Lesson 1 Pub Talk and the King’s English
Lesson 1 Pub Talk and the King’s English
第1课酒吧谈话和国王英语
1-2
Conversation is the most sociable of all human activities. It is an activity only of humans. However intricate the ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not indulge in anything that deserves the name of conversation.
谈话是所有人类活动中最具社交性的。它只是人类的活动。无论动物之间的交流方式多么复杂，它们都不会沉迷于任何值得称之为谈话的事情。
The charm of conversation is that it does not really start from anywhere, and no one has any idea where it will go as it meanders or leaps and sparkles or just glows. The enemy of good conversation is the person who has "something to say." Conversation is not for making a point. Argument may often be a part of it, but the purpose of the argument is not to convince. There is no winning in conversation. In fact, the best conversationalists are those who are prepared to lose. Suddenly they see the moment for one of their best anecdotes, but in a flash the conversation has moved on and the opportunity is lost. They are ready to let it go.
谈话的魅力在于它不会真正从任何地方开始，没有人知道它会在蜿蜒、跳跃、闪耀或闪耀时走向何方。好谈话的敌人是有“话要说”的人。谈话不是为了表达观点。争论可能经常是其中的一部分，但争论的目的不是说服。谈话中没有胜利。事实上，最好的谈话者是那些准备好失败的人。突然间，他们看到了他们最好的轶事之一的时刻，但在一瞬间，谈话已经继续，机会已经失去。他们准备放手了。
9-11
Someone took one of the best-known examples, which is still always worth the reconsidering. When we talk of meat on our tables we use French words; when we speak of the animals from which the meat comes we use Anglo-Saxon words. It is a pig in its sty; it is pork (porc) on the table. They are cattle in the fields, but we sit down to beef (boeuf). Chickens become poultry (poulet), and a calf becomes veal (veau). Even if our menus were not written in French out of snobbery, the English we used in them would still be Norman English. What all this tells us is of a deep class rift in the culture of England after the Norman Conquest.
有人举了一个最著名的例子，这仍然值得重新考虑。当我们谈论餐桌上的肉时，我们使用法语单词；当我们谈论肉来自的动物时，我们使用盎格鲁-撒克逊语单词。它是猪圈里的猪；它是餐桌上的猪肉（porc）。它们是田野里的牛，但我们坐下来吃牛肉（boeuf）。鸡变成家禽（poulet），小牛变成小牛肉（veau）。即使我们的菜单不是出于势利而用法语编写的，我们在其中使用的英语仍然是诺曼英语。所有这些告诉我们的是诺曼征服后英格兰文化中的深刻阶级裂痕。
The Saxon peasants who tilled the land and reared the animals could not afford the meat, which went to Norman tables. The peasants were allowed to eat the rabbits that scampered over their fields and, since that meat was cheap, the Norman lords of course turned up their noses at it. So rabbit is still rabbit on our tables, and not changed into some rendering of lapin.
撒克逊农民耕种土地并饲养动物，他们买不起肉，这些肉被送到诺曼人的餐桌上。农民被允许吃在他们的田野上奔跑的兔子，由于这些肉很便宜，诺曼领主当然对此不屑一顾。所以兔子仍然是我们餐桌上的兔子，而不是变成拉平的某种渲染。
As we listen today to the arguments about bilingual education, we ought to think ourselves back into the shoes of the Saxon peasant. The new ruling class had built a cultural barrier against him by building their French against his own language. There must have been a great deal of cultural humiliation felt by the English when they revolted under Saxon leaders like Hereward the Wake. "The King's English"—if the term had existed then—had become French. And here in America now, 900 years later, we are still the heirs to it.
当我们今天听到有关双语教育的争论时，我们应该回想起撒克逊农民的立场。新的统治阶级通过将他们的法语与他自己的语言相对立，建立了一个文化障碍。当英国人在像赫里沃德·韦克这样的撒克逊领袖的领导下起义时，他们一定感受到了很多文化上的屈辱。“国王的英语”——如果这个词当时存在的话——已经变成了法语。而在现在的美国，900年后，我们仍然是它的继承人。
Lesson 1 Pub Talk and the King’s English
第1课酒吧谈话和国王英语
16
There is always a great danger, as Carlyle put it, that "words will harden into things for us." Words are not themselves reality, but only representations of it, and the King's English, like the Anglo-French of the Normans, is a class representation of reality. Perhaps it is worth trying to speak it, but it should not be laid down as an edict, and made immune to change from below.
