第十七届韩素音翻译大赛英译汉部分原文

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从十七届韩素音翻译比赛译文看英汉对比与翻译

从十七届韩素音翻译比赛译文看英汉对比与翻译

从十七届韩素音翻译比赛译文看英汉对比与翻译作者:吴艳阳来源:《魅力中国》2018年第12期由于思维方式等方面不同,英汉这两种语言在词法、句法上存在较大差异。

如今,英汉语言对比研究不仅已经成为英汉学科科研热点,对我们做好翻译工作也有帮助。

本文从第十七届韩素音翻译比赛的两篇文章(英译汉节选自Scott Russell Sander的散文Beauty,汉译英为金克木先生所写散文《老来乐》)入手,从英汉对比角度分析部分原文及译文,从中总结英汉差异,继而为以后的翻译提供更好的指导。

一、汉语多主动,英语多被动被动是英语常见的语法现象,体现英语民族重分析、讲客观的思维倾向,英语句子分清主语和宾语,及物和不及物,施事与受事、主动与被动。

汉语被动式的使用受意义和形式的限制并不常见,或采用某些转换形式来表达被动意义。

原:While they share Newton’s faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules.译:世界受一套整合的法则所支配。

析:面对英语中频频出现的被动表达,在译入汉语时,我们要采用不同的策略,避免被字的使用。

如例二中将被转化为“受”字。

二、汉语是竹形结构,英语是树形结构汉语表达像竹子,一节接一节,节节推进,重点在于理清表达的先后顺序。

英语表达像一棵树,要确定句子的主干即主句,其他成分像枝干一样,在主干的基础上延伸。

主干是最重要的部分,其他成分属次要部分。

这就需要在翻译过程中把握中英差异,进行相对应的调整。

原:Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious.译:那些打动我们的理论,往往受到自然之母的肯定,其中奥妙不可言宣。

析:“Why nature ... beautiful”從句做主语,其中“we find beautiful”做“theories”的定语,“Why nature ... theories”则又是一个语意群,“…is far from obvious”是系表结构。

