加载中…The Pleasures of Reading(By Bennett Cerf) 英译汉
(2015-01-03 12:32:29)The Pleasures of Reading
By Bennett
Cerf
I am most interested in people, in meet them
and finding out about them. Some of the most remarkable people I've
met existed only in a writer's imagination, then on the pages of
his book, and then, again, in my imagination. I've found in books
new friends, new societies, new words.
书中人物最令我倾心，我乐于同他们相会、相识。其中一些超凡脱俗之辈，最初只浮现于作者的奇思妙想中，接着跃然纸上，后来又复活在我的想象空间。从书里，我结识了新朋友，了解到新社会，也欣赏到新的词句。
If I am interested in people, others are
interested not so much in “who” as in “how”. “Who” in the books
includes everybody from science fiction superman two hundred
centuries in the future all the way back to the first figures in
history. “How” covers everything from the ingenious explanations of
Sherlock Holmes to the discoveries of science and ways of teaching
manner to children.
我更喜爱书中人物，其他人可能更关注“情节”。上至社会之初的杰出人士，下至两万年后的科幻超人，皆归“人物”之列；而“情节”则包括神探福尔摩斯机智的案情推理，科学领域的重大发现，以及教育孩子的方式方法。【注】“情节”似乎不能完全传达How一词的意思。
Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means
that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and
quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the
writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind
work. Your own imagination works along with the author’s or even
goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to
the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop, as you
understand his.
读书的乐趣体现在精神上，这有点类似于体育运动：求知若渴，功底较深，且领悟力强，读书效益就高。读书之所以快乐，并非因为作者在向你讲述什么，而是因为阅读能使你的思想活跃起来。你的想象与作者的想象一道驰骋，甚至较作者更胜一筹；你的阅历同作者的阅历两相对照，或不谋而合或各有千秋。而随着对作者的深入了解，你的思想认识也有所提高。
Every book stands by itself, like a one-family
house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although
they are separate, together they all add up to something; they are
connected with each other and with other cities. The same ideas, or
related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that
repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with
different solutions according to different writings at different
times. Books influence each other; they link the past, the present
and the future and have their own generations, like families.
Wherever you start reading you connect yourself with one of the
families of the ideas, and, in the long run, you not only find out
about the world and the people in it; you find out about yourself,
too.
每本书都自成一体，恰如一户人家的房屋；而图书馆的万卷藏书则像城市里栉比林立的楼房。它们虽各自独立，但累聚一起却顿生气势；同时书与书彼此呼应，城与城相互牵连。相关或相同的观点融进不同的作品，一再困扰人类生活的难题也在文学里反复出现，只是在不同时代的不同作品中提供了不同的解决对策。书与书相互影响，它们联系过去，包融现在，又衔接未来，而且像家族一样，有自己的子孙后代。任选一本书来欣赏，你便和某家族的思想有了沟通。最终，你不仅熟如了书中人物，饱览了书中世界，也重新发现了自我。
Reading can only be fun if you expect it to
be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you you “ought” to
read, you probably won’t have fun. But if you put down the book you
don’t like and try another till you find one that means something
to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a
good time ---- and if you become, as a result of reading, better,
wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won’t have suffered during the
process.
注：本文选自英语专业旧版《大学英语》第二册。
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