正如卡莱尔所说，总是存在着巨大的危险，即“言语会变成我们的东西。”言语本身并不是现实，而只是它的代表，而国王的英语，就像诺曼人的英法英语一样，是现实的阶级代表。也许值得尝试说它，但它不应该被制定为法令，并使其免于从下面改变。
18
So we may return to my beginning. Even with the most educated and the most literate, the King's English slips and slides in conversation. There is no worse conversationalist than the one who punctuates his words as he speaks as if he were writing, or even who tries to use words as if he were composing a piece of prose for print. When E. M. Forster writes of "the sinister corridor of our age," we sit up at the vividness of the phrase, the force and even terror in the image. But if E. M. Forster sat in our living room and said, "We are all following each other down the sinister corridor of our age," we would be justified in asking him to leave.
所以我们可能会回到我的起点。即使是最受过教育和最有文化的人，国王的英语在谈话中也会时断时续。没有比一个人更糟糕的谈话者了，他说话时标点符号，就像他在写作一样，甚至试图使用单词，就像他在为印刷写一篇散文一样。当E. M.福斯特写“我们这个时代的邪恶走廊”时，我们会为这个短语的生动性、力量甚至图像中的恐惧而坐起来。但如果E.M.福斯特坐在我们的客厅里说：“我们都在沿着我们这个时代的邪恶走廊互相跟随”，我们就有理由要求他离开。
19
Great authors are often asked by those who may not understand their craft to speak as eloquently and formally as their written works. While it's imagined that the intellectual gatherings in 18th-century Paris salons were filled with profound discourse, it's likely that the esteemed attendees engaged in everyday chatter and critiques of the food and wine served. For instance, President Henault of the First Chamber of the Paris Parlement was known to have lamented the poor quality of the sauces at Mme. Deffand's salons, humorously noting that the primary distinction between her cook and the renowned chef Brinvilliers was their respective intentions.
伟大的作家经常被那些可能不理解他们手艺的人要求像他们的书面作品一样雄辩和正式地演讲。虽然人们想象18世纪巴黎沙龙的知识分子聚会充满了深刻的讨论，但很可能受人尊敬的与会者每天都在闲聊和批评所提供的食物和葡萄酒。例如，巴黎议会第一议院的主席Henault曾经抱怨Deffand女士沙龙的酱料质量差，幽默地指出她的厨师和著名厨师Brinvilliers之间的主要区别在于他们各自的意图。
Lesson 3 Loving and Hating New York
第三课爱与恨纽约
1-3
Those ad campaigns celebrating the Big Apple, those T-shirts with a heart design proclaiming "I Love New York," are signs, pathetic in their desperation, of how the mighty has fallen. New York City used to leave the bragging to others, for bragging was "bush." Being unique, the biggest and the best, New York didn't have to assert how special it was.
那些庆祝大苹果的广告活动，那些印有“我爱纽约”心形图案的T恤，是那些绝望中可悲的迹象，表明强者已经倒下。纽约市曾经把吹嘘留给别人，因为吹嘘是“丛林”。作为独特、最大和最好的城市，纽约不必强调它有多特别。
It isn't the top anymore, at least if the top is measured by who begets the styles and sets the trends. Nowadays, New York is out of phase with American taste as often as it is out of step with American politics. Once it was the nation's undisputed fashion authority, but it too long resisted the incoming casual style and lost its monopoly. No longer so looked up to or copied, New York even prides itself on being a holdout from prevailing American trends, a place to escape Common Denominator Land.
