第22届韩素音翻译大赛英译汉参考译文

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第26届韩素音青年翻译奖大赛参赛试卷（英译汉）

第26届韩素音青年翻译奖大赛参赛试卷（英译汉）请按照以下格式在答卷上填写选手信息栏姓名：_______性别：_____ 学号：_______年级专业：______________ 学院（全称）：_________________ 联系方式：_____________英译汉竞赛原文：How the News Got Less MeanThe 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 faith 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 lef t 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 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 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 says something about us to other people. So people would much rather be seen as a Positive Polly than a Debbie Downer.”It’s not always that simple: Berger says that though positive pieces drew more traffic than negative ones, within the categories of positive and negative stories, those articles that elicited more emotion always led to more shares.“Take two negative emotions, for example: anger and sadness,” Berger says. “Both of those emotions would make the reader feel bad. But anger, a high arousal emotion, leads to more sharing, whereas sadness, a low arousal emotion, doesn’t. The same is true of the positive side: excitement and humor increase sharing, whereas contentment decreases sharing.”And while some popular BuzzFeed posts —like the recent “Is this the most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done?” —might do their best to elicit shares through anger, both BuzzFeed and Upworthy recognize that their main success lies in creating positive viral material.“It’s not that people don’t share negative stories,” says Jack Shepherd, editorial director at BuzzFeed. “It just means that there’s a higher potential for positive stories to do well.”Upworthy’s mission is to highlight serious issues but in a hopeful way, encouraging readers to donate money, join organizations and take action. The strategy seems to be working: barely two years after its launch date (in March 2012), the site now boasts 30 million unique visitors per month, according to Upwort hy. The site’s average monthly unique visitors grew to 14 million people over its first six quarters — to put that in perspective, the Huffington Post had only about 2 million visitors in its first six quarters online.But Upworthy measures the success of a story not just by hits. The creators of the site only consider a post a success if it’s also shared frequently on social media. “We are interested in content that people want to share partly for pragmatic reasons,” Pariser says. “If you don’t have a g ood theory about how to appear in Facebook and Twitter, then you may disappear.”Nobody has mastered the ability to make a story go viral like BuzzFeed. The site, which began in 2006 as a lab to figure out what people share online, has used what it’s le arned to draw 60 million monthly unique visitors, according to BuzzFeed. (Most of that traffic comes from social-networking sites, driving readers toward BuzzFeed’s mix of cute animal photos and hard news.) By comparison the New York Times website, one of the most popular newspaper sites on the Web, courts only 29 million unique visitors each month, according to the Times.BuzzFeed editors have found that people do still read negative or critical stories, they just aren’t the posts they share with their friends. And those shareable posts are the ones that newsrooms increasingly prize.“Anecdotally, I can tell you people are just as likely to click on negative stories as they are to click on positive ones,” says Shepherd. “But they’re more likely to sh are positive stories. What you’re interested in is different from what you want your friends to see what you’re interested in.”So as newsrooms re-evaluate how they can draw readers and elicit more shares on Twitter and Facebook, they may look to BuzzFe ed’s and Upworthy’s happiness model for direction.“I think that the Web is only becoming more social,” Shepherd says. “We’re at a point where readers are your publishers. If news sites aren’t thinking about what it would mean for someone to share a story on social media, that coul be detrimental.”PS：1.请各位参赛选手关注我们的新浪微博：@安徽师范大学翻译协会2014，和腾讯微博：@安徽师范大学译协。

第27届韩素音翻译大赛译文参考(英译中)

The Posteverything Generation“后”一切的一代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.我从来没有指望通过上文学理论课来了解我们这一代人的特征，或美国大学不断变化的景象。

