广外研究生翻译作业附译文

07级研究生翻译作业（汉译英）

尺素寸心（节选）

余光中

回信，固然可畏，不回信，也绝非什么乐事。书架上经常叠着百多封未回之信，“债龄”或长或短，长的甚至一年以上，那样的压力，也绝非一个普通的罪徒所能负担的。一叠未回的信，就像一群不散的阴魂，在我罪深孽重的心底幢幢作祟。理论上说来，这些信当然是要回的。我可以坦然向天发誓，在我清醒的时刻，我绝未存心不回人信。问题出在技术上。给我一整个夏夜的空闲，我该先回一年半前的那封信呢，还是七个月前的这封信？隔了这么久，恐怕连谢罪自谴的有效期也早过了吧。在朋友的心目中，你早已沦为不值得计较的妄人。“莫名其妙！”是你在江湖上一致的评语。

其实，即使终于鼓起全部的道德勇气，坐在桌前，准备偿付信债于万一，也不是轻易能如愿的。七零八落的新简旧信，漫无规则地充塞在书架上，抽屉里，有的回过，有的未回，“只在此山中，云深不知处”，要找到你决心要回的那一封，耗费的时间和精力，往往数倍于回信本身。再想象朋友接信时的表情，不是喜出望外，而是余怒重炽，你那一点决心就整个崩溃了。你的债，永无清偿之日。不回信，绝不等于忘了朋友，正如世上绝无忘了债主的负债人。在你惶恐的深处，恶魇的尽头，隐隐约约，永远潜伏着这位朋友的怒眉和冷眼，不，你永远忘不了他。你真正忘掉的，而且忘得那么心安理得，是那些已经得到你回信的朋友。

我的译文：

An Excerpt from

Unanswered Letters

vs Unbounded Friendship

By Yu Guangzhong

Answering letters does make me flinch; however, not answering them allows me no release at all. Dozens of unanswered letters pile up on my bookshelf, like a sum of debt waiting to be paid. Some have been waiting there for over one year, while some have newly arrived. The pressure from paying off that debt is far beyond what a junior debtor can endure. The stack of unanswered letters are, like a group of haunting ghosts, continually pestering my guilt-loaded soul. Generally, the letters will certainly be replied to. I can even swear by heaven that never do I have the intention not to reply when my mind is clear. The problem is how to reply. Even if I spared myself a whole summer night, I would be wavering on which letter to reply to first, the 18-month-old one or the 7-month-old? The reply has been delayed for so long that I’m afraid even heartfelt apology and self-accusation have already become overdue. In friends’ heart, I’ve been marginalized as a cocky man unworthy of care. “Unaccountable”! That is their unanimous comment on me.

In fact, even though I pull myself together and settle down at the desk, ready to pay off the debt, my determination will easily be split up by doubts. Old and new letters, answered or yet-to-be, cram the shelf and the drawer in disorder, which reminds me of two verses: “He’s simply in the very mountain. In the depths of clouds, his whereabouts are unknown.” (from Calling on a Hermit in Vain by Jia Dao). Picking out the letter I decide to answer from such a mess will cost as multiplied time and energy as answering the letter does. Moreover, on visualizing the facial expression of friends when they receive the reply — rekindled lingering anger rather than surprised delight — my tiny amount of determination dwindle into naught. Consequently, the date when my debt is paid off extends into eternity. Although I ha ven’t answered the letters, I can never forget my friends, any more than a debtor can forget his creditor. In the depth of my disturbed and apologetic heart looms the indelible angry and icy look of my friends. Never can I forget them. Friends who really fall into oblivion, from which guilt is totally absent, are those who have received my reply.

David Pollard的译文：

Thus Friends Absent Speak

Written by Yu Guangzhong and Translated by David Pollard

If it is conceded that replying to letters is to be dreaded, on the other hand not replying to letters is by no means a matter of unalloyed bliss. Normally a hundred or so letters are stacked on my bookshelf, of diverse maturity of debt outstanding, the longest being over a year. That kind of pressure is more than an ordinary sinner can bear. A stack of unanswered letters battens on me like a bevy of plaintive ghosts and plays havoc with my smitten conscience. In principle the letters are there for replying to. I can swear in all honesty that I have never while of sound mind determined not to answer people’s letters. The problem is a technical one. Suppose I had a whole summer night at my disposal: should I first answer the letter that was sent eighteen months ago, or that one that was sent seven months ago? After such a long delay even the expiry date for apology and self-recrimination would surely have passed? In your friends’ eyes, you have already stepped beyond the pale, are of no account. On the grapevine your reputation is “that impossible fellow”.

Actually even if you screw up all your moral courage and settle down at you desk to pay off your letter debt come what may, the thing is easier said than done. Old epistles and new missives are jumbled up together and stuffed in the drawers or strewn on shelves; some have been answered, some not. As the poet was told about the recluse he was looking for: “I know he’s in these mountains, but in this mist I can’t tell where.” The time and energy you would spend to find the letter you have decided to answer would be several times that needed to write the reply itself. If you went on to anticipate that your friend’s reaction to receiving your letter would be less “surprised by joy” than “resentment rekindled”, then your marrow would turn to water, and your debt would never be cleared.