它不再是顶级了，至少如果顶级是由谁创造风格和引领潮流来衡量的话。如今，纽约与美国品味格格不入，就像它与美国政治格格不入一样。曾经它是全国无可争议的时尚权威，但它太长时间抵制了即将到来的休闲风格，失去了垄断地位。纽约不再那么受人尊敬或抄袭，甚至自豪地成为一个抵制主流美国潮流的地方，一个逃离共同教派领地的地方。
Its deficiencies as a pacesetter are more and more evident. A dozen other cities have buildings more inspired architecturally than any built in New York City in the past twenty years. The giant Manhattan television studios where Toscanini's NBC Symphony once played now sit empty most of the time, while sitcoms cloned and canned in Hollywood, and the Johnny Carson show live, pre-empt the airwaves from California. Tin Pan Alley has moved to Nashville and Hollywood. Vegas casinos routinely pay heavy sums to singers and entertainers whom no nightspot in Manhattan can afford to hire. In sports, the bigger superdomes, the more exciting teams, the most enthusiastic fans, are often found elsewhere.
它作为标兵的不足越来越明显。其他十几个城市的建筑在建筑上比纽约市过去二十年建造的任何建筑都更具启发性。托斯卡尼尼的NBC交响乐团曾经在曼哈顿的巨型电视演播室演出，现在大部分时间都空无一人，而在好莱坞克隆和罐装的情景喜剧，以及约翰尼·卡森的现场演出，抢先从加利福尼亚州的电波播出。铁皮锅巷已经搬到了纳什维尔和好莱坞。拉斯维加斯的赌场经常向歌手和表演者支付巨额费用，而曼哈顿的任何夜店都无法雇佣他们。在体育运动中，更大的超级圆顶，更令人兴奋的团队，最热情的粉丝，通常在其他地方找到。
9
Not the glamour of the city, which never beckoned to me from a distance, but its opportunity—to practice the kind of journalism I wanted—drew me to New York. I wasn't even sure how I'd measure up against others who had been more soundly educated at Ivy League schools, or whether I could compete against that tough local breed, those intellectual sons of immigrants, so highly motivated and single-minded, such as Alfred Kazin, who for diversion (for heaven's sake!) played Bach's Unaccompanied Partitas on the violin.
不是城市的魅力，它从未从远处吸引我，而是它的机会——实践我想要的新闻报道——吸引了我来到纽约。我甚至不确定我如何与那些在常春藤联盟学校受过更好教育的人相比，或者我是否能够与那些坚韧的本地人竞争，那些移民的知识分子儿子，他们非常有动力和专注，比如阿尔弗雷德·卡津，他为了消遣（天哪！）在小提琴上演奏巴赫的《无伴奏帕蒂塔斯》。
Lesson 3 Loving and Hating New York
第三课爱与恨纽约
10
A testing of oneself, a fear of giving in to the most banal and marketable of one's talents, still draws many of the young to New York. That and, as always, the company of others fleeing something constricting where they came from. Together these young share a freedom, a community of inexpensive amusements, a casual living, and some rough times. It can't be the living conditions that appeal, for only fond memory will forgive the inconvenience, risk, and squalor. Commercial Broadway may be inaccessible to them, but there is off-Broadway, and then off-off-Broadway. If painters disdain Madison Avenue's plush art galleries, Madison Avenue dealers set up shop in the grubby precincts of Soho. But the purity of a bohemian dedication can be exaggerated. The artistic young inhabit the same Greenwich Village and its fringes in which the experimentalists in the arts lived during the Depression, united by a world against them. But the present generation is enough of a subculture to be a source of profitable boutiques and coffeehouses. And it is not all that estranged.
对自己的考验，对屈服于最平庸和最有市场价值的才能的恐惧，仍然吸引着许多年轻人来到纽约。而且，像往常一样，还有其他逃离他们来自的地方的人的陪伴。这些年轻人一起分享自由，一个廉价娱乐、休闲生活和一些艰难时期的社区。吸引人的不可能是生活条件，因为只有美好的回忆才能原谅不便、风险和肮脏。商业百老汇对他们来说可能是不可接近的，但有非百老汇，然后是非百老汇。如果画家鄙视麦迪逊大道的豪华艺术画廊，麦迪逊大道的经销商在索霍区肮脏的区域设立了店铺。但波西米亚式奉献的纯洁性可能被夸大了。艺术青年居住在格林威治村及其边缘，与大萧条时期的艺术实验主义者生活在一起，被一个反对他们的世界团结在一起。但现在的一代足以成为有利可图的精品店和咖啡馆的来源。而且它并没有那么疏远。
11
Manhattan is an island cut off in most respects from mainland America, but in two areas it remains dominant. It is the banking and the communications headquarters for America. In both these roles it ratifies more than it creates. Wall Street will advance the millions to make a Hollywood movie only if convinced that a best-selling title or a star name will ensure its success. The networks' news centers are here, and the largest book publishers, and the biggest magazines—and therefore the largest body of critics to appraise the films, the plays, the music, the books that others have created. New York is a judging town, and often invokes standards that the rest of the country deplores or ignores. A market for knowingness exists in New York that doesn't exist for knowledge.
