翻译作业

Exercise for Advanced English-Chinese Translation 2-1

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Fear of Dearth （1）

Carl Tucker

I hate jogging. Every dawn, as I thud around New York City’s Central Park reservoir, I am reminded of how much I hate it. It’s so tedious. Some claim jogging is thought conducive; others insist the scenery relieves the monotony. For me, the pace is wrong for contemplation of either ideas or vistas. While jogging, all I can think about is jogging—or nothing. One advantage of jogging around a reservoir is that there’s no dry-shortcut home. From the listless looks of some fellow trotters, I gather I am not alone in my unenthusiasm: Bill-paying, it seems, would be about as diverting. Nonetheless, we continue to jog; more, we continue to choose to jog. From a practically infinite array of opportunities, we select one that we don’t enjoy and can’t wait to have done with. Why? For any trend, there are as many reasons as there are participants. This person runs to lower his blood pressure. That person runs to escape the telephone or a cranky spouse or a filthy household. Another person runs to avoid doing anything else, to dodge a decision about how to lead his life or a realization that his life is leading nowhere. Each of us has his carrot and stick. In my case, the stick is my slackening physical condition, which keeps me from beating opponents at tennis whom I overwhelmed two years ago. My carrot is to win. Beyond these disparate reasons, however, lies a deeper cause. It is no accident that now, in the last third of the 20th century, personal fitness and health has suddenly become a popular obsession. True, modern man likes to feel good, but that hardly distinguishes him from his predecessors. With zany myopia, economists like to claim that the deeper cause of every thing is economic. Delightfully, there seems no marketplace explanation for jogging. True, jogging is cheap, but then not jogging is cheaper. And the scant and skimpy equipment which jogging demands must make it a marketer’s least favored form of recreation. (336)

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Fear of Dearth （2）

Some scout-masterish philosophers argue that the appeal of jogging and other body-maintenance programs is the discipline they afford. We live in a world in which individuals have fewer and fewer obligations. The workweek has shrunk. Weekend worship is less compulsory. Technology gives us more free time. Satisfactorily filling free time requires imagination and effort. Freedom is a wide and risky river, it can drown the person who does not know how to swim across it. The more obligations one takes on, the more time one occupies, the less threat freedom poses. Jogging can become an instant obligation. For a portion of his day, the jogger is not his own man, he is obedient to a regimen he accepted. Theologists may take the argument one step farther. It is our modern irreligion, our lack of confidence in any hereafter, that makes us anxious to stretch our mortal stay as long as possible. We run, as the saying goes, for our lives, hounded by the suspicion that these are the only lives we are likely to enjoy.

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All of these theorists seem to me more or less right. As the growth of cults and charismatic religions and the resurgence of enthusiasm for the military draft suggest, we do crave commitment. And who can doubt, watching so many middle-aged and older persons torturing themselves in the name of fitness, that we are unreconciled to death, more so perhaps than any generation in modern memory? But I have a hunch there’s a further explanation of our obsession with exercise. I suspect that what motivates us even more than a fear of death is a fear of dearth. Our era is the first to anticipate the eventual depletion of all natural resources. We see wilderness shrinking, rivers losing their capacity to sustain life; the air, even the stratosphere, being loaded with potentially deadly junk. We see the irreplaceable being squandered, and in the depths of our consciousness we are fearful that we are creating an uninhabitable would. We feel more or less helpless and yet, at the same time, desirous to protect what resources we can. We recycle soda bottles and restore old buildings and protect our nearest natural resource—our physical health—in the almost superstitious hope that such small gestures will help save an earth that we are blighting. Jogging becomes a sort of penance for our sins of gluttony, greed, and waste. Like a hairshirt or a bed of nails, the more one hates it, the more virtuous it makes one feel. That is why we jog. Why I jog is to win at tennis. (433)

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In Amy's Eyes （1）

James Webb

Instead of certainties, my generation has treated its children to endless debates and doubts. How will they judge us?

On the dresser in Amy' S empty bedroom was a music box with Snoopy on the lid, a gift when she was four or five. She had outgrown it years before and yet could never bear to part with it. It connected her to simpler days.

