s a fine blanket.” She felt of the wool, and repeated in surprise, “A fine blanket—I’ll say it is!” She turned to Dad, and said to him coldly, “it cost something, that.”He cleared his throat, and said defensively, “I wanted him to have the best...”The girl stood there, still intent on the blanket. “It’s double, too,” she said reproachfully to Dad.“Yes,” said Granddad, “it’s double—a fine blanket for an old fellow to be going away with.”The boy went abruptly into the shanty. He was looking for something. He could hear that girl reproaching Dad, and Dad becoming angry in his slow way. And now she was suddenly going away in a huff.... As Petey came out, she turned and called back, “All the same, he doesn’t need a double blanket!” And she ran up the gully path.Dad was looking after her uncertainly.“Oh, she’s right,” said the boy coldly. “Here, Dad”—and he held out a pair of scissors. “Cut the blanket in two.”Both of them stared at the boy, startled. “Cut it in two, I tell you, Dad!” he cried out. “And keep the other half!”“That’s not a bad idea,” said Granddad gently. “I don’t need so much of a blanket.”“Yes,” said the boy harshly, “a single blanket is enough for an old man when he’s sent away. We’ll save the other half, Dad; it will come in handy later.”“Now, what do you mean by that?” asked Dad.“I mean,” said the boy slowly,” that I’ll give it to you, Dad—when you’re old and I’m sending you—away.”There was a silence, and then Dad went over to Granddad and stood before him, not speaking. But Granddad understood, for he put out a hand and laid it on Dad’s shoulder. Petey was watching them. And he heard Granddad whisper, “It’s all right, son—I knew you didn’t mean it....” And then Petey cried.But it didn’t matter—because they were all three crying together.译文：一床双人毛毯（美）弗罗伊德•戴尔晴朗的九月的夜晚，银色的月光洒落在溪谷上。

Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing TestThe idea of measuring A.I. by its ability to “pass” as a human – dramatized in countless scifi films – is actually as old as modern A.I. research itself. It is traceable at least to 1950 when the British mathematician Alan Turing published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” a paper in which he described what we now call the “Turing Test,” and which he referred to as the “imitation game.” There are different versions of the test, all of which are revealing as to why our approach to the culture and ethics of A.I. is what it is, for good and bad. For the most familiar version, a human interrogator asks questions of two hidden contestants, one a human and the other a computer. Turing suggests that if the interrogator usually cannot tell which is which, and if the computer can successfully pass as human, then can we not conclude, for practical purposes, that the computer is “intelligent”?More people “know” Turing’s foundational text than have actually read it. This is unfortunate because the text is marvelous, strange and surprising. Turing introduces his test as a variation on a popular parlor game in which two hidden contestants, a woman (player A) and a man (player B) try to convince a third that he or she is a woman by their written responses to leading questions. To win, one of the players must convincingly be who they really are, whereas the other must try to pass as another gender. Turing describes his own variation as one where “a computer takes the place of player A,” and so a literal reading would suggest that in his version the computer is not just pretending to be a human, but pretending to be a woman. It must pass as a she.Passing as a person comes down to what others see and interpret. Because everyone else is already willing to read others according to conventional cues (of race, sex, gender, species, etc.) the complicity between whoever (or whatever) is passing and those among which he or she or it performs is what allows passing to succeed. Whether or not an A.I. is trying to pass as a human or is merely in drag as a human is another matter. Is the ruse all just a game or, as for some people who are compelled to pass in their daily lives, an essential camouflage? Either way, “passing” may say more about the audience than about the performers.That we would wish to define the very existence of A.I. in relation to its ability to mimic how humans think that humans think will be looked back upon as a weird sort of speciesism. The legacy of that conceit helped to steer some older A.I. research down disappointingly fruitless paths, hoping to recreate human minds from available parts. It just doesn’t work that way. ContemporaryA.I. research suggests instead that the threshold by which any particular arrangement of matter can be said to be “intelligent” doesn’t have much to do with how it reflects humanness back at us. As Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig (now director of research at Google) suggest in their essential A.I. textbook, biomorphic imitation is not how we design complex technology. Airplanes don’t fly like birds fly, and we certainly don’t try to trick birds into thinking that airplanes are birds in order to test whether those planes “really” are flying machines. Why do it for A.I. then? Today’s serious A.I. research does not focus on the Turing Test as an objective criterion of success, and yet in our popular culture of A.I., the test’s anthropocentrism holds such durable conceptual importance. Like the animals who talk like teenagers in a Disney movie, other minds are conceivable mostly by way of puerile ventriloquism.Where is the real injury in this? If we want everyday A.I. to be congenial in a humane sort of