历年专八翻译真题

英译汉练习

1． Four months before the Election Day, five men gathered in a small conference room at the Reagan-Bush headquarters and reviewed an oversize calendar that marked the remaining days of the 1984 presidential campaign. It was the last Saturday in June and at ten o'clock in the morning the rest of the office was practically deserted. Even so, the men kept the door shut and the drapes carefully drawn. The three principals and their two deputies had come from around the country for a critical meeting. Their aim was to devise a strategy that would guarantee Ronald Reagan's resounding reelection to a second term in the White House.

It should have been easy. These were battle-tested veterans with long ties to Reagan and even longer ones to the Republican Party, men who understood presidential politics as well as any in the country. The backdrop of the campaign was hospitable, with lots of good news to work with: America was at peace, and the nation's economy, a key factor in any election, was rebounding vigorously after recession. Furthermore, the campaign itself was lavishly financed, with plenty of money for a topflight staff, travel, and television commercials. And, most important, their candidate was Ronald Reagan, a president of tremendous personal popularity and dazzling communication skills. Reagan has succeeded more than any president since John. F. Kennedy in projecting a broad vision of America -a nation of renewed military strength, individual initiative, and smaller federal government.

2. Opera is expensive: that much is inevitable. But expensive things are not inevitably the province of the rich unless we abdicate society's power of choice. We can choose to make opera, and other expensive forms of culture, accessible to those who cannot individually pay for it. The question is: why should we? Nobody denies the imperatives of food, shelter, defense, health and education. But even in a prehistoric cave, mankind stretched out a hand not just to eat, drink or fight, but also to draw. The impulse towards culture, the desire to express and explore the world through imagination and representation is fundamental. In Europe, this desire has found fulfillment in the masterpieces of our music, art, literature and theatre. These masterpieces are the touchstones for all our efforts; they are the touchstones for the

possibilities to which human thought and imagination may aspire; they carry the

most profound messages that can be sent from one human to another.

3. I agree to some extent with my imaginary English reader. American literary historians are perhaps prone to view their own national scene too narrowly, mistaking prominence for uniqueness. They do over-phrase their own literature, or certainly its minor figures. And Americans do swing from aggressive overphrase of their literature to an equally unfortunate, imitative deference. But then, the English themselves are somewhat insular in their literary appraisals. Moreover, in fields where they are not pre-eminent - e. g. in painting and music -they too alternate between boasting of native products

and copying those of the Continent. How many English paintings try to look as though they were done in Paris; how many times have we read in articles that they really represent an \"English tradition\" after all.

To speak of American literature, then, is not to assert that it is completely unlike that of Europe. Broadly speaking, America and Europe have kept step. At any given moment the traveler could find examples in both of the same architecture, the same styles in dress, the same books on the shelves. Ideas have crossed the Atlantic as freely as men and merchandise, though sometimes more slowly. When I refer to American habit, thoughts, etc., I intend some sort of qualification to precede the word, for frequently the difference between America and Europe (especially England) will be one of degree, sometimes only of a small degree. The amount of divergence is a subtle affair, liable to perplex the Englishman when he looks at America. He is looking at a country which in important senses grew out of his own, which in several ways still resembles his own - and which is yet a foreign country. There are odd overlappings and abrupt unfamiliarities; kinship yields to a sudden alienation, as when we hail a person across the street, only to discover from his blank response that we have mistaken a stranger for a friend.

4. In some societies people want children for what might be called familial reasons: to extend the family line or the family name, to propitiate the ancestors; to enable the proper functioning of religious rituals involving the family. Such reasons may seem thin in the modern, secularized society but they have been and are powerful indeed in other places.

In addition, one class of family reasons shares a border with the following category, namely, having children in order to maintain or improve a marriage: to hold the husband or occupy the wife; to repair or rejuvenate the marriage; to increase the number of children on the assumption that family happiness lies that way. The point is underlined by its converse: in some societies the failure to bear children (or males) is a threat to the marriage and a ready cause for divorce.

Beyond all that is the profound significance of children to the very institution of the family itself. To many people, husband and wife alone do not seem a proper family -they need children to enrich the circle, to validate its family character, to gather the redemptive influence of offspring. Children need the family, but the family seems also to need children, as the social institution uniquely available, at least in principle, for security, comfort, assurance, and direction in a changing, often hostile, world. To most people, such a home base, in the literal sense, needs more than one person for sustenance and in generational extension.

5. Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau's idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening one's perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.

Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime depends on how high we choose our difficulties. Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of \"The pleasure of taking pains\". The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to

be effortless.

We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of difficulty. When someone ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun.

6. The word \"winner\" and \"loser\" have many meanings. When we refer to a person as a winner, we do not mean one who makes someone else lose. To us, a winner

is

one

who

responds

authentically

by

being

credible,

trustworthy, responsive, and genuine, both as an individual and as a member of a society. Winners do not dedicate their lives to a concept of what they imagine they should be; rather, they are themselves and as such do not use their energy putting on a performance, maintaining pretence, and manipulating others. They are aware that there is a difference between being loving and acting loving, between being stupid and acting stupid, between being knowledgeable

and acting knowledgeable. Winners do not need to hide behind a mask. Winners are not afraid to do their own thinking and to use their own knowledge. They can separate facts from opinions and don't pretend to have all the answers. They listen to others, evaluate what they say, but come to their own conclusions. Although winners can admire and respect other people, they are not totally defined, demolished, bound, or awed by them. Winners do not play \"helpless\for their own lives.

7. Ever since the economist David Ricardo offered the basic theory in 1817, economic scripture has taught that open trade—free of tariffs, quotas, subsidies or other government distortions—improves the well-being of both parties. U.S. policy has implemented this doctrine with a vengeance. Why is free trade said to be universally beneficial? The answer is a doctrine called “comparative advantage”. Here’s a simple analogy. If a surgeon is highly skilled both at doing operations and performing routine blood tests, it’s more efficient for the surgeon to concentrate on the surgery and pay a less efficient technician to do the tests, since that allows the surgeon to make the most efficient use of her own time.

By extension, even if the United States is efficient both at inventing advanced biotechnologies and at the routine manufacture of medicines, it makes sense for the United States to let the production work migrate to countries that can make the stuff more cheaply. Americans get the benefit of the cheaper products and get to spend their resources on even more valuable pursuits, That, anyway, has always been the premise. But here Samuelson dissents. What if the lower wage country

also captures the advanced industry?

If enough higher-paying jobs are lost by American workers to outsourcing, he calculates, then the gain from the cheaper prices may not compensate for the loss in U.S. purchasing power.

“Free trade is not always a win-win situation,” Samuelson concludes. It is particularly a problem, he says, in a world where large countries with far lower wages, like India and China, are increasingly able to make almost any product or offer almost any service performed in the United States.

If America trades freely with them, then the powerful drag of their far lower will begin dragging down U.S. average wages. The U.S. economy may still grow, he calculates, but at a lower rate than it otherwise would have.

8. The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called good sense than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally. They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all. They do not think or speak by rule; and they have in general more eloquence and wit as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense, and eloquence together, they generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when they write to their friends, is better than that of most

authors. Uneducated people have most exuberance of invention.

9. Since pleasure is the first good and natural to us, for this very reason we do not choose every pleasure, but sometimes we pass over many pleasures, when greater discomfort accrues to us as the result of them: and similarly we think many pains better than pleasures, since a greater pleasure comes to us when we have endured pains for a long time. Every pleasure then because of its natural kinship to us is good, yet not every pleasure is to be chosen; even as every pain also is an evil, yet not all are always of a nature to be avoided. Yet by a scale of comparison and by the consideration of advantages and disadvantages we must form our judgment on all these matters. For the good on certain occasions we treat as bad, and conversely the bad as good.

We must consider that of desires some are natural, others vain, and of the natural some are necessary and others merely natural; and of the necessary some are necessary for happiness, others for the repose of the body, and others for very life.

Unhappiness comes either through fear or through vain and unbridled desire; but if a man curbs these, he can win for himself the blessedness of understanding.... Of desires, all that does not lead to a sense of pain, if they are not satisfied, are not necessary, but involve a craving which is easily dispelled, when the object is hard to procure or they seem likely to produce harm. . . . Wherever in the case of desires which are natural, but do not lead to a sense of pain, if they are not fulfilled, the effort is intense, such pleasures are due to idle imagination, and it is not owing to

their own nature that they fail to be dispelled, but owing to the empty imaginings of the man.