第25届韩素音翻译大赛汉翻英参考

Whether The Traditional Department Stores Will Become “A Disappearing Industry A Disappearing Industry””?As is shown by the data, the overall size of China the overall size of China’’s e-commerce market in 2011 reached 7 trillion yuan, a year-on-year growth of 46.4%. The achievements of electricity marketing pose a great challenge to the market share of traditional department store industry industry. More and . More and more people are shopping online. And under no large range variations of demand for the short term, that means the corresponding department stores are alienating customers. According to the insiders, the categories with falling sales in department store industry in recent years is just the ones convenient to buy online, such as appliances, IT products and textiles, and even luxuries.Meanwhile, some traditional department stores are faced up with the embarrassment of becoming “dressing rooms rooms””of electricity suppliers. Many people go to the stores to decide on the style and size of clothes and other items, and then purchase at the online payment; that purchase at the online payment; that’’s how s how ““the candid party the candid party”” and and ““the copy number the copy number”” were born. With the growing online shopping markets, clothing, cosmetics and household goods, etc. have been incorporated into the hunting range where customers select goods offline and purchase them online.Apart from the encroachment of the electricity suppliers, the fierce competition within the industry cannot be underestimated. The growing severity of homogenization among traditional department stores results in fierce competition among the interbank, and in recent years, a number of cities across the country are building large shopping malls like shopping centers so vigorously that the operations of these competitive department stores become more difficult. Walking along the city city’’s commercial district, you will find almost all the department stores have a lot in common in terms of sales content, store design and product layout. A doctoral said that the shopping centers of each city were almost the same from Beijing to Fuzhou.Under “internal and external external””problems, will the traditional department stores become the next “disappearing industry industry”?”?Many experts interviewed said although it was facing greater competitive pressure, it didn was facing greater competitive pressure, it didn’’t have no chance. By means of online and offline integrated, diversified competition and innovation of business model, thedepartment store industry may achieve the success of “counter-attackcounter-attack””.electronic shock”” are As is informed, the department stores that have experienced “electronic shock minority. . Large department stores in Beijing have built their online not in the minoritye-commerce platforms. The e-commerce in Tianjin Department Store is now under plan of implement.At the same time, department stores should take the path of multi-position management and differentiated marketing, aiming at the targeted customer segments.A doctoral tutor emphasized that in spite of the more severe business environment the department stores had faced in recent years and the more fierce competition among electricity suppliers and large-scale commercial complexes, customer segments of the department stores were just billabong in a part. Department stores should pay more attention to the customer segments they own now, improve after-sale service and explore the personalized service for their customers.In addition, traditional department stores should take advantage of the momentum of development in shopping centers to transform. It It’’s understood that there exist certain corresponding patterns in the structures of the retail industry and per capita GDP. General merchandise stores dominate the market when per capita GDP ranges from $3,000 to $5,000 while shopping centers exclusive shops, specialty stores and convenience stores play a leading role when per capita GDP ranges from $5,000 to $10,000. However, the per capita GDP of our country has risen to more than $5,000 in 2011, so traditional department stores can be directed to the transformation to shopping centers at this time.。

“戴着镣铐跳舞”再思考——兼及翻译比喻之分类

第28卷第3期江苏理工学院学报JOURNAL OF JIANGSU UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGYVo l.28，No.3Jun.，20222022年6月翻译比喻是翻译教学和翻译研究过程中普遍存在的一种语言现象，既涉及到具体的翻译概念，也涵盖翻译现象中的其他因素（如译者和读者）。

丰富多彩的翻译比喻能够从特定视角形象地描述有关翻译现象的特点，有助于翻译学习者更好地理解和认识翻译及其相关研究。

作为一个形象比喻，“戴着镣铐跳舞”在汉语中的使用范围非常广泛，尤其在翻译研究领域更是广为引用。

就其作为翻译比喻而言，学者刘爱兰[1]进行了较为深入的探析，让人颇为受益，却也存在言之欠详令人意犹未尽之感。

故此，本文从考察“戴着镣铐跳舞”的使用情况入手，通过追根溯源，分析目前运用该语作为翻译比喻的可能误区，并尝试对翻译比喻重新思考和分类，以利于人们更好地理解和使用翻译比喻。

一、“戴着镣铐跳舞”之考察在通过各种途径搜集相关文献资料的过程中，笔者发现“戴着镣铐跳舞”一语的使用频率以及应用范围甚广。

仅以中国期刊全文数据库（CNKI ）的统计为例（截至2020年底），调查发现包含“戴着镣铐跳舞”一语的各类论文共计3300余篇（其中核心期刊论文1100多篇），甚至标题中包含该语的论文超过50篇，涉及文学、语言、哲学、历史、经济、教育、法律等学科，其中文学、语言和教育三个领域的论文最多。