way, so what? The answer is that we have much to gain from a more sincere and disenchanted relationship to synthetic intelligences, and much to lose by keeping illusions on life support. Some philosophers write about the possible ethical “rights” of A.I. as sentient entities, but that’s not my point here. Rather, the truer perspective is also the better one for us as thinking technical creatures.Musk, Gates and Hawking made headlines by speaking to the dangers that A.I. may pose. Their points are important, but I fear were largely misunderstood by many readers. Relying on efforts to program A.I. not to “harm humans” (inspired by Isaac Asimov’s “three laws” of robotics from 1942) makes sense only when an A.I. knows what humans are and what harming them might mean. There are many ways that an A.I. might harm us that have nothing to do with its malevolence toward us, and chief among these is exactly following our well-meaning instructions to an idiotic and catastrophic extreme. Instead of mechanical failure or a transgression of moral code, the A.I. may pose an existential risk because it is both powerfully intelligent and disinterested in humans. To the extent that we recognize A.I. by its anthropomorphic qualities, or presume its preoccupation with us, we are vulnerable to those eventualities.Whether or not “hard A.I.” ever appears, the harm is also in the loss of all that we prevent ourselves from discovering and understanding when we insist on protecting beliefs we know to be false. In the 1950 essay, Turing offers several rebuttals to his speculative A.I., including a striking comparison with earlier objections to Copernican astronomy. Copernican traumas that abolish the false centrality and absolute specialness of human thought and species-being are pricelessaccomplishments. They allow for human culture based on how the world actually is more than on how it appears to us from our limited vantage point. Turing referred to these as “theological objections,” but one could argue that the anthropomorphic precondition for A.I. is a“pre-Copernican” attitude as well, however secular it may appear. The advent of robust inhuman A.I. may let us achieve another disenchantment, one that should enable a more reality-based understanding of ourselves, our situation, and a fuller and more complex understanding of what “intelligence” is and is not. From there we can hopefully make our world with a greater confidence that our models are good approximations of what’s out there.。

老来乐Delights in Growing Old六十整岁望七十岁如攀高山。

不料七十岁居然过了。

又想八十岁是难于上青天，可望不可即了。

岂知八十岁又过了。

老汉今年八十二矣。

这是照传统算法，务虚不务实。

现在不是提倡尊重传统吗 ?At the age of sixty I longed for a life span of seventy, a goal as difficult as a summit to be reached. Who would expect that I had reached it? Then I dreamed of living to be eighty, a target in sight but as inaccessible as Heaven. Out of my anticipation, I had hit it. As a matter of fact, I am now an old man of eighty-two. Such longevity is a grant bestowed by Nature; though nominal and not real, yet it conforms to our tradition. Is it not advocated to pay respect to nowadays?老年多半能悟道。

孔子说 “天下有道”。

老子说 “道可道”。

《圣经》说“太初有道”。

佛教说“邪魔外道”。

我老了，不免胡思乱想，胡说八道，自觉悟出一条真理 : 老年是广阔天地，是可以大有作为的。

An old man is said to understand the Way most probably: the Way of good administration as put forth by Confucius, the Way that can be explained as suggested by Laotzu, the Word (Way) in the very beginning as written in the Bible and the Way of pagans as denounced by the Buddhists. As I am growing old, I can't help being given to flights of fancy and having my own Way of creating stories. However I have come to realize the truth: my old age serves as a vast world in which I can still have my talents employed fully and developed completely.七十岁开始可以诸事不做而拿退休金，不愁没有一碗饭吃，自由自在，自得其乐。