曼哈顿是一个在大多数方面与美国本土隔绝的岛屿，但在两个领域仍占主导地位。它是美国的银行和通讯总部。在这两个角色中，它批准的多于创造的。只有在确信畅销书或明星名字将确保其成功的情况下，华尔街才会为好莱坞电影提供数百万美元的资金。电视网络的新闻中心在这里，最大的图书出版商和最大的杂志也在这里，因此也是评估其他人创作的电影、戏剧、音乐和书籍的最大批评家机构。纽约是一个评判之城，经常引用其他国家谴责或忽视的标准。纽约存在一个知识市场，而这个市场并不存在于知识市场。
12
The ad agencies are all here too, testing the markets and devising the catchy jingles that will move millions from McDonald's to Burger King, so that the ad agency's "creative director" can lunch instead in Manhattan's expense-account French restaurants. The bankers and the admen, the marketing specialists and a thousand well-paid ancillary service people, really set the city's brittle tone—catering to a wide American public whose numbers must be respected but whose tastes do not have to be shared. The condescending view from the fiftieth floor of the city's crowds below cuts these people off from humanity. So does an attitude, which sees the public only in terms of large, malleable numbers—as impersonally as does the clattering subway turnstile beneath the office towers.
广告公司也都在这里，测试市场，并设计出吸引人的广告，将数百万人从麦当劳转移到汉堡王，这样广告公司的“创意总监”就可以在曼哈顿的报销法国餐厅吃午饭了。银行家和广告人、营销专家以及一千名高薪的辅助服务人员，真正为这座城市定下了脆弱的基调——迎合了广大美国公众，他们的人数必须受到尊重，但他们的口味不必分享。从这座城市50楼下面人群的居高临下的视角切断了这些人与人类的联系。一种态度也是如此，它只以大量、可塑的人数来看待公众——就像办公楼下面嘈杂的地铁闸门一样没有人情味。
13
I am surprised by the lack of cynicism, particularly among the younger ones, of those who work in such fields. The television generation grew up in the insistent presence of hype, delights in much of it, and has no scruples about practicing it. Men and women do their jobs professionally, and, like the pilots who from great heights bombed Hanoi, seem unmarked by it. They lead their real lives elsewhere. In the Village bars they are indistinguishable in dress or behavior from would-be artists, actors, and writers. The boundaries of "art for art's sake" aren't so rigid anymore; art itself is less sharply defined, and those whose paintings don't sell do illustrations; those who can't get acting jobs do commercials; those who are writing ambitious novels sustain themselves on the magazines. Besides, serious art often feeds on the popular these days, changing it with fond irony.
我对在这些领域工作的人缺乏愤世嫉俗感到惊讶，特别是在年轻人中。电视一代在炒作的持续存在中长大，喜欢其中的大部分，并且毫不顾忌地实践它。男人和女人都以专业的方式完成他们的工作，就像从高空轰炸河内的飞行员一样，他们似乎没有被它标记。他们在其他地方过着他们的真实生活。在村庄酒吧里，他们在着装或行为上与潜在的艺术家、演员和作家毫无区别。“为艺术而艺术”的界限不再那么严格；艺术本身的定义不那么明确，那些画作卖不出去的人做插图；那些找不到表演工作的人做广告；那些写雄心勃勃的小说的人在杂志上维持自己。此外，严肃的艺术现在经常以流行为食，用喜欢的讽刺改变它。
14
In time the newcomers find or form their own worlds; Manhattan is many such worlds, huddled together but rarely interacting. I think this is what gives the city its sense of freedom. There are enough like you, whatever you are. And it isn't as necessary to know anything about an apartment neighbor—or to worry about his judgment of you—as it is about someone with an adjoining yard. In New York, like seeks like, and by economy of effort excludes the rest as strangers. This distancing, this uncaring in ordinary encounters, has another side: in no other American city can the lonely be as lonely.