经过文献梳理表明，国内早期使用“戴着镣铐跳舞”一语的领域并非翻译研究，而是出现于文学尤其诗歌创作领域，来源大都模糊不明，且措辞也存在些微差异（如“带”和“戴”），如例（1）和例（2），这或许是早期学术论文的一个普遍特征。

（1）《女神》与同一时期的诗风也大不一样。

在当时的诗作中……有的虽同情人民的苦难，却不过是人道主义的怜悯。

虽号召战斗，却不知如何战斗。

虽描绘光明，却又十分朦胧;虽向往未来，却又脱离现实基础。

虽大胆探求新诗形式，却又“戴着镣铐跳舞”再思考——兼及翻译比喻之分类收稿日期：2022-05-04基金项目：教育部人文社会科学研究项目“中国译者《论语》英译与传播研究（1898—2017）”（20YJA740056）作者简介：张德福，教授，博士，主要研究方向为翻译学和典籍翻译。

第23届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛译文2

第23届"韩素音青年翻译奖"竞赛译文2：如何翻译“fiscal stimulus”?高斋翻译TransElegant整理的CATTI和MTI备考资料英译汉Are We There Yet?我们到了吗？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.美国经济一向能从衰退中迅速反弹，为何此次的前景却如此黯淡？这是因为，以往的衰退大多是由货币政策紧缩而引起的，一旦政策放宽，需求就会反弹。

变通调整照应全局：对第十二届“韩素音青年翻译奖”英译汉参考译文的几点补充意见

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围绕着这个中心，成有机整体；二）切细节都要形（一互相协调。相照应；三）表现事物的因果关互（要
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王金波
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摘要：文简要分析了Ｇｒａｄｈｓｍｂｙ一文的思想内容和语言特色，价了该文参考本ａｉｌｉｎｔｅＡｓｅｌｂｉ评
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现了意大利民族英雄加里波第的光辉形象。参考译文基本贯彻了英译汉评审小组提出的“ 确理解，准审慎表达的原则，体属上乘之作。而，整然白璧微瑕，参考译文也存在一些不尽如人意之处，些地方值有得商榷。已有学者撰文指出其欠妥之处＠。笔者经过认真分析、细核对。揣浅陋，充以下几点商榷仔不补意见，迎译界的专家学者批评指正。欢