I picked it up the evening after she departed for college. Her bedroom haunted me with its silence, its unaccustomed tidiness, with the odd souvenirs from a childhood that was now history. But it was the music box that caught my eye. I opened it and the plaintive song played automatically, surprising me. I remembered, tears filling my eyes, the small child holding the box before she went to sleep. When I saw that she had placed my Marine Corps ribbons from Vietnam inside, I wept like a fool.

I had not seen the ribbons in ten years. When Amy was small, she wore them to school, picking out one or a few to match a jacket or a sweater. It perplexed her mother and caused her teacher to think I was a militarist at a time when virulent antimilitarism was de rigueur. But even at five she could read inside my heart. She had conceived a way to show her loyalty on an issue that was drowning me in pain.

At a time when right and wrong had canceled each other out, when the country was in chaos and I was struggling with the wreckage of my life, my daughter was my friend. At three, she comforted me, asking the right questions when I learned that my closest friend in law school had died. At five, she tried to take care of me when, badly shaken by the suicide of a young veteran, I retreated to a remote campsite. At ten, as her class cheered the return of our hostages from Iran, she lectured them on the difficult homecoming of our Vietnam veterans. Amy' s childhood years have formed her view of the world, but like so many compatriots,

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her life echoed with the turmoil of her elders. Amy has been treated to a view that government is corrupt and unfair. This was fed by continuous debates over civil rights, the Vietnam war, Watergate and the Iran-contra affair. (394)

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In Amy's Eyes （2）

James Webb

Amy grew up listening to the disagreements of her parents, both before and after their divorce. She learned what it meant to be a \who had celebrated the drug culture tell her \dealers started wearing beepers to class. She knows that the generation that flaunted sexual freedom is queasy now, what with abortion so common among teenagers and the illegitimacy rate triple that of 20 years ago.

The greatest legacy of the babyboom generation's early adulthood has been that it asked all the right questions but resolved nothing. Raised by parents whose sacrifices during the Great Depression and World War II purchased for us the luxury of being able to question, we all understood the standards from which some of us were choosing to deviate.

But riven by disagreement, we have encouraged our children to believe that there are no touchstones, no true answers, no commitments worthy of sacrifice. That there are no firm principles: That for every cause there is a countercause. That for every reason to fight there is a reason to run. That for every yin there is a yang.

How will our children react to this philosophical quagmire? My bet is that they will surprise us with their stability, that they will perhaps be slower to make commitments, but more serious when they do.

Someone who has bounced between two parents will not marry with the thought that \can always get a divorce if it doesn't work.\of political policies and recreational activities that were rather innocently begun will be more careful to consider the implications of new seductions at the outset. In the end, just as my tiny daughter eased my personal turmoil years ago, she and her contemporaries may become the arbiters of the generation that spawned them.

Thinking of these things as I sat in the quiet of her bed-room, listening to the yellow music box that still reminds me of the adoration in Amy's eyes, I understood another truth: we, the members of a creative, sometimes absurd, always narcissistic postwar generation, will soon receive a judgment. Whatever it is, our children have earned the right to make it. (382)

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You next computer By Brad Stone

One hundred nineteen hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds. That’s the amount of time Adam Rappoport, a high-school senior in Philadelphia, has spent talking into his silver version LG phone since he got it as a gift last Chanukah. That’s not even the full extent of his habit. He also spends countless additional hours using his phone’s Internet connection to check sports scores, download new ringtones (at a buck a piece) and send short messages to his friends’ phones, even in the middle of class. “I know the touch-tone pad on the phone

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better than I know a key-board,” he says. “I’m a phone guy.” (104)

In some European airport, Peter Hiltunen, a computer-sales executive from Finland, is waiting for another flight…. To pass the time, he downloads the sports magazine Riento! to his mobile phone. For $2, publisher Sendandsee gives him eight pages of pictures and text about sporting events and athletes… (48) …