第二十二届韩素音青年翻译奖汉译英参考译文Simple Happiness of Dwelling in the Back StreetsA secluded life has traditionally been deemed, as it seems, the supreme state of happiness, although such aloofness and retirement breed loneliness as well. Few people in fact end up as genuine recluses, whose contentment does not suffice to construe what happiness is for all.As a common saying goes, while the “lesser hermit” lives in seclusion in the country, the “greater hermit” does so in the cit y. Not necessarily in solitude does reside true happiness which can be found in busy streets rather than in the woods.Here in the city lanes the early morning sunshine filters through the carved old-style latticed windows on the walls and faintly gilds the exquisite potted plants in courtyards. As eggs sizzle in frying pans, the morning begins to fill with rising sounds: the soft voices of children, the chugging rhythm of car engines, the sweet exchange of goodbyes between husbands and wives, as well as the brief greetings among neighbors. Such back streets are busy but not chaotic, lively but not clamorous, plain but not wearisome.Although the green patches at the end of the back streets are not so lushly verdant as those on the mountains, the urban air is permeated with a vitality lacking in the wilderness.Under pale yellow street lamps, each bench embodies diversified feelings—sweetness and happiness, joys and sorrows—all interwoven to slowly ferment in tranquility. No one knows what kind of pleasant surprise may be in store for him around the corner: a uniquely styled and busy cafe? Or a bar emitting jazz music? Or a coffee shop with tall stools and a relaxed atmosphere? Perhaps it is also satisfying just to sit outdoors on a wooden chair under a sunshade, chatting over a cup of tea about daily trifles with new friends.All these elements, tempered and deposited by time, settled finally into a custom, a tacit understanding and a culture.When neighbors and friends come, they share witty jokes about personal trivialities, implicitly understanding each other's eye movements of like astuteness. Family members sit around the dining table, chattering through mouthfuls of food, and no one is bothered by the noise.Those lanes, narrow as they may be, cannot hold back the pervading happiness...But as dense, cold high-rises shoot up in the city, woefully accompanied by traffic congestion and air pollution, people’s happiness is little by little being eroded and lost. With more dwelling space and privacy, one has his “self” encircled in a solitary world, careful not to infringe on the souls of others, while also seeking not to be infringed upon. However, when one quiets dow n, the once tiresome hubbub now may evoke warm feelings and nostalgia.To Manhattan with soaring skyscrapers, people prefer Florence with sun-bathed ancient alleys by the towering red dome (1); to Lujiazui with dazzling night lights, people prefer Wanhangdu Road with narrow lanes full of rollicking children. Even as one grows old, it is likely that his dreams would be embellished by the serenity of the grey old houses, the calls of vendors in a soft-toned local dialect, and the small lanes filled with soothing memories.If observed with a perceptive eye, every inch of the walls and corners adorned with moss and ivy becomes a verdurous poem, which, neither elegant nor powerful, represents plain and simple happiness.Perhaps it is not so difficult to define happiness after all. Happiness is an unfurled scroll of poems, describing ordinary alleys under the city skies.No one knows how much simple happiness is seeping through those back streets lit up by the scattered lamps as the night falls...注释(1) 即佛罗伦萨的Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (圣母百花大教堂）。

历届韩素音翻译大奖赛竞赛原文及译文英译汉部分 (3)Beauty (excerpt) (3)美(节选) (3)The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power byThomas De Quincey (8)知识文学与力量文学托马斯.昆西 (8)An Experience of Aesthetics by Robert Ginsberg (11)审美的体验罗伯特.金斯伯格 (11)A Person Who Apologizes Has the Moral Ball in His Court by Paul Johnson (14)谁给别人道歉，谁就在道义上掌握了主动保罗.约翰逊 (14)On Going Home by Joan Didion (18)回家琼.狄迪恩 (18)The Making of Ashenden (Excerpt) by Stanley Elkin (22)艾兴登其人（节选）斯坦利.埃尔金 (22)Beyond Life (28)超越生命[美] 卡贝尔著 (28)Envy by Samuel Johnson (33)论嫉妒[英]塞缪尔.约翰逊著 (33)中译英部分 (37)在义与利之外 (37)Beyond Righteousness and Interests (37)读书苦乐杨绛 (40)The Bitter-Sweetness of Reading Yang Jiang (40)想起清华种种王佐良 (43)Reminiscences of Tsinghua Wang Zuoliang (43)歌德之人生启示宗白华 (45)What Goethe's Life Reveals by Zong Baihua (45)怀想那片青草地赵红波 (48)Yearning for That Piece of Green Meadow by Zhao Hongbo (48)可爱的南京 (51)Nanjing the Beloved City (51)霞冰心 (53)The Rosy Cloud byBingxin (53)黎明前的北平 (54)Predawn Peiping (54)老来乐金克木 (55)Delights in Growing Old by Jin Kemu (55)可贵的“他人意识” (58)Calling for an Awareness of Others (58)教孩子相信 (61)To Implant In Our Children’s Young Hearts An Undying Faith In Humanity (61)英译汉部分Beauty (excerpt)美(节选)Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping撞倒; 冲撞into beauty. “I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset,”a friend tells me, “but it feels the same.”This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering破译(密码), 辨认(潦草字迹) what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me this thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's⑴equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. “They're so beautiful,” he says, “you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth.” I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, “Si mplicity, symmetry .对称(性); 匀称, 整齐, elegance, and power.”我结识一些科学家（包括伊娃和露丝），也拜读过不少科学家的著作，从中我作出推断：人们在探求自然规律的旅途中，须臾便会与美不期而遇。