第二十八届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛英汉汉英译文完整版

第二十八届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛英译汉、汉译英竞赛原文英译汉竞赛原文：On IrritabilityIrritability 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.The journey begins by recognising the role of fear in irritability in couples. Behind most outbursts are cack-handed attempts to teach the other person something. There are things we’d like to point out, flaws that we can discern, remarks we feel we really must make, but our awareness of how to proceed is panicked and hasty. We give cack-handed, mean speeches, which bear no faith in the legitimacy (even the nobility) of the act of imparting advice. And when our partners are on the receiving end of these irritable “lessons”, they of course swiftly grow defensive and brittle in the face of suggestions which seem more like mean-minded and senseless assaults on their very natures rather than caring, gentle attempts to address troublesome aspects of joint life.The prerequisite of calm in a teacher is a degree of indifference as to the success or failure of the lesson. One naturally wants for things to go well, but if an obdurate pupil flunks trigonometry, it is – at base – their problem. Tempers can stay even because individual students do not have very much power over teachers’ lives. Fortunately, as not caring too much turns out to be a critical aspect of successful pedagogy.Yet this isn’t an option open t o the fearful, irritable lover. They feel ineluctably led to deliver their “lessons” in a cataclysmic, frenzied manner (the door slams very loudly indeed) not because they are insane or vile (though one could easily draw these conclusions) so much as because they are terrified; terrified of spoiling what remains of their years on the planet in the company of someone who it appears cannot in any way understand a pivotal point about conversation, or cutlery, or the right time to order a taxi.One knows intuitively, when teaching a child, that only the utmost care and patience will ever work: one must never shout, one has to use extraordinary tact, one has to make ten compliments for every one negative remark and one must leave oneself plenty of time…All t his wisdom we reliably forget in love’s classroom, sadly because increasing the level of threat seldom hastens development. We do not grow more reasonable, more accepting of responsibility and more accurate about our weaknesses when our pride has been wounded, our integrity is threatened and our self-esteem has been violated.The complaint against the irritable person is that they are getting worked up over “nothing”. But symbols offer a way of seeing how a detail can stand for something much bigger and more serious. The groceries placed on the wrong table are not upsetting at all in themselves. But symbolically they mean your partner doesn’t care about domestic order; they muddle things up; they are messy. Or the question about one’s day is experienced as a symbol of interrogation, a lack of privacy and a humiliation (because one’s days rarely go well enough).The solution is, ideally, to concentrate on what the bigger issue is. Entire philosophies of life stir and collide beneath the surface of apparently petty squabbles. Irritations are the outward indications of stifled debates between competing conceptions of existence. It’s to the bigger themes we need to try to get.In the course of discussions, one might even come face-to-face with that perennially surprising truth about relationships: that the other person is not an extension of oneself that has, mysteriously, gone off message. They are that most surprising of things, a different person, with a psyche all of their own, filled with a perplexing number of subtle, eccentric and unforeseen reasons for thinking as they do.The decoding may take time, perhaps half an hour or more of concentrated exploration for something that had until then seemed as if it would more rightfully deserve an instant.We pay a heavy price for this neglect; every conflict that ends in sour stalemate is a blocked capillary within the heart of love. Emotions will find other ways to flow for now, but with the accumulation of unresolved disputes, pathways will fur and possibilities for trust and generosity narrow.A last point. It may just be sleep or food: when a baby is irritable, we rarely feel the need to preach about self-control and a proper sense of proportion. It’s not simply that we fear the infant’s intellect might n ot quite be up to it, but because we have a much better explanation of what is going on. We know that they’re acting this way –and getting bothered by any little thing – because they are tired, hungry, too hot or having some challenging digestive episode.The fact is, though, that the same physiological causes get to us all our lives. When we are tired, we get upset more easily; when we feel very hungry, it takes less to bother us. But it is immensely difficult to transfer the lesson in generosity (and accuracy) that we gain around to children and apply it to someone with a degree in business administration or a pilot’s license, or to whom we have been married for three-and-a-half years.We should try to see irritability for what it actually is: a confused, inarticulate, often shameful attempt to get us to understand how much someone is suffering and how urgently they need our help. We should – when we can manage it – attempt to help them out.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。

第十七届韩素音翻译大赛英译汉部分原文[策划]

第十七届韩素音翻译大赛英译汉部分原文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 trut h.” 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 thatscreen 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 t he 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’m never 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 mereevolutionary 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 source of meaning and hope.A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and 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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隐藏在科技王国后的文学世界
当我还是一个“探索文学”的男孩，我曾想如果大街上每个人都熟知普鲁斯特、乔伊斯、T·E·劳伦斯、帕斯捷尔纳克和卡夫卡，那该多好。