PalmOne is among the firms racing to trot out the full-featured computerlike phones that the industry dubs “smartphones”. Hawkins’s newest product, the sleek, pocket-size Treo 600, has a tiny key-board, a built-in digital camera and slots for added memory. Other device makers have introduced their own unique versions of the smartphone. Nokia’s N-Gage, launched last fall, with a new version to hit stores this month, plays videogames. Motorola’s upcoming MPx has a nifty “dual-hings” design: the handset opens in one direction and looks like a regular phone, but it also flips open along another axis and looks like an email device, with the expanded phone keypad serving as a small QWERTY keyboard. There are also smart-phones on the way with video cameras, GPS antennas and access to local Wi-fi hotspots, the superfast wireless networks often found in offices, airports and local cafes. There’s not yet a phone that doubles as an electric toothbrush, but that can’t be far away. (159)

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Person of the Year Nancy Gibbs

Sept.11 delivered both a shock and a surprise - the attack, and our response to it - and we can argue forever over which mattered more. There has been so much talk of the goodness that erupted that day that we forget how unprepared we were for it. We did not expect much from a generation that had spent its middle age examining all the ways it failed to measure up to the one that had come before - all fat, no muscle, less a beacon to the world than a bully, drunk on blessings taken for granted.

It was tempting to say that Sept. 11 changed all that, just as it is tempting to say that every hero needs a villain, and goodness needs evil as its grinding stone. But try looking a widow in the eye and talking about all the good that has come of this. It may not be a coincidence, but neither is it a partnership: good does not need evil, we owe no debt to demons, and the attack did not make us better. It was an occasion to discover what we already were. \the purpose of all this,\find out if America today is as strong as when we fought for our independence or when we fought for ourselves as a Union to end slavery or as strong as our fathers and grandfathers who fought to rid the world of Nazism.\ The terrorists, he argues, were counting on our cowardice. They've learned a lot about us since then. And so have we.

For leading that lesson, for having more faith in us than we had in ourselves, for being brave when required and rude where appropriate and tender without being trite, for not sleeping and not quitting and not quitting and not shrinking from the pain all around him, Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of the World, is TIME' s2001 Person of the Year. (336) (From Time, December31, 2001/January 7, 2002)

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My Financial Career Stephen Leacock

When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattle me. The moment I cross the threshold of a bank and attempt to transact business there, I become an irresponsible idiot. I knew this beforehand, but my salary had been raised to fifty dollars a month and I felt that the bank was the only place for it. So I shambled in and looked timidly round at the clerks. I had an idea that a person about to open an account must need consult the manager. I went up to a wicket marked 'Accountant'. The Accountant was a tall, cool devil. The very sight of him rattled me. My voice was sepulchral. 'Can I see the manager?' I said, and added solemnly, 'alone.' I don't know why I said 'alone.' 'Certainly,' said the accountant, and fetched him. The manager was a grave, calm man. I held my fifty-six dollars clutched in a crumpled ball in my pocket. 'Are you the manager?' I said. god knows I didn't doubt it. 'Yes,' he said. 'Can I see you,' I asked, 'alone?' I didn't want to say 'alone' again, but without it the thing seemed self-evident. The manager looked at me in some alarm. He felt that I had an awful secret to reveal. 'Come in here,' he said, and led the way to a private room He turned the key in the lock. 'We are safe from interruption here,' he said: 'sit down.' We both sat down and looked at each other. I found no voice to speak. 'You are one of Pinkerton's men, I presume,' he said. He had gathered from my mysterious manner that I was a detective. I knew what he was thinking, and it made me worse. 'No, not from Pinkerton's,' I said, seeming to imply that I came from a rival agency. 'To tell the truth,' I went on, as if I had been prompted to lie about it, 'I am not a detective at all. I have come to open an account. I intend to keep all my money in this bank.' The manager looked relieved but still serious; he concluded now that I was a son of Baron Rothschild or a young Gould. 'A large account, I suppose,' he said. 'Fairly large, I whispered. 'I propose to deposit fifty-six dollars now and fifty dollars a month regularly. The manager got up and opened the door. He called to the accountant. 'Mr. Montgomery,' he said unkindly loud, 'this gentleman is opening an account. He will deposit fifty-six dollars. Good morning.' I rose. A big iron door stood open at the side of the room. 'Good morning,' I said, and stepped into the safe. 'Come out,' said the manager coldly, and showed me the other way.

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