英译汉：Hidden Within Technology‟s Empire, a Republic of LettersWhen 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 very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.In refusing to be obsolete, you challenged and defied the evolutionist historians. I had great respect for Spengler in my youth, but even then I couldn‟t accept his conclusions, and (with respect and admiration) I mentally told him to get lost.Sixty years later, in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, I come upon the old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form. Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence.He speaks of our “atomized culture,” and his is a responsible, up-to-date and carefully considered opinion. He speaks of “art forms as technologies.” He tells us that movies will soon be “downloadable”—that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device—and predicts that films will soon be marketed like books. He predicts that the near-magical powers of technology are bringing us to the threshold of a new age and concludes, “Once this happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the 21st century.”In support of this argument, Mr. Teachout cites the ominous drop in the volume of book sales and the great increase in movie attendance: “For Americans under the age of 30, film has replaced thenovel as the dominant mode of artistic expression_r_r.” To this Mr. Teachout adds that popular novelists like Tom Clancy and Stephen King “top out at around a million copies per book,” and notes, “The final episode of NBC‟s …Cheers,‟ by contrast, was seen by 42 million people.”On majoritarian grounds, the movi es win. “The power of novels to shape the national conversation has declined,” says Mr. Teachout. But I am not at all certain that in their day “Moby-Dick” or “The Scarlet Letter” had any considerable influence on “the national conversation.” In themid-19th century it was “Uncle Tom‟s Cabin” that impressed the great public. “Moby-Dick” was a small-public novel.The literary masterpieces of the 20th century were for the most part the work of novelists who had no large public in mind. The novels of Proust and Joyce were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity.Mr. Teachout‟s article in The Journal follows the path generally taken by observers whose aim is to discover a trend. “According to o ne recent study 55 percent of Americans spend less than 30 minutes reading anything at all. . . . It may even be that movies have superseded novels not because Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology.”“We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies,” he says, “but that is what they are, which means they have been rendered moribund by new technical developments.”Together with this emphasis on technics that attracts the scientific-minded young, there are other preferences discernible: It is better to do as a majority of your contemporaries are doing, better tobe one of millions viewing a film than one of mere thousands reading a book. Moreover, the reader reads in solitude, whereas the viewer belongs to a great majority; he has powers of numerosity as well as the powers of mechanization. Add to this the importance of avoiding technological obsolescence and the attraction of feeling that technics will decide questions for us more dependably than the thinking of an individual, no matter how distinctive he may be.John Cheever told me long ago that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him. When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn. “If I couldn‟t picture them, I‟d be sunk,” he said. And the novelist Wright Morris, urging me to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off. “When I‟m not writing, I listen to the electricity,” he said. “It keeps me company. We have conversations.”I wonder how Mr. Teachout might square such idiosyncrasies with his “art forms as technologies.” Perhaps he would argue that these two writers had somehow isolated themselves from“b road-based cultural influence.” Mr. Teachout has at least one laudable purpose: He thinks that he sees a way to bring together the Great Public of the movies with the Small Public of the highbrows. He is, however, interested in millions: millions of dollars, millions of readers, millions of viewers.The one thing “everybody” does is go to the movies, Mr. Teachout says. How right he is.Back in the 20‟s children between the ages of 8 and 12 lined up on Saturdays to buy their nickel tickets to see the crisis of last Saturday resolved. The heroine was untied in a matter of seconds just before the locomotive would have crushed her. Then came a new episode; and after that thenewsreel and “Our Gang.” Finally there was a western with Tom Mix, or a Janet Gaynor picture about a young bride and her husband blissful in the attic, or Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara or Wallace Beery or Adolphe Menjou or Marie Dressler. And of course there was Charlie Chaplin in “The Gold Rush,” and from “The Gold Rush” it was only one step to the stories of Jack London.There was no rivalry then between the viewer and the reader. Nobody supervised our reading. We were on our own. We civilized ourselves. We found or made a mental and imaginative life. Because we could read, we learned also to write. It did not confuse me to see “Treasure Island” in the movies and then read the book. There was no competition for our attention.One of the more attractive oddities of the United States is that our minorities are so numerous, so huge. A minority of millions is not at all unusual. But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind. They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the woods. Departments of literature across the country have not succeeded in alienating them from books, works old and new. My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly that if the woods were filled with readers gone astray, among those readers there were probably writers as well.To learn in detail of their existence you have only to publish a magazine like The Republic of Letters. Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly without hope, materialize. One early reader wrote that our paper, “with its contents so fresh, p erson-to-person,” was “real,non-synthetic, undistracting.” Noting that there were no ads, she asked, “Is it possible, can it last?” and called it “an antidote to the shrinking of the human being in every one of us.” And toward the end of her letter our co rrespondent added, “It behooves the elder generation to come up with reminders of who we used to be and need to be.”This is what Keith Botsford and I had hoped that our “tabloid for literates” would be. And for two years it has been just that. We are a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature. I hope we are not like those humane do-gooders who, when the horse was vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall Square for thirsty nags.We have no way of guessing how many independent, self-initiated connoisseurs and lovers of literature have survived in remote corners of the country. The little evidence we have suggests that they are glad to find us, they are grateful. They want more than they are getting. Ingenious technology has failed to give them what they so badly need.蜗居在巷陌的寻常幸福 (韩素音翻译大赛汉译英原文)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。