韩素音翻译大赛-英译汉一等奖

韩素音翻译大赛-英译汉一等奖

GlobalizationA fundamental shift is occurring in the world economy. We are moving rapidly away from a world in which national economies were relatively self-contained entities, isolated from each other by barriers to cross-border trade and investment; by distance, time zones, and language; and by national differences in government regulation, culture, and business systems. And we are moving toward a world in which barriers to cross-border trade and investment are tumbling; perceived distance is shrinking due to advances in transportation and telecommunications technology; material culture is starting to look similar the world over; and national economies are merging into an interdependent global economic system. The process by which this is occurring is commonly referred to as globalization.Correspondent: Globalization has been one of the most important factors to affect business over the last twenty years. How is it different from what existed before? Companies used to export to other parts of the world from a base in their home country. Many of the connections between exporting and importing countries had a historical basis. Today, to be competitive, companies are looking for bigger markets and want to export to every country. They want to move into the global market. To do this many companies have set up local bases in different countries. Two chief executives will talk about how their companies dealt with going global. Percy Barnevik, one of the world’s most admired business leaders when he was Chairman of the international engineering group ABB and Dick Brown of telecommunications provider Cable & Wireless.Cable & Wireless already operates in many countries and is well-placed to take advantage of the increasingly global market for telecommunications. For Dick Brown globalization involves the economies of countries being connected to each other and companies doing business in many countries and therefore having multinational accounts.Dick Brown: The world is globalizing and the telecommunications industry is becoming more and more global, and so we feel we’re well-positioned in that market place. You see currency markets are more global tied, economies are globally connected, more so nowadays with expanded trade, more and more multinational accounts are d oing business in many, many more countries. We’re a company at Cable & Wireless now, well-positioned to carry the traffic and to provide the services to more and more companies that now need to get to five countries or twelve countries, we’re often there.Correspondent: When Percy Barnevik became head of the international engineering group ABB, his task was to make globalization work. He decided to divide the business into over a thousand smaller companies. In this way he believed the company could be both global and local. In answering the question “How do you make globalization work?”, Percy Barnevik describes the “global glue” that keeps the many different people in ABB together. He then looks at the need to manage the three contradictions of company: it is decentralized but centrally controlled, it is big and small at the same time and it is both global and local.Percy Barnevik: We have now for ten years after our big merger created a “global glue” where people are tied together, where they don’t interna lly compete, but support each other, and you have global leaders with global responsibility and your local managers working with their profit centers, and if you have the right, so to say, agenda for these people and the right structure, you can use a scale of economy and your advantages of bigness but being small. We used to say you have three contradictions: decentralized and still centrally controlled, big and small, global and local, and, of course, to try to make these contradictions work together effectively, then I think youhave a big organizational competitive edge.Correspondent: Globalizations can bring advantage to a business, but how does a company go global? Dick Brown mentions three ways companies can achieve “globalness”. Firstly, companies can work together in alliances. Secondly, they can acquire or buy other companies, and thirdly they can grow organically by expanding from their existing base.Dick Brown: Well, as you go global, and a handful or more of companies are going to really push out, in my view, to be truly global companies, and some of them, maybe all of them, will also work to be local. They’ll be local in chosen markets and global in their ability to carry their customers’ needs from continent A to continent B. We want to be one of the companies that’s both global and local. Alliances are one way to be global, it’s not the only way to be global; you can acquire your way to “globalness”, you can organically grow your way to “globalness”, you can have alliances which help you get global quicker, so you take your pick.Percy Barnevik: You have to start from the top with local people who understand language, culture and so on, and I think in this global world where the East is coming up now, that’s a winning recipe.Correspondent: ABB already found the winning recipe. Its theory of globalization has become the company’s working practice. So how do you make theory work in practice? Percy Barnevik believes that successful globalization involves getting people to work together, overcoming national, cultural barriers and making the organization customer-driven.Percy Barnevik: You see the easy thing is to have the theory, but then to make the systems work, to make people really work together, to trust each other — Americans, Europeans, Asians, to get over these national cultural barriers and create a common glue, ABB, and then make them customer-driven. If you can achieve that, and create that culture deep down then I think you have an important competitive edge.Correspondent: What Dick Brown and Percy Barnevik have shown is that there are different routes to globalization and that companies have to work hard to succeed in going global. Actually one of the disadvantages of the Global Strategy is that integrated competitive moves can lead to the sacrificing of revenues, profits, or competitive positions in individual countries — especially when the subsidiary in one country is told to attack a global competitor in order to convey a signal or divert that competitor’s resources from another nati on. The challenges managers of transnational corporations face are to identify and exploit cross-border synergies and to balance local demands with the global vision for the corporation. Building an effective transnational organization requires a corporate culture that values global dissimilarities across cultures and markets.英译汉一等奖参赛译文来源:中国译协网EC301全球化1世界经济正在发生根本性的转变。

2016年韩素音青年翻译大赛英译中原题

2016年韩素音青年翻译大赛英译中原题

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2016年第6期(11月15日出版)《中国翻译》杂志将公布竞赛结果。

汉译英竞赛原文:屠呦呦秉持的,不是好事者争论的随着诺贝尔奖颁奖典礼的临近,持续2个月的“屠呦呦热”正在渐入高潮。

当地时间7日下午,屠呦呦在瑞典卡罗林斯卡学院发表题为“青蒿素——中医药给世界的一份礼物”的演讲,详细回顾了青蒿素的发现过程,并援引毛泽东的话称,中医药学“是一个伟大的宝库”。

韩素英翻译大赛原文

韩素英翻译大赛原文

Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing TestThe idea of measuring A.I. by its ability to “pass” as a human – dramatized in countless sci- fi 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. Contemporary A.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. maypose 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 priceless accomplishments. 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.人工智能:超越图灵实验以人工智能“冒充”人的能力的来衡量人工智能的这个概念---已经被数不清的科幻电影搬上了荧幕---实际上已经和现代人工智能研究一样久远了。