稍后我才明白平民大众对高雅文化有多么抵触。

作为一个年轻的拓荒者，林肯读过普鲁塔克、莎士比亚和《圣经》，但是那时他是林肯。

后来，在中西部驾车、乘巴士或火车游历的时候，我经常去参观一些小城镇的图书馆。

在爱阿华州基奥卡克县和密歇根州本顿港的图书馆里，我发现读者们都借阅普鲁斯特和乔伊斯的著作，甚至是斯威沃和安德烈·别雷的作品，D·H·劳伦斯也是他们的最爱之一。

有时我会联想到上帝愿意放弃毁灭罪恶深重的索多玛城，只为了城里有十个义人。

并不是说基奥卡克县和邪恶的索多玛城有任何相似之处，也不是说普鲁斯特笔下的夏吕斯男爵被引诱到密歇根本顿港定居。

而是我似乎有种持久的民主的渴望——在最不可能的地方寻找高雅文化存在的证据。

我做小说作家已经有十几年了，而从一开始我就意识到这是个不太可取的职业。

在二十世纪三十年代，一个芝加哥的旧邻居告诉我他写小说给通俗大众阅读。

“邻居们都好奇为什么我不去找一份职业。

他们看我总是到处闲逛，修剪树丛或者漆刷篱笆，而不是在工厂里工作。

但我是一个作家，我的文章是卖给《商船队》小说期刊和《勇士骑兵》杂志的。

”他十分愁闷地说，“他们不会认为那是一种职业。

”他向我诉苦也许因为注意到我是个书呆子气的孩子，比较可能会同情他；又或者他是在告诫我不要特立独行。

但那时候已经为时晚矣。

也是在一开始的时候，我就被警告小说已经接近了衰落阶段，就像城壁城市或者十字弓那样都是过时的事物。

没有人喜欢和历史有分歧。

奥尔斯瓦尔德·斯宾格勒是三十年代初最受广泛阅读的作家之一。

他教育世人：我们疲倦老旧的文明已经非常接近终结，年轻人们应该避开文学和艺术，去拥抱机械化并成为工程师。

为了避免被淘汰，你挑战并蔑视那些进化论历史家们。

我年轻的时候对斯宾格勒是非常尊重的，但即使是那时我也无法接受他的结论——带着尊重和仰慕，我在思想上让他别来烦我。

六十年后，在最近一期《华尔街日报》上我又看到了以当代形式出现的旧斯宾格勒理论之争。

泰瑞·蒂乔特，不同于斯宾格勒，并没有把大量的使人崩溃的历史理论扔到我们身上。

但还是有迹象可以看出他对那些证据做出了权衡、筛选和斟酌。

他提出“分裂的文化”的理论，还说他的观点是非常有责任感和与时俱进的，并且经过
深思熟虑。

他提出“作为技术的艺术形式”的说法。

他告诉我们电影很快就可以被下载——意味着可以从一部电脑转移到另一个装置的记忆储存里——并预言电影很快会像书本那样出售。

他还预言科学技术那近似魔术般的力量会把我们带到新时代的起点，并总结：“一旦这发生以后，我猜想独立的电影将取代小说，成为讲述故事的最重要手段。

为了支持他的论证，蒂乔特先生还提及了书本销售量预兆性的下跌和观看电影人数的剧增：“对于30岁以下的美国人来说，电影已经取代小说成为艺术表达的首要形式。

”对此，蒂乔特先生还补充，像汤姆·克兰西和史蒂芬·金这样的流行小说家“每本书达到100万册的销量最高点”，还特别提到：“美国全国广播公司的电视剧《欢乐酒店》大结局那一集，相对比，有4200万的观众收看。

”
在大范围上，电影是赢了。

“小说塑造民族谈话的力量已经变弱”，蒂乔特先生如是说。

不过我一点都不确定当年《白鲸》或《红字》是否曾经对“民族谈话”有过相当大的影响。

在19世纪中期，给大众留下深刻印象的是《汤姆叔叔的小屋》。

《白鲸》是一本不那么流行的小说。

20世纪的文学杰作大多数都是由脑中没有大众概念的小说家所创作。

普鲁斯特和乔伊斯的小说都是在文化衰退期所写的，并没有打算要获得荣耀和光辉的声望。

蒂乔特先生在《华尔街日报》发表的文章沿袭了那些企图发现新潮流的观察者们所走的路径。

“根据一个最近的调查，数据显示55%的美国人花在阅读上的时间少于30分钟……甚至有可能电影已经取代了小说，不是因为美国人变笨了，而是因为小说是一种过时的艺术技术。