The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended nor true joy created either by the possession of the greatest wealth or by honor and respect in the eyes of the mob or by anything else that is associated with causes of unlimited desires.... We must not violate nature, but obey her; and we shall obey her if we fulfill the necessary desires and also the natural, if they bring no harm to us, but sternly reject the harmful.... The man who follows nature and not vain opinions is independent in all things. For in reference to what is enough for nature every possession is riches, but in reference to unlimited desires even the greatest wealth is not riches but poverty.

Insofar as you are in difficulties, it is because you forget nature; for you create for yourself unlimited fears and desires. It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.

10. If people mean anything at all by the expression “untimely death”, they must believe that some deaths run on a better schedule than others. Death in old age is rarely called untimely-a long life is thought to be a full one. But with the passing of a young person, one assumes that the best years lay ahead and the measure of that life was still to be taken.

History denies this, of course. Among prominent summer deaths, one recalls those of Marilyn Monroe and James Deans, whose lives seemed equally brief and complete. Writers cannot bear the fact that poet John Keats died at 26, and only

half playfully judge their own lives as failures when they pass that year. The idea that the life cut short is unfilled is illogical because lives are measured by the impressions they leave on the world and by their intensity and virtue.

11. Eye contact is one way of measuring the degree of closeness of relationship between two speakers, although there are cultural variations in the meaning of eye contact. In the Middle East, for example, it is considered extremely provocative for a woman to let a man catch her eye, let alone return his gaze. Social psychologist Michael Argyle observes that there is more eye contact between people who like each other than those who are indifferent or hostile towards each other. And the longer the length of the gaze, the more likely it is that the listener is more interested in the person who is speaking than the actual topic of conversation. Frequently looking down can indicate submissiveness or embarrassment. Looking away repeatedly may express boredom or dislike. Women tend to engage in more eye contact than men, especially when talking to other women.

But too steady eye contact can make one feel uneasy at times. Most people become uncomfortable under the intense gaze of a stare. One scientist suggests that perhaps one reason that man becomes tense under the force of a stare is in his biological ancestors: in apes, a stare signifies aggressiveness and hostility. The person who insistently fixes his eyes on our face is often more successful in arousing our dislike than impressing us with his directness and sincerity.

12. Psychologically there are two dangers to be guarded against in old age.

One of these is undue absorption in the past. It does not do to live in memories, in regrets for the good old days, or in sadness about friends who are dead. One’s thoughts must be directed to the future, and to things about which there is something to be done. This is not always easy; one’s own past is a gradually increasing weight. It is easy to think to oneself that one’s emotions used to be more vivid than they are, and one’s mind more keen. If this is true it should be forgotten, and if it is forgotten it will probably not be true.

The other thing to be avoided is clinging to youth in the hope of sucking vigor from its vitality. When your children are grown up they want to live their own lives, and if you continue to be as interested in them as you were when they were young, you are likely to become a burden to them, unless they are unusually callous. I do not mean that one should be without interest in them, but one’s interest should be contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic, but not unduly emotional. Animals become indifferent to their young as soon as their young can look after themselves, but human beings, owing to the length of infancy, find this difficult.

13. America’s Careening foreign Policy

Realities: It is unglamorous to articulate, and complex to conduct, a centrist policy. But only this course can marshal our resources, meet global realities and maintain domestic rapport. Since World War II our major achievements have been forged at the center. American foreign policy must contain elements of both power and principle, to promote both security and justice.

For our adversaries we need firmness and negotiation. With our allies we need to lead and to evoke greater contributions. For national security we must strengthen defenses and search for arms control. In the developing world we must address the East-West dimension and the deeper roots of unrest.

Our permanent interests do not change every four years. The next administration, whether Democratic or Republican, should pursue a balanced policy from the beginning. It should acknowledge that sometimes its predecessor was right; appoint some members of the opposition; selectively use the Scowcroft Commission model, and strive for interagency coherence---- in short, conduct our foreign policy in a non-partisan manner. Surely debates will continue. But they will be infused with a consciousness that all Americans are engaged in a common enterprise.

In this way America will demonstrate that if we are no longer young, neither are we old. If we are no longer paramount, neither are we pawns of destiny.