第三十二届韩素音翻译大赛英译汉原文Aesthetic Education and National Progress[1]The diminution of emphasis on the arts and the humanities and the corresponding increased emphasis on business and STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) has resulted in a normative conception of national progress that excludes aesthetic education. In this essay, I argue that aesthetic educators should challenge the normative understanding of national progress. (In the humanities, aesthetic educators typically are educators of English, foreign languages and literature, philosophy, art history and film studies.) To this end, I call attention to the writings of the French philosopher Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) because in the adaptation of her notion of progress lies possible hope for the future of the humanities and the arts.[2][2] In contemporary American society, national progress is more often than not equated with job creation, and job creation is linked to advancement in business and the STEM disciplines. For example, in his 2012 acceptance speech after the national election, President Obama called for the United States to remain the leader in science and technology, and then he exclaimed, “America, I believe we can build on the progress we've made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunities and new security for the mi ddle class.”[3]Lip service is paid to civic responsibility and its role in national progress, while federal and state governments, as well as institutions of higher education, drastically cut budgets and/or entire programs in the humanities and the arts. Aesthetic educators know that these cuts will, in the long term, be devastating to civil society because the humanities and the arts are precisely the programs that convey cultural capital. More precisely, they cultivate in students the critical judgment and the independence of thought needed to be able to make informed decisions about their place in civil society. Given the number of indicators that point to a decline in public and institutional support for the humanities and the arts, however, it has become easy for aesthetic educators to become demoralized, feel irrelevant, and even believe that we, in fact, have little or no role in national progress.[4]As examples of indicators that point to the increasing irrelevance of the humanities, in FY 2014, the appropriations to both the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts(NEA) were cut by 13 percent from their peak 2010 numbers, while the National Science Foundation (NSF) appropriations increased by almost 4percent from 2010. Perhaps the 13 percent cut would not have been so shocking if the NEH and NEA allocations did not represent a mere 2 percent of the total NSF allocation. The pill is even harder to swallow when one considers that, in 1979, the NEH and the NEA, respectively, received funding equivalent to approximately 16 percent of the NSF.[5]Salaries represent a second measure of the diminishing consideration for the humanities and the arts within university structures. The Oklahoma Faculty Survey by Discipline, a study that surveys the salaries of professors at 114 “Research University/Very High Research Activity” institutions, lists average salaries for all ranks of tenure-track faculty in a number of disciplines. According to the 2013-14 study, the average salary of a faculty member in the arts was $71,463; in English, $76,627; in philosophy and religious studies, $81,971; in physical sciences, $102,636; in engineering, $114,827; and in business management, $139,093. While salaries in 2013-14 increased from 2011-12 in the physical science, engineering, and business management, they decreased in the fine arts, English, and philosophy. If markets drive salaries, the arts and the humanities are clearly not high in market demand. This lack of demand for the humanities and the arts is further underscored in Governor Rick Scott's proposal that tuition rates for Florida state universities be frozen for students who major in “strategic areas”. Lizette Alvarez from the New York Times states of Scott’s proposal, “The messa ge from Tallahassee could not be blunter: Give us engineers, scientists, health care specialists and technology experts. Do not worry so much about historians, philosophers, anthropologists and English majors.” From multiple perspectives, then, we see an explicit shift to STEM disciplines and a discouragement of humanities and arts education, whether in program development, faculty salaries, or student tuitions. Faced with what seems to be such overwhelming confirmation of aesthetic educators’ irrelevance t o today’s understanding of national progress—namely, advancement in business, science and technology—aesthetic educators in the humanities and the arts are struggling to communicate to others outside our field, and to the public at large, our vital role.[6]As demoralizing as the perceived irrelevance of arts and humanities education may be and as disappointing as our attempts to articulate our relevance have been, we may be able to begin to find hope and purpose in renewed debate around how we think about “progress” and, more precisely, the role of aesthetic education in “progress”. The writings of Germaine de Staël are particularly illuminating because they situate aesthetic education squarely in the progress of the nation and have bearing on the dilemma facing the humanities and the arts today. Her prescient philosophy turns the definition of progress on its head and could give aestheticeducators a powerful tool to fight for the increased relevance and vitality of the humanities and the arts in the broader notion of progress.[7]Germaine de Staël’s notion of progress—namely, the alignment of the perfectibility of the human mind (accretion of knowledge) with the perfectibility of the human species (interplay between individual morality and public morality) —has direct bearing on the difficulties that we as aesthetic educators are having today in articulating our essential role in national progress. Obviously, both types of progress (perfectibility of the human mind and perfectibility of the human species) are essential to the progress of the nation, but Germaine de Staël argues convincingly that they must align. Aesthetic educators might thus remind the public that business and the STEM disciplines neither have as their mandate the watchful alignment of individual and public morality (the vector that guarantees freedom and the continual perfecting of the nation) nor do they have as their directive resistance against dogma. Furthermore, investment in STEM at the expense of the arts and the humanities parallels th e Enlightenment’s obsession with progress as defined as the conservation and accretion of empirical knowledge and material gain. This obsession, at least in Germaine de Staël’s view, contributed to the neglect of the interior moral life of the individual. It, furthermore, diminished emphasis on moral responsibility and independence of judgment, which consequently led to increased partisanship, culminating in the fanaticism of the Reign of Terror. While it is hard to imagine the advent of a Reign of Terror in the United States, it can be argued that obsession with unbridled advancement in science and business at the expense of aesthetic education could lead to the weakening of individual morality—defined by Staël as the devotion to freedom, human rights, and the possibility of collective happiness for all.[8] If Germaine de Staël were alive today, she might argue that the solution to our current humanities and arts crisis is a relatively simple one. First, argue for national progress to be understood as the alignment of the perfectibility of the human mind with the perfectibility of the human species. Scientific advancement at the expense of the watchful alignment of individual and public morality poses a threat to the stability of our nation. Consequently, any call for national progress must include sufficient support of and funding for precisely the disciplines (the humanities and the arts) that have this alignment as their mandate. Secondly, encourage educational models that allow for the combination of a “useful” subject that contributes to a knowledge-based economy and a subject in which they will receive an aesthetic education.。