随着时间的推移，新来者找到或形成了自己的世界；曼哈顿有许多这样的世界，聚集在一起，但很少互动。我认为这就是赋予这座城市自由感的原因。有足够多像你这样的人，无论你是谁。而且，了解公寓邻居的任何事情——或者担心他对你的评判——并不像了解相邻院子的人那样必要。在纽约，像寻找一样，通过努力的经济性，将其他人排除在陌生人之外。这种疏远，这种在普通相遇中的漠不关心，有另一面：在任何其他美国城市，孤独的人都不会如此孤独。
Lesson 12 Disappearing Through the Skylight
第十二课从天窗消失
2
As the corollary of science, technology also exhibits the universalizing tendency. This is why the spread of technology makes the world look ever more homogeneous. Architectural styles, dress styles, musical styles—even eating styles—tend increasingly to be world styles. The world looks more homogeneous because it is more homogeneous. Children who grow up in this world therefore experience it as a sameness rather than a diversity, and because their identities are shaped by this sameness, their sense of differences among cultures and individuals diminishes. As buildings become more alike, the people who inhabit the buildings become more alike. The result is described precisely in a phrase that is already familiar: the disappearance of history.
作为科学的必然结果，技术也表现出普遍性的趋势。这就是为什么技术的传播使世界看起来越来越同质化。建筑风格、服装风格、音乐风格——甚至饮食风格——越来越倾向于成为世界风格。世界看起来更加同质化，因为它更加同质化。因此，在这个世界上长大的孩子们将其视为同一性而不是多样性，由于他们的身份是由这种同一性塑造的，他们在文化和个人之间的差异感会减弱。随着建筑物变得越来越相似，居住在建筑物中的人也变得越来越相似。结果用一个已经熟悉的短语来精确描述：历史的消失。
7
If man creates machines, machines in turn shape their creators. As the automobile is universalized, it universalizes those who use it. Like the World Car he drives, modern man is becoming universal. No longer quite an individual, no longer quite the product of a unique geography and culture, he moves from one climate-controlled shopping mall to another, from one airport to the next, from one Holiday Inn to its successor three hundred miles down the road; but somehow his location never changes. He is cosmopolitan. The price he pays is that he no longer has a home in the traditional sense of the word. The benefit is that he begins to suspect home in the traditional sense is another name for limitations, and that home in the modern sense is everywhere and always surrounded by neighbors.
如果人类创造了机器，机器反过来又塑造了它们的创造者。随着汽车的普及，它也普及了那些使用它的人。就像他驾驶的世界汽车一样，现代人正在变得普遍。他不再是一个完全独立的个体，不再是独特地理和文化的产物，他从一个气候控制的购物中心到另一个购物中心，从一个机场到另一个机场，从一个假日酒店到三百英里外的继任者；但不知何故，他的位置从未改变。他是世界性的。他付出的代价是他不再拥有传统意义上的家。好处是他开始怀疑传统意义上的家是限制的另一个名称，而现代意义上的家无处不在，总是被邻居包围。
8
The universalizing imperative of technology is irresistible. Barring the catastrophe of nuclear war, it will continue to shape both modern culture and the consciousness of those who inhabit that culture.
技术的普遍性势在必行是不可抗拒的。除非发生核战争的灾难，否则它将继续塑造现代文化和居住在该文化中的人们的意识。
10-11
Art is, in one definition, simply an effort to name the real world. Are machines "the real world" or only its surface? Is the real world that easy to find? Science has shown the insubstantiality of the world. It has thus undermined an article of faith: the thingliness of things. At the same time, it has produced images of orders of reality underlying the thingliness of things. Are images of cells or of molecules or of galaxies more or less real than images of machines? Science has also produced images that are pure artifacts. Are images of self-squared dragons more or less real than images of molecules?