To leave letters unanswered is not equivalent to forgetting friends, no more than it is conceivable that debtors can forget their creditors. At the bottom of such disquietude, at the end of your nightmares, there forever lurks the shadowy presence of this friend with his angry frown and baleful looks: no, you can never forget him. Those who you really put out of your mind, and do so without qualm, are those friends who have already been replied to.

Note:“尺素寸心”假如直译则不达，只好用对策。“尺素寸心”代表书信，最好是找同样代表书信的英语成语或名句。Thus friends absent speak出于John Donne的To Sir Henry Wotton一书。

终生遗憾

八十年代，有一姑娘号召：1.70米以下的男人均为“残废”。于是全国未婚女青年纷纷揭竿而起。

我细细量过九十九次自己标高，实属“终生残废”系列。

但那时年少，血旺气盛，誓与凡俗抗争到底，于是连哄带骗将一净高1.74米的女孩拐回家做了太太，这一壮举颇为“残疾人”们扬了一段眉吐了半口气。

将太太置回家中后我才意识到我的悲哀，这一愤世之举不仅未了我“终生残废”而又平添了“终生遗憾”，我从未享受过将男人坚定有力的胳膊窝勾着太太姣美柔滑的后脖子上街遛弯的幸福。

这一幸福对我来说不仅意味着双脚要离开这生我养我的土地，而且神圣的肚脐亦将昭之于众。

现在，每每出门，高扬的手臂牢牢地挂在太太肩头，其状如猴子紧紧扒着电杆，任凭太太在马路上将我拖来拖去……

痛苦的我常常痛苦地想，如果能重活一回，我再也不与世俗去抗争，因为与世俗抗争是要付出代价的。

Lifetime Regret

In the 1980s, one young lady issued a public pronouncement dismissing all men under the height of 1.70 metres as “handicapped “. It was met with an avalanche of responses from virtually all unmarried women in the nation.

After making perennial efforts to measure my exact height, I reached the inescapable conclusion that I was permanently handicapped. Back in those days, I was a callow young chap vastly capable of daring and fool-hardiness, and determined to wrestle with this prejudice against men’s lack of height .So by hook or by crook, I married a girl who was 1.74 metres in height. Such an astonishing tour de force thus achieved greatly bolstered the morale and esteem of those of us who were “handicapped”.

But only after the girl was enticed into matrimony did I begin to feel my self-inflicted anguish.

This over-reaction of mine not only failed to put an end to my “permanent handicap”, but also gave me lifetime regret. I was deprived of the earthly pleasure of walking with my wife in the street with my strong arm around her delicate neck because it meant that my feet would be lifted from the land that had nurtured me, and worse still, my sacred belly-button would be put on public display.

What happens now is that whenever we go out together, with my outstretched arms tightly clinging to my wife’s shoulder, I am pretty much like a monkey hanging on to a wire pole, allowing her to drag my along the street…

In excruciating agony, I often ponder this: if I could live my life once again, I would never try to achieve the elimination of prejudices of any kind for the simple reason that there is a price to pay.

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 had 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 window 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. “Maybe the purpose of all this,” New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said at a funeral for a friend, “is to 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 abo ut 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 shrinking from the pain all around him, Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of the World, is TIME’s 2001 Person of the Year.

11事件让我们措手不及，也令我们震惊不已。如果要问袭击造成的影响和我们做出的反应，哪一个更有讨论意义，可能永远也没有办法给出答案。四面八方传颂着当天涌现的英勇感人

事迹，我们却忘记了自己疏于防备而不堪一击。我们本没有对这一代人期待太多，因为我们看到的是他们花去壮年时期反复考察他们不及上一代人的原因。结果落得大腹便便，看不到一丝一毫的力量与活力。他们自以为是世界的航标，其实是身在福中不知福的恃强凌弱者。911事件以后想必他们对我们有了很多了解。当然我们对自己也有了不少认识。 朱利安尼在参加一个朋友的葬礼时这样说道：“也许这一切的目的是要我们看到当今的美国仍像我们为独立而战时一样强大；当今的美国仍像我们为推翻奴隶制而团结奋战时一样强大；当今的美国仍像我们的父辈为粉碎纳粹而战时一样强大。”他指出，恐怖主义分子希望我们怯懦，从9 11事件中表现出的正义。这次也许并不是一个巧合。正义与邪恶也不是相互依存，正义不需要邪恶陪伴。我们也不欠这些恶棍什么。这次袭击也没有让我们变得更好。这是一个我们自省的机会。纽约市市长鲁迪 11死难者遗孀的眼睛，谈谈9 11事件改变了这一切，正如同我们会脱口而出说每一个英雄都需要一个反面人物来衬托，正义需要邪恶来砥砺。但试着看看9 我们也许会脱口而出9

他以身作则，比我们自己更信任我们。必须时挺身而出，必要时态度强硬，充满柔情又不落俗套，废寝忘食,苦难当前毫不退缩。他就是朱利安尼,全世界最出色的市长,《时代》周刊2001年度人物.