第十七届“韩素音青年翻译奖”赛(汉译英)中文原文及参考译文和解析

第十七届“韩素音青年翻译奖”赛(汉译英)中文原文及参考译文和解析

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。

“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛汉译英之体感

“韩素音青年翻译奖”竞赛汉译英之体感

【 关键 词 】 “ 韩素音青年翻译 奖”竞赛 ;汉译英
自改革 开放以来 , 我 国和世界其他地 区间接触 日益频繁 , 作为沟通 、交 流桥梁的翻译工作者在其 中扮演 的角色越来越 重要 。为培养更 多 “ 高层次 、应用型 、专业性 口笔译 人才” 。 我 国也定期举办 各类 型的翻译大赛 ,鼓励更 多优 秀的人才投 身到翻译领域 中来 ,为社会主义现代化建设 服务 。“ 韩素音 ” 青年翻译奖竞赛 即为其 中的焦点赛 事之 一。笔者作为 M T I 专 业 的一名研究 生 ,参加了今年第二十五届 “ 韩 素音”翻译大 赛 。本文 回忆 了笔者 在参 加该项赛事 中 ,翻译 的全过程 ,并 由此得 出的一些 体会 ,旨在能够加深 自己对 翻译 的理解 ,升 华 、提高 自身 的翻泽能力 。 “ 韩素 音青年翻译奖”竞赛 由来 “ 韩 素音青年 翻译奖 ”竞赛前 身为 《 中国翻译 》编辑 部 1 9 8 6年 开始每年定期举办 的 “ 青 年有奖翻译 比赛 ” 。1 9 8 9年 3月 , 英籍华裔 , 韩 素音 女士前来 我国访 问期间 , 与 当时 《 中 国翻译 》杂 志主编叶君健会面 时 ,得 知了国 内正在举办这一 青年翻译赛事 。 作为一名非常支持 中国翻译事业 的爱 国人士 , 韩素影女 士当即表示 愿意 出资一笔赞助 基金来 使这项充满意 义 的活动更好 的开展 下去 。后 经商议 , 《中国翻译 》杂 志决 定用这笔基金设立 “ 韩素音青年翻译奖” , 此后每年举办的 “ 韩 素音青年翻译奖 ”竞赛 ,由此诞生 。


二 、 翻 译 过 程 回 顾
第二十五届 “ 韩素音青年 翻译 奖”竞赛 的汉译英原文名 为《 传 统百货 会否成 为 “ 消 失的行业 ” 》 ,全 文字数 9 1 9 字, 文章讲述 了传统 百货面临 的挑 战及未来 发展 的对策 ,是一个 典型 的应用 型文本。笔者在翻译过程 中 ,依 次经过了译前准 备一翻译—译 后检查 ,三个 阶段 。译前 准备 阶段 ,笔者在通 读全文 的基础上 , 首先找 出文 中专业词汇 , 如“ 传统百货 ” 、 “ 电 商营销 ” 、 “ 同业竞争 ” 、 “ 线上线下一体化 ” 、 “ 差异化竞争 ” 、 “ 商 业模式 ” 、“ 实体 店”等 ; 其次 ,把握整篇 文章的脉络 ,理清 句与句之 间 ,段 与段之间的 内在逻辑关 系 ; 再次 ,读完全文 后 ,通过 网络查 找相关的平行文本 ,熟悉其行 文 、用词等习 惯 ,参考相关 已有 的专业术语 翻译 ,并作好 记录。进 入到动 手翻译 阶段 , 有 了前 期的准备工作 , 为这一 阶段 的翻译做 了 很好的铺垫 。最后一个 阶段是译后检查 , 笔者在译完初稿后 , 首先抛开原 文 ,通读译文 ,修改不通顺 的地方 ,以求行文流 畅; 其次 ,对个人觉 得欠妥的用词 ,语句 ,与同学 、导师协 商之后进行 了修改 。 三、翻译体感 翻译— —仁者见仁 ,智者见智 。 笔 者最大的感触是对于翻译而言 , 仁者见仁 , 智者见智 。 译完文章后 ,笔者将译文发给湖南大学 、湖南师 范大学 、广 东外语外贸大学在读 翻译研究生批改 , 他们提 出的宝贵 意见 , 非常值得参考 。 但 同时也发现 了每个人 的修改 意见都不 一样 , 笔者试着将 每个 修改人的意见用不 同颜 色的笔标 出 ,惊奇 的 发现整片译 文接 近百分之六十左右都是修 改过的 ,其 中有着 短语搭配 的不 同意见 , 句子不 同次序 , 修饰性词语 , 如形容词 、 副词 的不 同用词 ,动名词 、过去分词 的用法 ,时态等 ,就连 同一处地方都 出现了好几种修改意见 。虽然 一篇 文章被修改