”
“我们并不习惯把艺术形式看成是一种技术，”他说，“但是那就是它们本来的真面目，这意味着在技术的新发展下它们已经处于日趋消亡的状况。

”
与技术的重要性一同吸引头脑科学的年轻人的，可以看得出还有其他优先的理由：你最好去做你大部分的同龄人正在做的事。

成为百万个电影观众中的一员，总强于成为区区几千名读者里的一个。

此外，读者在孤独中阅读，而观众则归属于一个庞大的群体。

观众拥有人多势众的优势和机械化的力量。

作为补充的还有避免技术上被淘汰的重要性，以及相比个人的思考（无论他有多么出众）科学技术能够更可靠地为我们解决问题——这种感觉非常具有吸引力。

约翰·契弗很久以前曾告诉过我，让他坚持下去的，正是他的读者们，以及全国各地写信支持他的人。

他在工作的时候，总会觉得他的读者和通信者们，就藏在草坪后面的小树林里默默关注着他。

他说：“如果我不在脑海中想象着他们，我就会懈怠。

”小说家莱特·莫
里斯也力劝我去买一个电动打字机，并说他从不关掉他的机器。

“不写字的时候，我就听电流的声音，”他说，“那让我感觉自己是有陪伴的，我们就像是在谈天。

”
我很想知道蒂乔特先生会如何使他那个“作为技术的艺术形式”理论与这样的癖好相一致。

也许他会争辩，这两位作家在某种程度上已将他们自己从“大众文化的影响”中孤立出来。

蒂乔特先生至少有一个值得称赞的地方：他认为自己找到了将电影这种大众文化与少数人欣赏的高雅文化结合起来的方法。

然而，他却对“百万”的事物很感兴趣：百万的钞票，百万的读者，百万的观众。

看电影是“每个人”都要做的事情，蒂乔特先生如是说。

他说得何其正确啊。

回到20世纪，年龄在8至12岁之间的孩子在每个星期六都排长队买五分钱的电影票，为了看上周六未播完的前半段故事里那个危机如何得到解决。

女主人公就在火车头撞上她的几秒之前获得了解救。

然后是下一集，然后是新闻短片和《小顽童》。

最后还有一部汤姆·米克斯主演的西部影片，或者是珍妮·盖诺主演的关于一位年轻新娘和她丈夫在阁楼里的幸福故事，又或者是格洛丽亚·施旺森、蒂达·巴拉、华莱士·比里、阿道夫·门吉欧和玛丽·德雷斯勒等明星的作品。

当然还有卓别林的《淘金记》，而《淘金记》和杰克·伦敦笔下的故事仅差一步之遥。

那时观众和读者之间是没有冲突的。

没有人来指导我们阅读，我们全靠自己。

我们教育自己，让自己变得有文化。

我们发现或创造富有想象的精神生活。

因为我们可以阅读，我们也从中学会了写作。

看电影版的《金银岛》后再去阅读小说版，并不会让我觉得混淆。

在吸引我们的注意力这一点上，电影和小说并不存在竞争。

美国还有一个更引人注目的反常之处就是我们的少数民族是如此的众多，数目庞大。

说我们有百万个少数民族也不足为奇。

不过倒是有一个事实，那就是百万个有修养的美国人正处于一种与其他有文化的人相分隔的状态。

如果你喜欢，他们是奇弗的读者，他们是那么庞大而无法隐藏的一个群体。

这个国家的文学部门没能让他们远离书本——无论是新还是旧的著作。

我和我的朋友基斯·波茨弗德都强烈地认为：如果有很多读者“误入歧途”，那么这些读者中可能就存在着作家。

你只需出版一本类似《文学界》的杂志，就可以了解更多关于他们的细节。

只要给予鼓励，过去默默无闻、没有希望的作家就会浮出水面。

对于我们的报纸，一位早期读者曾经这样写过：“它的内容是如此的新颖，注重人与人之间关系的互动，天然真实而没有丝毫矫揉做作，让人读得全神贯注。

”她注意到报纸上没有广告，问道：“这是可能的吗？可以维持吗？”她称它为“一剂消除我们萎缩的人性的良药”。

在信的最后，我们这位读者还补充说：“对较
老的一代人来说，我们应当想起我们原来是怎样的人，我们应该怎样做。

”
这就是我和基斯·波茨弗德对我们的“文学小报”的期望，而且这两年来它都如我们所期待地运行着。

我们就像一对乌托邦式的伙伴，觉得自己对文学有着一份责任。

我希望我们不要像那些好心却帮倒忙的人——在这个路上已经没有马匹的年代，还给市政厅广场捐赠饮马的水槽。

我们无法猜测在这个国家各个遥远的角落里生活着多少个自发的文学鉴赏家和文学爱好者。

但我们所掌握的少量事实可以表明，他们见到我们出版的报纸时很高兴，心怀感激。

他们想得到比既得的更多，新颖的科学技术无法满足他们的迫切需求。