艺术在一个定义中只是一种命名真实世界的努力。机器是“真实世界”还是只是它的表面？真实世界那么容易找到吗？科学已经展示了世界的不实体性。因此，它破坏了一种信仰：事物的物质性。同时，它产生了现实秩序的图像，这些秩序是事物的物质性基础。细胞、分子或星系的图像比机器的图像更真实还是更不真实？科学也产生了纯人工制品的图像。自平方龙的图像比分子的图像更真实还是更不真实？
The skepticism of modern science about the thingliness of things implies a new appreciation of the humanity of art entirely consistent with Kandinsky's observation in "On the Spiritual in Art" that beautiful art "springs from inner need, which springs from the soul." Modern art opens on a world whose reality is not "out there" in nature defined as things seen from a middle distance but "in here" in the soul or the mind. It is a world radically emptied of history because it is a form of perception rather than a content.
现代科学对事物物质性的怀疑意味着对艺术人性的新欣赏，完全符合康定斯基在《论艺术中的精神》中的观察，即美丽的艺术“源于内在需求，而内在需求源于灵魂。”现代艺术打开了一个世界，其现实不是自然界中的“外面”，而是灵魂或心灵中的“这里”。这是一个历史被彻底清空的世界，因为它是一种感知形式而不是内容。
15-17
It is a human world, but one that is human in ways no one expected. The image it reveals is not the worn and battered face that stares from Leonardo's self-portrait, much less the one that stares, bleary and uninspired, every morning from the bathroom mirror. These are the faces of history. It is, rather, the image of an eternally playful and eternally youthful power that makes order whether order is there or not, and that, having made one order, is quite capable of putting it aside and creating an entirely different one, or the way a child might build one structure from a set of blocks and then, without malice and purely in the spirit of play, demolish it and begin again. It is an image of the power that made humanity possible in the first place.
这是一个人性化的世界，但却是一个没有人预料到的人性化世界。它所展现的形象不是列奥纳多自画像中那张疲惫的脸，更不是每天早上从浴室镜子里茫然无神地凝视着的那张脸。这些是历史的面孔。相反，它是一个永远好玩和永远年轻的力量的形象，无论秩序是否存在，它都能创造出一个完全不同的秩序，或者一个孩子可以用一组积木建造一个结构，然后，没有恶意地，纯粹出于游戏精神，拆除它并重新开始。这是一个让人类成为可能的力量的形象。
The banks of the nineteenth century tended to be neoclassic structures of marble or granite, faced with ponderous rows of columns. They made a statement: "We are solid. We are permanent. We are as reliable as history. Your money is safe in our vaults."
十九世纪的河岸往往是大理石或花岗岩的新古典主义建筑，面对着沉重的柱子行。他们发表了一个声明：“我们是坚实的。我们是永久的。我们像历史一样可靠。你的钱在我们的金库里是安全的。”
Today's banks are airy structures of steel and glass, or they are storefronts with slot-machine-like terminals, or trailers parked on the lots of suburban shopping malls.
今天的银行是钢和玻璃的通风结构，或者是带有老虎ji般的终端的店面，或者是停在郊区购物中心停车场的拖车。
18-19
The vaults have been replaced by magnetic tapes. In a computer, money is sequences of digital signals endlessly recorded, erased, processed, and reprocessed, and endlessly modified by other computers. The statement of modern banks is, "We are abstract like art and almost invisible like the Crystal Palace. If we exist at all, we exist as an airy medium in which your transactions are completed and your wealth increased."
金库已被磁带所取代。在计算机中，货币是一系列数字信号的序列，不断记录、擦除、处理和再处理，并被其他计算机不断修改。现代银行的说法是：“我们像艺术一样抽象，几乎像水晶宫一样看不见。如果我们存在，我们就存在于一个通风的媒介中，在其中完成交易并增加财富。”
That, perhaps, establishes the logical limit of the modern aesthetic. If so, the limit is a long way ahead, but it can be made out, just barely, through the haze over the road. As surely as nature is being swallowed up by the mind, the banks, you might say, are disappearing through their own skylights.
或许，这就确立了现代美学的逻辑极限。如果是这样，那么这个极限还有很长的路要走，但它可以通过道路上的雾气勉强辨认出来。正如自然被心灵吞噬一样，你可以说，银行正在通过它们自己的天窗消失。