2011韩素英翻译大赛全文翻译

2011韩素英翻译大赛全文翻译

“美利坚,你的路在何方?”半个世纪前,“垮掉的一代”的代表作家杰克•凯鲁雅克就曾发出这样的疑问,现在这个问题成为困扰世界经济的最大不确定性因素,同时也反应了美国选民最大的担忧,11月2日国会中期选举在即,而美国10%的失业率还是居高不下。

人们要有所准备,前路漫漫,充满坎坷。

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 likelier to rise than fall. Fears grew over the summer that if this deceleration continued, America’s economy would slip back into recession.自上世纪30年代以来最严重的经济衰退在一年前结束。

但是复苏的起步步伐不够强劲,并且势头在今年早些时候突然放缓。

GDP在第二季度的年增长速度只有区区1.6%,并且自那以后就再无起色。

政府对购买过期未还贷的住房给予短期的税收鼓励政策,但是之后房地长市场行情一路下跌。

2022韩素音国际翻译大赛(英译汉)二等奖译文

2022韩素音国际翻译大赛(英译汉)二等奖译文

行禅人生中的“疫”与益1965年,加里·斯奈德、艾伦·金斯伯格和菲利普·韦伦暂别凡尘杂念,行走在塔玛佩斯山上,冥思苦想。

在此番或曰作环山行禅的旅途中,他们既是诗人,又是佛学生。

他们依循佛教传统以顺时针方向经行,哪儿的自然风光让他们眼前一亮,他们就在哪儿择定仪式并逐一施行:以佛教、印度教的咏唱、诵咒、念经、祈愿等形式。

在1992年的一次采访中,斯奈德鼓励后来的经行者们能像他们表现出来的那样富有创新力。

采访最后他还想说点什么,但欲言又止,或许他原本还想说道说道他们仨选停的地点吧。

经行,是指出于特定目的,围绕神物进行庄严的旋回往返的活动。

这一古老的仪式植根于世界上诸多文化。

那么在现代的语境下,它的意思是什么呢?斯奈德解释道:“要诀是你得用心,得行动,一边走、一边停,一心一意。

它不过是人类驻足欣赏风光——同时也是审视自身——的一种方式。

”二十世纪九十年代末,我在加利福尼亚大学戴维斯分校研究生院师从斯奈德学习诗歌。

他教会我,人类察觉并能阐明自己在哪、周围是什么,有多么的重要。

这也是生物地域主义所倡导的观点。

二十世纪九十年代,英文教授、摄影师大卫·罗伯特森效仿斯奈德,推行环山绕行。

他会带着学生前往塔山作短途旅行,以纪念斯奈德、金斯伯格与韦伦。

1998年3月里寒冷的一天,我彼时的男友、现时的丈夫和我一同参与他组织的长达14英里的上山、下山旋回往返徒步,途中我们会停下来诵念相同的佛教、印度教咒语、经文,在1965年三人朝圣的十个地点祈愿。

罗伯特森此举意在让戴维斯分校里学习荒野文学课程的学生离开教室而深入风土。

该门课程以斯奈德的诗歌为一大特色,因此让学生去一趟塔山看上去是一个不错的选择。

雾气里弥漫着加州湾月桂的浓烈气味。

整整一天的时间里,我们在雾气中翻越一座又一座青翠的山坡、穿越一片又一片的加州栎、花旗松、北美红杉。

终于,我随大部队穿过了最后一片丛林。

这也太难熬了,即便我身体强壮、酷爱徒步。

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Beauty (excerpt)Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those I’ve read about, you can’t pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping 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 what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me this thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac’s equations 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, “Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power.”Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it’s comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short—lived biped on a two--bit planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We’re a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Issac Newton.By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton’s faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I’ve kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.I’mnever more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva’s wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.“All nature is meant to make us think of paradise,” Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even 15 billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird’s wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts. This predilection brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles, carve stone into statues, map time and space.Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there’s more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound sourceof meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming heartsand teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation.美在其中(节选)我认识的科学家,像伊凡和卢斯,还有我通过阅读了解的科学家,普遍认为人们在探索自然界规律的过程中,很快便能与美不期而遇。

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